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Best free AI meeting minutes for a small team: choose an ongoing-free plan when $0 access matters every month; use Tiro’s separate trial to evaluate live multilingual capture.
- Fathom pairs uncapped listed recording and transcription with summaries, clips, and search.
- Fireflies.ai offers searchable transcripts and sharing, with a stored-minute limit.
- Otter.ai suits short calls and teams that can work within a monthly transcription allowance and a per-conversation cap.
- tl;dv and Granola offer recurring free access, with different history and AI-feature constraints.
- Tiro offers a three-week trial: 100 signup minutes plus four 50-minute onboarding rewards; per note, 50 minutes are viewable and up to 120 minutes can be recorded within the available balance.
For a small team that needs meeting minutes without an ongoing software bill, start by comparing Fathom, Fireflies.ai, Otter.ai, tl;dv, and Granola, then pick the free plan whose cap matches your call schedule. If your team’s deciding need is real-time transcription and translation across languages, Tiro is a separate trial to evaluate, not a sixth continuing-free option. Plan details below were checked October 12, 2026.
The free-plan and trial comparison uses official documentation checked on October 13, 2026. A cross-language pilot should separately review caption access, translated meaning, and the record available to colleagues afterwards.
How to compare free meeting-minutes plans
A free plan is usable for ongoing work when access continues without a trial clock; a free trial provides a limited evaluation period before the free access ends. For recurring use, the key question is not only whether recording has a cap, but whether the team can keep useful summaries and find older decisions after the meeting.
Compare these five constraints before choosing:
- Recording or transcription allowance: Is the limit monthly, per meeting, tied to an eligible capture method, or absent from the listed free terms?
- AI-summary access: Are summaries included, limited by credits, or restricted to a paid tier?
- Seats and sharing: Can several teammates contribute and share notes on free access, or does the team workspace require paid seats?
- History and storage: How many minutes or days remain readily available, and can the team search older conversations?
- The upgrade trigger: Identify the first limit your normal work week would reach, such as a 30-minute call cap or a small searchable archive.
An individual owner may work from personal notes, while a team that shares decisions needs a way for each colleague to find and act on the record. For a light call schedule, a monthly transcription allowance may cover routine use; for a longer customer interview, check that the per-conversation cap leaves the full transcript accessible.
Fathom: ongoing free capture and call search
Fathom is a strong starting point when a small team wants to record and transcribe meetings regularly. Its pricing page lists a free option with unlimited recordings and transcriptions, instant call summaries, clips, playlists, and search across calls. The same page lists a choice of bot or bot-free capture, with bot-free capture marked as a Mac beta.
That combination suits a lead who wants a durable record of regular calls and a way to pull selected moments from them.
Fathom’s team-plan help page states that its new Team and Business plans have no free seats; each member who needs ongoing access on those plans needs a paid seat. For a strict $0 team, Fathom fits best when an individual owner can manage capture and the group’s sharing needs remain modest.
Fireflies.ai: transcript search and sharing
The Fireflies Free-plan guide describes keyword retrieval and sharing with teammates or guests. Its feature guide explains the starter transcription allowance and Auto Join for eligible meetings. Check that capture setup against the calls your team needs to record.
Free storage is 400 minutes per seat, pooled across the workspace according to the storage guide; teams reclaim capacity by removing older meetings. The Free-plan guide includes sharing with teammates or external guests and up to three additional public channels; unlimited private channels require Business. Transcript downloads require a paid plan.
The Fireflies comparison covers meeting transcription, ordinary keyword search, sharing, and stored meeting minutes. Advanced AI assistants, AI-generated highlights, and custom AI skills are outside this comparison. Assess whether colleagues can locate and open the meeting record using the capture, search, and access conditions described here.
Otter.ai: short calls within a clear monthly cap
Otter.ai fits teams that value meeting transcription and can keep calls within a per-conversation ceiling. Otter’s Basic free-plan help page documents a monthly transcription allowance and per-conversation duration ceiling, limits audio and video imports, and surfaces only recent conversation history.
The 30-minute limit affects the transcript a user can read: a longer recording or import continues, but the free plan makes only up to 30 minutes of its transcription accessible. Otter’s free transcription page also lists unlimited shared meetings and describes searching, editing, and sharing transcripts. It places enhanced collaboration tools among paid-plan features.
For a concrete example, one 45-minute customer call uses 45 minutes of the monthly allowance, while the free transcript access stops at 30 minutes for that conversation. Otter suits a team with shorter recurring meetings and a modest import need; teams that rely on full transcripts from long calls will reach the per-call limit first.
tl;dv: generous capture with a short free archive window
tl;dv's official Free-plan limits separate ongoing capture from finite AI allowances. The Free plan permits unlimited numbers of recordings, transcripts, and manually timestamped notes, with a three-hour ceiling per recorded or uploaded meeting. The first 10 meetings receive full-meeting automatic AI notes; later meetings receive automatic notes for their first 10 minutes. The account also receives 10 AI prompts and 10 AI reports. These allowances apply over the account's lifetime rather than resetting each month.
