Best AI Note Taker for Zoom in 2026

By Nam Nguyen, founder of saas.com.ai · Published July 11, 2026 · Last updated July 11, 2026 saas.com.ai curates and tracks AI tools by real traffic and growth data to help readers find the right tool for any task.

Key takeaways

• Zoom’s own AI Companion is included free on paid Zoom plans (Pro and up), but it only works inside Zoom.
• Granola captures Zoom audio with no bot in the call, so no participant sees it join and no recording banner fires.
• Otter, Fireflies and Fathom send a visible bot into the Zoom participant list, which doubles as your consent notice.
• Fathom has the most generous free tier for Zoom: unlimited recordings, capped only at 5 AI summaries a month.
• If you only ever use Zoom, AI Companion is enough. If you also live in Meet or Teams, pick a third-party tool.

The best AI note taker for Zoom in 2026 depends on one question: do you live only in Zoom, or do you jump between Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams? Zoom AI Companion is included at no extra cost on paid Zoom Workplace plans and handles summaries and transcription well, but it stays locked to Zoom. Third-party tools like Granola, Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, Fathom and tl;dv travel across every platform, and each joins Zoom a different way: some send a visible bot, Granola captures audio silently. This guide compares all six, with free tiers, exact Zoom setup steps, and a verdict.

Zoom AI note takers at a glance

Here is the fast comparison. The “Zoom method” column matters more than most buyers realize, because it decides whether other people can see that you are recording.

Tool	Zoom method	Free tier (2026)	Best for
Zoom AI Companion	Native, built into Zoom	Not on free Basic plan; free on paid Zoom	People who only ever meet in Zoom
Granola	Bot-free, captures device audio	25 meetings lifetime	Silent capture, cross-platform, one-person use
Otter.ai	OtterPilot bot joins the call	300 min/month, 90-min cap	Live transcription and searchable archives
Fireflies.ai	Bot joins the call	Unlimited recording, 800 min storage/mo	CRM sync and team knowledge base
Fathom	Bot joins (bot-less mode added 2026)	Unlimited recording, 5 AI summaries/mo	Best free plan for solo Zoom users
tl;dv	Bot joins the call	Unlimited recording, 10 summaries lifetime	Timestamped clips and many integrations

(Prices and limits verified against each vendor’s July 2026 pricing pages. Vendors change free tiers often, so confirm before you commit a team.)

Is Zoom AI Companion free, and is it enough?

Zoom AI Companion is included at no additional cost on paid Zoom Workplace plans, but it is not available on the free Basic plan. As of 2026, paid Zoom starts at Pro (13.33/user/month)andBusiness(18.33/user/month), and AI Companion rides along with both at no line-item charge, according to Zoom’s pricing pages. There is also a standalone AI Companion add-on from $8.33/user/month for people on plans that do not bundle it.

What you get: automatic meeting summaries, real-time transcription, smart recordings, and a “Catch Me Up” feature that summarizes what you missed if you join a Zoom call late. Zoom AI Companion 3.0 became generally available in 2026 with deeper agentic features, per Zoom’s own announcements covered by No Jitter.

Here is the honest limitation, and it is the whole reason this article exists. Zoom AI Companion only works inside Zoom. The moment your Tuesday standup moves to Google Meet or a client insists on Microsoft Teams, AI Companion produces nothing. Your notes now live in two or three different places with two or three different formats.

(Aside for the skeptics: “free” here is doing a lot of work. It is free because you already pay Zoom every month. If your calendar is 60% Zoom and 40% everything else, that free tool covers 60% of your meetings and zero percent of the rest.)

So AI Companion is genuinely good and genuinely free on paid Zoom. It is also a walled garden. Whether that is a dealbreaker depends entirely on how monogamous you are with Zoom.

What is the best bot-free AI note taker for Zoom?

Granola is the best bot-free option for Zoom because it captures your computer’s audio directly instead of sending a bot into the call. Nothing joins the meeting. No participant appears in the Zoom list, and no recording announcement plays. Granola runs as a quiet listener on your laptop, transcribes what your machine can hear, then turns your sparse typed notes into a full write-up you can chat with afterward.

