Granola is for solo operators who run their own meeting notes. Fathom is for sales teams that need calls in the CRM. Circleback is for ops-heavy teams that want structured outputs. Otter is for long-form transcripts and async review. relly is for live team meetings that need a participant who listens, speaks, and does the work in real time. Pick by the job, not the feature list.
Why "best AI notetaker" is the wrong question
The category called "AI meeting notetakers" actually contains four different products in a trench coat: a personal scribe, a sales recorder, an ops automation, and a live teammate. They share a transcription engine and a summary template. Past that, they diverge sharply.
Picking by review-site star ratings or feature checkboxes will leave you with whichever tool happened to optimize for review-site visibility. Pick by the actual job your meetings need done. The five tools below cover the most common shapes.
The five tools, in one paragraph each
Granola
Granola is a personal notetaker for the kind of person who already takes their own notes and just wants the AI to clean them up. It runs on your laptop, listens via system audio, and merges your typed bullets with the transcript into a polished recap. No bot joins the call. The output is yours alone, stored locally and synced for you. If you are an investor, founder, PM, or solo operator who lives in back-to-back calls and writes good notes, Granola feels like a personal upgrade.
Fathom
Fathom is a meeting recorder built for sales and customer-facing teams. It joins the call as a bot, records, transcribes, and pushes a tidy recap and action items into Salesforce, HubSpot, or whichever CRM you live in. Fathom is at its best when the meeting is a customer call and the output needs to land in a deal record, not a personal Notion. It is the closest thing the category has to a Gong-lite for teams who want call review without the enterprise pricing.
Circleback
Circleback is the structured-output notetaker. It joins your meetings, transcribes, and produces unusually clean action-item extractions, decision logs, and follow-up emails. Where most tools give you a paragraph, Circleback gives you a checklist with owners. Ops, project management, and any team where "what did we decide and who's doing it" matters more than the conversation itself tend to gravitate to it.
Otter
Otter is the OG of the category. It started as a transcription tool for journalists and researchers and grew into a meeting platform. Its strengths remain at the long-tail end: live transcription, searchable archives, accurate speaker labels, and a generous free tier. Teams that need to revisit meetings months later, or that record interviews and lectures alongside meetings, are Otter's home turf.
relly
relly is not a notetaker. It is a voice AI teammate that joins your meeting, listens to the conversation, speaks like a participant, and does follow-up work while you are still talking. Recap and action items come out the back, but the point is the live participation: pulling research, opening Figma frames, drafting Slack messages, and reading back the team's prior decisions when the room references them. Teams whose problem is "our meetings make decisions but the work happens later" pick relly.
The shape of each tool, side by side
If you only need a transcript, the cheapest tool wins. If you need a teammate, the cheapest tool is the most expensive thing in the room.
Capture method
Granola: on-device, no bot. Fathom: bot joins the call. Circleback: bot joins the call. Otter: bot or device, both supported. relly: on-device by default, bot fallback when needed.
Live behavior in the meeting
Granola: silent, surfaces nothing in real time. Fathom: silent. Circleback: silent. Otter: live transcript visible if you open the app. relly: participates in the conversation, speaks when useful, runs research and tool actions in parallel.
Primary output
Granola: personal recap merged with your own notes. Fathom: CRM-ready call summary plus action items. Circleback: action items, decision log, follow-up email drafts. Otter: full transcript plus highlight reel. relly: live work artifacts during the meeting and a team-shared recap after.
Memory
Granola: personal memory, your meetings only. Fathom: CRM-scoped, organized by deal or contact. Circleback: meeting-scoped with cross-meeting search. Otter: personal vault with team workspaces. relly: team-shared continuous memory across all meetings, surfaced when context calls for it.
Best fit
Granola: solo operators, founders, investors. Fathom: sales and CS teams. Circleback: ops, PM, and execution-heavy teams. Otter: long-form interviews, lectures, archive-heavy work. relly: small-to-mid teams whose meetings drive decisions and need to move faster than the post-meeting Slack thread.
How to actually pick
Three questions cut through most of the confusion.
- Who is the audience for the output? If it is just you, Granola or Otter. If it is a CRM, Fathom. If it is a project tracker or ops doc, Circleback. If it is the team itself, in real time, relly.
