You want your meetings captured, summarized, searchable. The question is what you are willing to trade for it. Fathom gives you unlimited recording for zero dollars and asks nothing beyond a Zoom seat. Avoma charges per seat, plus an add-on, plus another add-on, and turns every sales call into a scored, forecastable revenue artifact. AmyNote lives on the phone in your pocket and captures the conversation that never had a Zoom link. Three products, three different bets about where meetings actually live.
Quick Verdict
Fathom wins on price. A free plan with unlimited cloud recording, unlimited transcripts, and 5 advanced AI calls per month is genuinely unmatched. Nothing else in the category comes close to zero dollars.
Avoma wins on sales intelligence. Scorecards, deal-risk alerts, and revenue forecasting baked into the meeting layer is what mid-market sales orgs are buying. The closest comparable is Gong, at four to five times the seat cost.
AmyNote wins on location. No bot, no laptop, no Zoom link required. The meeting can be a kitchen-table conversation with a client and the recorder is the phone already on the table.
If your meetings are on Zoom and you want zero cost: Fathom. If your meetings are sales calls and you want a coaching layer on top: Avoma. If your meetings are in person, on the move, or in a language other than English: AmyNote.
What We Compared
Six dimensions that actually change how a tool fits into a real week:
- Recording surface. Where the audio comes from. Bot on Zoom, native desktop, or a phone.
- Pricing at the tier you would actually buy. Free is not free if it gates the feature you need.
- Language coverage. Whether the tool handles the languages your clients actually speak.
- AI depth beyond the summary. Re-prompting, scorecards, deal intelligence.
- Where audio sits at rest. Vendor cloud, regional cloud, or device-local.
- What happens when the bot fails. Or never had a calendar invite to begin with.
All pricing verified June 2026 from each vendor’s published plans.
Fathom: The Free Unlimited Cloud Notetaker
Strengths
Fathom is the most generous free tier in the category and it is not close. The free plan gives you unlimited recordings, unlimited transcripts, unlimited storage, and call summaries on every call across Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. G2 rates Fathom 5.0 across 6,000-plus reviews, the highest in the entire AI-meeting space. Users routinely report switching from Gong, Chorus, Otter, or Fireflies because the free Fathom plan outperformed a paid competitor.
Post-call summaries arrive in around 30 seconds. Accuracy sits at 85 to 95 percent on clean audio, with around 87 percent average across mixed conditions. The Ask Fathom conversational layer works well on individual calls — you can ask “what did the customer say about budget?” and get a quoted, timestamped answer pulled from the transcript.
Weaknesses
The free plan is capped at 5 advanced AI actions per month. Once consumed, you can still record and transcribe unlimited meetings, but Ask Fathom and the deeper summaries lock until the calendar flips. Premium at $15.60 per month annual ($20 monthly) removes that cap. Team Edition runs around $19 per seat annual, Team Edition Pro around $29 per seat annual.
Language coverage is 25 languages, narrower than most competitors. Fathom is bot-based: it joins Zoom, Meet, or Teams as a participant. No in-person mode, no mobile-first recording path. If your meeting is not on a calendar with a video link, Fathom cannot help. And the bot in the participant list is visible — if the other side asks “who is Fathom?” you owe them an answer.
Avoma: The Premium Conversation Intelligence Layer
Strengths
Avoma is built for sales teams. Startup at $19 per seat per month annual ($29 monthly) includes the AI Meeting Assistant, 1:1 scheduler, CRM auto-save, and dialer integration. The differentiator sits in the add-ons:
- Conversation Intelligence at $29 per seat adds AI scorecards (MEDDIC, SPICED, custom), a real-time answer assistant during calls, and performance dashboards by rep.
- Revenue Intelligence at $29 per seat adds deal-risk alerts, pipeline forecasting, and two-way CRM field updates pulled straight from call content.
Bundle any two add-ons and Avoma takes 10 percent off. Bundle all three and the discount is 15 percent. Industry analysts price Avoma at 15 to 25 percent of what Gong charges for comparable feature breadth, which is why mid-market revenue orgs evaluate it.
Weaknesses
Stacked add-ons get expensive fast. A rep on Startup plus CI plus RI pays around $77 per seat per month before bundle discounts. Language coverage is 30-plus, narrower than AmyNote (120-plus), Fireflies, or Notta.
The deeper issue is reliability. G2 reviewers consistently flag bots joining late, dropping mid-call, or failing to appear, forcing reps back to manual notes. AI summaries miss details users care about, and scorecards need extensive setup before they produce signal — you do not buy Avoma in week one and have a coaching dashboard in week two. Avoma earns its keep on structured sales workflows where the data model is already in place, not as a generic note-taker for a five-person company.
AmyNote: The Mobile-First Pocket Recorder
Strengths
AmyNote sidesteps the entire bot question. The recorder is the iPhone already in your pocket, so the meeting can be a coffee with a customer, a hallway chat at a conference, a kitchen-table sit-down with a client. Transcription runs on OpenAI’s latest Speech API; analysis on Anthropic’s Claude Opus. Both providers contractually guarantee zero training on user data. Audio is encrypted in transit, not retained on provider servers after processing. Transcripts live locally on the device with end-to-end encryption.