This is the feature people underestimate until they feel it. Every other tool in this guide, except Granola, drops a visible “Otter” or “Fathom” participant into the Zoom call. Clients notice. Some get twitchy. Granola sidesteps that entire social moment because there is no bot to notice.

Granola works with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack Huddles, WebEx, and frankly anything that produces sound, since it listens to device audio rather than hooking a specific platform. On Zoom there is nothing to “add.” You start Granola, it hears the call, done.

The catch: the free plan is 25 meetings for the lifetime of the account, not per month. That is a trial dressed as a free tier. Paid Individual runs $18/month for unlimited meetings, Business is $14/user/month with CRM integrations and team folders, and Enterprise starts at $35/user/month with SSO and the ability to opt out of AI training, per Granola’s pricing page.

There is a compliance wrinkle nobody markets. Because Granola is silent, the legal duty to disclose recording falls entirely on you. Zoom’s native recording throws up a consent prompt for everyone; a bot in the participant list is itself a notice; Granola’s silent capture gives neither. In one-party-consent situations that is fine. In two-party-consent states or with regulated clients, you have to announce it yourself, out loud, or you are exposed. I would not run Granola on a call with lawyers present without saying so first.

How to add Granola to Zoom

1. Download Granola for macOS or Windows and grant microphone and system-audio permission.
2. Join your Zoom call as normal.
3. Open Granola and hit record. It captures the call audio locally; no bot joins.
4. Type rough notes during the call if you want. Granola enhances them from the transcript afterward.

How do Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai handle Zoom?

Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai both send a bot into your Zoom call, and both shine when you need a searchable archive rather than silence. The bot approach is the trade-off: everyone sees it join, which some teams prefer precisely because it is transparent.

Otter.ai runs on OtterPilot. Connect Otter to your Google or Outlook calendar, and it detects scheduled Zoom links, then joins those calls automatically at the start time. You get live real-time transcription you can watch scroll, Otter AI Chat to query the meeting, and automatic summaries. The free Basic tier gives 300 transcription minutes a month with a 90-minute cap per meeting, per Otter’s pricing. That 300 minutes sounds generous until you realize it is roughly three or four hour-long meetings, then you are done for the month. Paid Pro is 16.99/month(8.33 annual), Business is 30/month(19.99 annual) with unlimited meetings.

Fireflies.ai plays the same bot game but aims at teams and revenue orgs. Its edge is integrations: it pipes call notes into CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce, generates “soundbites” (short clip highlights), and offers strong search across a growing library. The free tier gives unlimited recordings with 800 minutes of storage a month and a handful of AI summaries; Premium is 19/month( 15 annual), Team is 29/month( 19 annual), per Fireflies’ pricing.

The unglamorous truth from watching teams use both: Otter wins for the person who wants to read the transcript live and act during the call; Fireflies wins for the team that wants the notes to end up inside their CRM without anyone copy-pasting. Pick based on where the notes need to land, not on the demo video.

How to add Otter or Fireflies to Zoom

1. Create the account and connect your Google or Outlook calendar.
2. Enable the auto-join setting (OtterPilot for Otter, the Fireflies notetaker for Fireflies).
3. The bot joins any Zoom link on your calendar at the scheduled time.
4. For ad-hoc calls, paste the Zoom link into the app to send the bot manually.

Which AI note taker has the best free plan for Zoom?

Fathom has the best genuinely free plan for Zoom in 2026: unlimited recordings, unlimited transcription, and unlimited storage, capped only at 5 AI summaries per month. No credit card. No minute limit. For a solo user on Zoom who mostly wants the recording and transcript, and only occasionally needs the AI write-up, Fathom’s free tier is hard to beat and, in my testing, the most generous in the category.

Fathom’s default is a bot that joins the Zoom call and appears in the participant list. Turning off the recording banner does not hide that bot; it stays visible, which Fathom treats as a feature, not a bug, because visibility is consent. In 2026 Fathom also added a bot-less meeting mode for people who want quieter capture, narrowing Granola’s old monopoly on that trick. Paid tiers unlock unlimited AI summaries and team features, with Premium around $20 per user per month (roughly $16 on annual billing).

tl;dv is the other free-tier contender, and it is built around clips. It records Zoom, Meet and Teams, timestamps everything, and lets you cut and share moments from a call, which sales and product teams love. It also carries a long list of integrations. But read the free tier carefully: recordings auto-delete after 3 months, and you get only 10 AI summaries for the entire lifetime of the account, per tl;dv’s pricing. Every plan caps a single recording at 3 hours. Paid Pro is 29/user/month(18 annual), Business $59/month.