Video storage has two stages: after three days, recordings move to archived storage, while transcripts and notes stay accessible. Watching an archived video requires restoring it, which can take up to 90 minutes. Free recordings are retained for three months before deletion; users receive four weeks' notice and can download recordings during that window. Pro or Business unlocks features such as unlimited single-meeting AI summaries and instant access to older storage. For a free workflow, plan around the first 10 full-meeting summaries and export the records your team needs before the retention deadline.
Granola: ongoing free notes for recent meetings
Granola’s free option fits a small team or individual who mainly needs notes from their own meetings and can work with a recent-history view. Its pricing and plan guide describes Basic as free with unlimited meetings and no time cap, making it continuing access rather than a time-limited trial.
On Basic, notes older than 30 days remain stored but are not visible in the app. It also describes fewer integrations and no access to advanced AI thinking models compared with Business. Granola Basic includes shared folders and AI chat within and across meetings, so teams can share context; the 30-day visibility window, fewer integrations, and lack of advanced AI models make it a better fit for recent-note workflows than for teams that need older notes visible in the app.
Tiro: a time-limited test for multilingual meetings
Tiro's free-trial guide gives a new eligible account 100 minutes at signup. Within the three-week trial, four onboarding tasks each add 50 minutes: create a first note, connect a calendar, install the desktop app, and install the mobile app. Completing all four raises the total to 300 minutes. The allowance is shared across live recording, offline recording, and audio uploads, is granted once per account, and ends after three weeks or when a paid plan starts.
The trial limits viewing to the first 50 minutes of each note and allows recording up to 120 minutes per note, subject to the remaining trial balance. Recording continues past minute 50; text beyond that point stays blurred until a paid upgrade. Recording stops at minute 120, so later audio is not captured. A paid upgrade unlocks the recorded text beyond minute 50.
For cross-language meetings, the live-recording guide explains how to select Multilingual for Listen In, choose a supported Write In language, and enable the live Translation display. Use representative meetings to assess translated decisions, specialist terms, and action owners before deciding on a paid plan.
Which free plan fits your team?
Comparison table Scroll to view every column ↔
| Tool | Access | Capture and AI allowance | History, search, sharing, and paid-plan conditions | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fathom | Free individual; Team/Business paid | Unlimited recording, storage, and transcription; five advanced summaries each month, then General/Enhanced summaries | Personal call search and clips on Free; Premium for Ask Fathom and advanced action/follow-up features; Team for shared team search and collaboration; Team/Business have paid seats | An individual-led workflow that needs regular capture, summaries, and call search. |
| Fireflies.ai | Free; paid tiers for specified features | Three initial meeting transcriptions; Auto Join enables ongoing transcription of eligible meetings; 400 stored minutes per seat, pooled by workspace; advanced AI allowances are outside this comparison | Transcript keyword search and recap sharing on Free; up to three additional public channels; unlimited private channels require Business; transcript downloads require a paid plan | Teams that need searchable transcripts and a controlled shared archive |
| Otter.ai | Basic free; paid tiers expand access | 300 transcription minutes per month; 30 viewable transcript minutes per conversation/import; three imports per account for its lifetime; latest 25 conversations visible, older ones archived | Basic supports shared transcripts and TXT export; full older history and DOCX/PDF/SRT exports require a paid plan | Teams with shorter calls and limited import needs. |
| tl;dv | Free; Pro/Business expand AI and archive access | Unlimited number of recordings/transcripts, each up to three hours; first 10 meetings get full AI notes, then first 10 minutes only; 10 AI prompts and 10 AI reports for the account lifetime | After three days videos are archived, but transcripts/notes stay accessible; restore archived videos to watch; videos retained for three months before deletion; Pro/Business add unlimited single-meeting AI summaries and instant older-storage access | Teams that review meeting highlights promptly and need frequent capture. |
| Granola | Basic free; Business/Enterprise paid | No meeting-count limit; Basic history visible for 30 days; older notes remain stored | Basic includes shared folders and cross-meeting AI chat; Business adds full history and advanced integrations; Enterprise adds workspace-wide sharing controls | Individuals or small teams focused on recent notes from their own meetings. |
| Tiro | Three-week trial; paid plan for continued creation | 100 signup minutes + four onboarding tasks at 50 minutes each = up to 300 within three weeks; per note: first 50 minutes viewable, up to 120 minutes recorded within the available balance | Trial notes can still be viewed, edited, and shared afterwards; text beyond minute 50 unlocks on paid upgrade; Team is the plan for workspace-folder collaboration | Cross-language teams evaluating real-time transcription and translation before paying. |
For an ongoing $0 workflow, begin with Fathom if uncapped capture and call search lead the decision, Fireflies if searchable transcripts and shared access matter more, Otter if calls are short, tl;dv if the team reviews promptly, or Granola if recent personal meeting notes are enough. If your team’s deciding requirement is live multilingual meetings, Tiro’s three-week trial provides a bounded test of that workflow, and the team can decide afterward whether the feature merits a paid plan.