Cross-session speaker memory means Marcus stays Marcus across every meeting once labeled, not Speaker 1 in one call and Speaker 3 in the next. 120-plus languages with real-time translation cover meetings Fathom (25 languages) and Avoma (30-plus) cannot. The 3-day free trial requires no credit card.
Weaknesses
AmyNote is iPhone-first. No desktop app today. No native CRM integration like Fellow or Avoma. No video recording the way tl;dv and Fathom offer for sales-clip reels. No team or enterprise tier yet, so it does not slot into a 200-seat revenue org the way Avoma does. Brand recognition is smaller than Fathom or Avoma. Honest fit: solo professionals, small teams, mobile workflows, multilingual meetings, in-person work.
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Dimension | Fathom | Avoma | AmyNote |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recording surface | Bot on Zoom, Meet, Teams | Bot on Zoom, Meet, Teams + dialer | Phone microphone, no bot |
| Free tier ceiling | Unlimited recording, 5 AI calls/mo | 14-day trial, then paid | 3-day full trial, no card |
| Entry paid price | $15.60/mo annual | $19/seat/mo annual | Single tier |
| Fully loaded price | ~$29/seat (Team Pro) | ~$77/seat (Startup + CI + RI) | Single tier |
| Languages | 25 | 30+ | 120+ with real-time translation |
| Sales coaching depth | Light (Ask Fathom) | Heavy (scorecards, RI) | None |
| In-person capture | No | No | Yes — native use case |
| Privacy posture | Cloud-hosted, SOC 2 | Cloud-hosted, SOC 2, GDPR | Contractual zero-training, local-on-device, E2E encryption |
| G2 rating | 5.0 (6,000+ reviews) | 4.6 | New entrant |
| Speaker memory across meetings | Session-scoped | Session-scoped | Cross-session |
How To Decide In Five Minutes
If you are not sure which of the three fits your week, answer these in order:
- Are at least a quarter of your meetings in person, on the phone, or off a laptop? If yes, only AmyNote covers them. Fathom and Avoma both assume the conversation runs through a Zoom, Meet, or Teams session with a calendar invite. The meetings you most wish you had captured are usually the ones that never had a calendar event.
- Do you run a structured sales process with MEDDIC, SPICED, or a custom scorecard? If yes, Avoma is the only one of the three that closes the loop from call content to pipeline forecast. Fathom can transcribe a sales call beautifully but cannot tell you the deal is slipping next quarter. Budget around $48 to $77 per seat for the stack that earns its keep.
- Are you the buyer, paying out of pocket, working solo on Zoom? Fathom Free covers an enormous amount of ground at zero dollars. Use it for a month. If the 5 AI calls per month is the constraint that bites, upgrade to Premium. If it never bites, you have your answer.
Most decisions break cleanly on question one. The teams that lose the most value are the ones who buy Fathom or Avoma, then realize three months in that the meetings they most wish they had captured were the on-site ones the bot was never going to reach.
Pricing, In One Line Each
- Fathom Free: $0. Unlimited recording, transcripts, storage on Zoom/Meet/Teams. 5 AI calls/mo.
- Fathom Premium: $15.60/mo annual ($20 monthly). Unlimited AI calls. Solo workflow.
- Fathom Team Edition: ~$19/seat annual. Shared library, basic team features.
- Fathom Team Edition Pro: ~$29/seat annual. CRM sync, video clips, integrations.
- Avoma Startup: $19/seat/mo annual. Up to 25 seats. AI assistant + CRM auto-save.
- Avoma Organization: $29/seat/mo annual. Mid-market tier.
- Avoma Enterprise: $39/seat/mo annual, 10-seat minimum.
- Avoma CI add-on: +$29/seat/mo. Scorecards, real-time assistant.
- Avoma RI add-on: +$29/seat/mo. Deal risk, pipeline forecast.
- AmyNote: 3-day free trial, no card. Single subscription tier afterward.
The Bottom Line
Three different bets about where your meetings live. Fathom bets they all happen on Zoom and no one objects to a bot in the participant list. Avoma bets they are sales calls and you will pay for the coaching layer that turns each one into a forecast input. AmyNote bets the meetings that matter most are the ones no calendar invite captured: the gate-side chat, the conference hallway, the client across the table.
For the Zoom-only operator who wants zero cost, Fathom remains the category-leading free plan. Nothing in the AI-meeting space gives you more for $0.
For the mid-market sales team running MEDDIC or SPICED that wants the meeting layer to feed the pipeline, Avoma earns its add-on stack. Just go in knowing the fully loaded seat is close to $80 per month, not the $19 entry price.
For the lawyer, advisor, consultant, journalist, or anyone whose meeting just walked into a coffee shop, the recorder lives in the pocket. AmyNote runs on the iPhone, captures any conversation in 120-plus languages, keeps the transcript on the device, and guarantees the audio never trains a model. Try the 3-day free trial at amynote.app, no credit card required.
Whichever you pick, the question is no longer “will the meeting be captured?” The question is “which form factor matches the room you actually meet in?”
Originally published as an X Article.