Here is where the free-tier marketing gets slippery, and it is worth saying plainly. “Free” means five different things across these six tools. Granola’s free is 25 meetings ever. tl;dv’s is 10 summaries ever. Otter’s is 300 minutes a month. Fireflies’ is 800 storage minutes a month. Fathom’s is unlimited recording with 5 summaries a month. Do not compare the word “free.” Compare the actual ceiling you will hit, because you will hit it fast.

The verdict: which Zoom AI note taker should you pick?

I will give you a decision, not a shrug.

If you only ever meet in Zoom and already pay for a Zoom plan, use Zoom AI Companion. It is free, it is built in, and paying for a second tool to do what your existing subscription already does is money set on fire. Turn it on and move on.

If you also use Google Meet or Microsoft Teams, do not use AI Companion as your main tool, because it abandons you the moment you leave Zoom. Pick one cross-platform tool instead so all your notes live in one searchable place:

• Solo, want silence and no bot: Granola. Just remember the consent duty is now yours.
• Solo, want the best free plan: Fathom. Unlimited recording covers most of what you need.
• Team that lives in a CRM: Fireflies.ai. The notes land where your pipeline already is.
• Want live transcription you read during the call: Otter.ai.
• Want shareable clips and timestamps: tl;dv.

My own take after running these across real client calls: for a one-person operation, the fight is Granola versus Fathom, and it comes down to temperament. If a visible bot in the room makes you wince, pay for Granola. If you would rather keep $18 a month and do not mind the bot, live on Fathom’s free tier. Everyone else should choose by where the notes need to end up, not by which homepage looked slickest.

Frequently asked questions

Does Zoom have its own built-in AI note taker?

Yes. Zoom AI Companion is built into Zoom and generates meeting summaries and transcripts automatically. It is included at no extra cost on paid Zoom Workplace plans like Pro and Business, but it is not available on the free Basic plan and only works inside Zoom, not on Google Meet or Teams.

Is there an AI note taker for Zoom that does not join as a bot?

Yes. Granola captures your computer’s audio directly, so no bot appears in the Zoom participant list and no recording announcement plays. In 2026 Fathom also added a bot-less mode. With any silent capture, you are responsible for disclosing that you are recording, since the tool no longer does it for you.

What is the best free AI note taker for Zoom?

Fathom’s free plan is the most generous: unlimited recordings and transcription with 5 AI summaries per month and no credit card required. Otter gives 300 minutes a month, Fireflies gives 800 storage minutes a month, while Granola (25 meetings lifetime) and tl;dv (10 summaries lifetime) are closer to trials than free plans.

Can these AI note takers record Zoom, Google Meet and Teams?

Granola, Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, Fathom and tl;dv all work across Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. Only Zoom AI Companion is limited to Zoom. If your meetings span multiple platforms, a third-party tool keeps every summary in one place.

Do I need consent to use an AI note taker on Zoom?

Recording consent rules depend on your location, and in two-party-consent regions you must inform everyone on the call. A visible bot or Zoom’s native recording banner acts as that notice; silent bot-free tools do not, so you must announce recording yourself. This is general information, not legal advice.

About the author

Nam Nguyen is the founder of saas.com.ai, where he curates and tracks AI tools by real traffic and growth data to help readers find the right tool for any task. He tests meeting and productivity tools on live client calls across Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams.

Sources

• Zoom, AI Companion product and pricing pages (2026)
• No Jitter, “Zoom AI Companion 3.0 now generally available” (2026)
• Granola, pricing page (2026)
• Otter.ai, pricing page (2026)
• Fireflies.ai, pricing page (2026)
• Fathom, help center and pricing (2026)
• tl;dv, pricing page (2026)

Related on saas.com.ai: Granola AI review · Best AI note takers · Fathom listing