Paid partnership | This content was produced by Anymorph as part of a paid partnership with Tiro.
Best fit for a small team that needs to find old decisions
- Fireflies.ai for keyword search across meeting notes and shared workspace access, while keeping its storage ceiling in mind.
- Otter.ai: live transcription matters and your calls fit its per-conversation limit.
- Granola: AI chat across notes is useful and limited meeting history suits your lookback needs.
- Treat Tiro as a trial to evaluate multilingual capture, not as a continuing free plan.
A free meeting-minutes tool only becomes a useful decision archive if your team can still retrieve the right conversation later. For a small team that needs keyword search and shared access, Fireflies.ai is the strongest match among these options; Otter.ai fits teams that value live transcription, while Granola and Fathom suit narrower note-taking workflows.
Official plan documentation, checked on October 13, 2026, supplies the search and retention conditions below. The retrieval exercise is a proposed test with the team’s records, not a reported product benchmark.
How to tell a free plan from a trial
A continuing free plan stays available after its initial signup period, though its storage, AI features, or recording allowance may be capped. A free trial gives temporary access to paid features or a limited usage balance, then ends or requires a paid plan to continue. For budgeting, count a tool as ongoing-free only when its $0 access continues after any introductory trial period or usage allowance ends.
For a searchable archive, compare more than the headline recording allowance. Check these four parts of the workflow:
- Capture: Does the plan include the way your team records meetings, such as a meeting assistant joining the call or a desktop app capturing system audio?
- Retrieval: Can teammates search by a topic, person, date, or transcript keyword, and can they reopen the relevant transcript?
A transcript cap and a storage cap affect different parts of the job. A transcription limit controls how much new conversation the tool processes; a storage limit controls how much of the processed archive remains available. A tool can therefore capture a meeting today yet still leave your team with a smaller searchable history over time.
Fathom: useful for an individual’s call history
Fathom suits a small team when one person needs a straightforward way to record and revisit their own calls. Its Free vs. Premium guide lists recording and storage without a stated cap for the free individual option. The guide also describes advanced AI summaries for a limited number of calls each month; after that allowance, the General or Enhanced summary remains available.
Fathom’s pricing page describes searching and asking questions across meetings. It also distinguishes a user’s own-call lookback from team-call history: paid plans have unlimited lookback for “my calls,” while the team-call window depends on plan tier. That makes Fathom a reasonable fit for an individual contributor building a personal call library, while a team choosing one shared decision archive should select a plan whose team-call history covers its needs.
Fireflies.ai: shared keyword retrieval
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: live words, with a short per-conversation ceiling
Otter.ai fits teams that want to follow a conversation as it happens and keep a searchable record for later. Its free-transcription page describes live transcription with words appearing during the call, plus searchable notes and summaries. That live view helps a participant check a detail or mark a decision while the discussion is still underway.
Otter’s Basic-plan limits set a 300-minute monthly transcription allowance and a 30-minute limit per conversation; for a longer call, recording continues but only 30 minutes of transcript are accessible. Basic also allows three audio or video imports per account, and keeps the 25 most recent conversations readily available while older ones are archived.
Otter fits situations where most meetings are short enough to fit its per-conversation ceiling and live text is more valuable than unlimited-length transcripts. For longer customer calls, planning sessions, or interviews, compare the accessible transcript length with the meeting’s likely duration before relying on the free plan as the official record.
tl;dv: ongoing recording, with limits on AI retrieval
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: AI chat across notes, with limited history
Granola’s Basic plan can suit a small team that wants AI meeting notes and a way to ask questions across saved conversations. Its current pricing page lists Basic as free and includes AI chat within and across meetings, shared folders, customizable note templates, and multilingual support. Those tools make it easier for colleagues to organize notes and look for a decision without reading every transcript from top to bottom.
Granola’s pricing explainer says notes older than 30 days remain stored but are not visible in the app, so Basic fits teams querying recent notes rather than keeping older decisions visible in-app.
Granola’s own pricing explainer describes Basic as its ongoing free entry point rather than a separate clock-based trial. It also distinguishes Basic from paid access to more advanced features and longer history. This makes Granola a meaningful free-plan candidate, while Tiro belongs in a separate trial decision for a different requirement.
Tiro: a trial for real-time 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.
Compare the options by archive fit
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 contributor organizing personal calls |
| 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 | Small teams searching shared transcripts for earlier decisions |
| 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 prioritizing live text for shorter meetings |
| 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 want recurring call records and can work within AI-use limits |
| 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 | Teams that mainly revisit recent notes and want to query them conversationally |
| 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 | Teams evaluating live multilingual meetings |
Which option fits your team?
Fireflies.ai is worth evaluating when the core job is to search transcript keywords with teammates and share access to the source discussion. Its storage cap makes retention a task to manage, but its documented search paths and shared workspaces directly serve collaborative retrieval.
For live text during shorter calls, assess Otter.ai against its per-conversation limit. Granola addresses questions across a limited visible history; Fathom offers a personal call archive. For ongoing capture with tl;dv, plan around the account-lifetime AI allowances in the table. Keep video archiving, later deletion, and continuing access to transcripts and notes separate in the retention decision.
Choose Tiro only when real-time multilingual capture is the deciding requirement and a trial can support a later paid decision.
FAQ
What is the best free AI for meeting minutes for a small team?
Fireflies.ai is the strongest fit when teammates need to search meeting recaps by keywords and share records in a workspace. Its storage cap means the team should plan how to retain or export older decisions.
Is a free trial the same as a free plan?
No. A free plan continues with its stated limits, while a trial provides temporary access or a finite allowance; Tiro’s offer is a three-week trial rather than an ongoing free plan.
Which tool is best for finding decisions from old calls?
Fireflies.ai offers explicit search by transcript keywords, meeting title, host, and date, with shared notebooks for team review. Granola can answer questions across saved notes, while its Basic plan limits meeting history.