- Should the AI be silent or active? A silent tool is a recorder with a recap. An active tool is a participant. Most teams default to silent because that is what existed in 2023. In 2026, silent is a choice, not a constraint.
- Where does the work happen? If the work is "remember this later," any of these will do. If the work is "do this now while we are still in the meeting," only relly is built for that shape.
Most teams will end up using two: a recorder for archival and a teammate for live participation. That is fine. They are different tools.
Where each one struggles
Granola
Granola is single-player by design. Once a meeting has more than two participants who all want the recap, you are back to copy-paste. There is no team memory, no shared archive, and no live action.
Fathom
Outside of sales workflows, Fathom feels overbuilt. Internal team meetings rarely need CRM sync or call review at minute-level granularity. The bot joining each call is also a small social tax that some teams resist.
Circleback
Circleback's output is excellent, but it is still post-hoc. The decisions and owners arrive after the meeting ends. If a wrong owner is logged, you find out later. The conversation moved on without the AI in it.
Otter
Otter's summaries trail the best of the new entrants. The transcript is great, the recap is generic. For teams who care about action items and decisions more than transcripts, Otter feels like a layer below the surface.
relly
relly is a teammate, not an archive. If your goal is "I want to search every meeting from the last two years," relly is not the tool. relly is for the meetings you are running this week, not the ones you ran last quarter. Teams that need both pair relly with an archival tool.
The factor most comparisons miss: who owns the memory
Notetakers store memory in three places, and the choice matters more than people realize.
Personal memory (Granola, Otter personal) belongs to you. Switch jobs, take it with you. Great for individuals, fragile for teams: when one person leaves, their meeting history goes too.
Account memory (Fathom, Circleback, Otter teams) belongs to the workspace. Survives turnover. Tends to be siloed by tool: sales calls in Fathom, ops decisions in Circleback, all-hands in Otter.
Team memory (relly) is the live, shared context the AI itself holds. The same teammate that joined Monday's strategy session shows up in Friday's design review and remembers what got decided. This is the layer most tools do not even attempt, because it requires the AI to be a continuous participant, not a per-meeting recorder.
If you are buying a tool for a team, ask where memory lives and who can access it. The answer often points you to the right product before any feature comparison.
A short verdict by team type
- Solo founder, investor, exec coach: Granola.
- Sales or CS team with a CRM: Fathom.
- Ops, PM, agency, or consulting team: Circleback.
- Researchers, journalists, education, archive-heavy work: Otter.
- Small-to-mid product, design, or strategy team that meets to decide: relly.
If you want to see what voice-first participation looks like in your actual meetings, early access to relly is open with 50% off the first 12 months. No card needed until launch. (And if relly is not the right shape for you, the categories above point to the tool that probably is.)
Common questions
What is the best AI meeting notetaker in 2026?
There is no single best AI meeting notetaker because the tools solve different problems. Granola fits solo operators who want clean recaps. Fathom fits sales teams who live in CRMs. Circleback fits ops-heavy teams who want structured action items. Otter fits long-form transcripts and asynchronous review. relly fits live team meetings that need a participant, not just a recorder.
What is the difference between a notetaker and a voice AI teammate?
A notetaker records and summarizes. A voice AI teammate listens, speaks back, runs research, and pushes work into Slack, Notion, or Linear during the meeting. Notetakers help you remember what happened. A voice teammate helps you finish the work while it is still happening.
Do AI notetakers work with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams?
All five tools in this comparison support Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams either through a meeting bot that joins the call or through native audio capture on your device. Coverage and audio quality vary by approach. Bot-based capture works on any platform but adds a guest. Device-based capture is invisible but requires the app to run on the host machine.
Which AI notetaker is best for privacy-sensitive meetings?
For privacy-sensitive meetings, look for tools that do device-side capture instead of cloud bots, offer per-meeting consent prompts, and let admins control retention and training opt-out. Granola and relly capture on-device by default. Fathom, Circleback, and Otter support enterprise privacy controls but rely on a meeting bot in most setups.
Want a teammate, not just a notetaker?
relly joins your next meeting, listens, speaks like a participant, and finishes the work while your team is still talking. Early access is open through May 18, 2026, with 50% off your first year.
Claim early access →