Fathom is a polished AI meeting recorder. It joins your call as a silent bot, captures the audio, and ships a clean recap, transcript, and action list once the meeting ends. relly is a voice teammate that joins the same call as a named participant, can be spoken to, and produces shared work while the team is still talking. Both transcribe, both summarize, both export to your tools. The fork is when the AI does its job. Fathom owns the after. relly owns the during.
The shortest honest answer
Fathom is a recap product. relly is a participant product. Once you hold that distinction in your head, every other comparison line in this post becomes easier to read.
Both tools sit in the same broader category that the market loosely calls "AI notetakers," and both will give you a transcript, a summary, and action items at the end of a call. That makes them feel interchangeable from a feature checklist. They are not. The shape of the work is different because the moment of the work is different.
How Fathom behaves in a meeting
Fathom joins your meeting as a notetaker bot, listens silently, and produces a recap when the call ends. It does not speak, it does not act, it does not interrupt. From the room's point of view, there is a small additional participant whose job is to remember everything.
The recap is the product. A few minutes after the call, you get a structured summary, a searchable transcript, time-stamped highlights, and a list of action items pulled from the conversation. You can clip moments to share, push the summary to a CRM, or send it as a follow-up email. For a customer call or a sales review, that workflow is genuinely useful. The team did not have to type, the talking points did not get lost, and a clean record exists for whoever was not in the room.
Fathom is also known for a strong free tier on the recording side, which lowers the cost of trying it. For a lot of small teams and solo operators, the free recap is the thing that gets them to install it in the first place.
How relly behaves in a meeting
relly is a voice AI that joins your call as a named participant on Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams and can be talked to like another teammate. It listens, holds the team's running context, and contributes when the room asks for something the AI can do faster.
That contribution is concrete. When someone says "what did we decide about pricing last week," relly pulls the answer from the team's memory layer and posts it in chat before the next sentence finishes. When the conversation produces a decision, relly captures it with the owner and date in the right doc. When an action item lands, the Linear or Jira ticket gets filed during the call, not in someone's notebook for later. By the time the call ends, the recap, the decisions, and the follow-up tickets are already in the right tools.
The room can also stay quiet around relly. If nobody addresses it, it does not interrupt. The default behavior is participant-shaped restraint, not constant suggestion. For a deeper read on that design choice, see how AI should behave in a real meeting.
What's actually the same
Most of the surface features overlap. The buying decision is not on the surface.
Both products give you accurate transcription, an AI-generated summary, an action item list, and integrations with the tools your team already uses. Both can post the recap to Slack and the action items to a project tracker. Both support the major meeting platforms.
Both also handle the basic privacy work you would expect: a visible bot in the call so participants know recording is happening, controls over what gets stored, and admin tools for who can see what. The category-level baseline is solid in both products.
If your only requirement is "I want the meeting recorded, transcribed, summarized, and the action items captured," either tool will get you there. The decision sits one layer deeper than that.
Where Fathom wins
Fathom is the right pick when the meeting itself does not need help, but the after-meeting record does.
- Sales calls handled solo: the rep does the talking, the recap goes to the CRM, the highlight clip gets shared with the deal team. Fathom's free tier and CRM integrations make this very low-friction.
- Customer interviews and research calls: you need a clean transcript and a structured summary, not a participant. Fathom's silent presence is exactly right.
- Recurring 1:1s: the conversation is between two people, the recap is for the person who hosted it, the follow-up is light.
- Teams just starting with AI in meetings: Fathom's pricing model and zero-config setup make it the easiest first AI tool to put on every call.
If you described your AI need as "give me a clean record of every call without changing how I run it," Fathom is the right answer.
Where relly wins
relly is the right pick when the meeting itself is doing the team's work, and pausing to type, search, or prompt costs the room real time.
- Team strategy and planning sessions: "what was retention last quarter" gets answered in seconds, not in a follow-up Slack thread the next day.
- Live client pitches: when a prospect asks a hard question, relly surfaces the relevant doc or stat while the rep keeps eye contact and keeps talking.
- Design and product reviews: Figma frames open, comp screenshots appear, decisions get logged in the right product doc as the team converges.
- Engineering standups and weekly reviews: blockers, decisions, and owners are captured automatically, tickets are created live, and the recap is shaped for the people who were not in the room.
- Cross-timezone teams: the during-meeting output is what async teammates open the next morning, not a 2,000-word transcript they have to skim.
If you described your AI need as "stop making the meeting do the AI's work," relly is the right answer. The framework behind that line is in the two-shifts problem.
The during-shift test
A simple way to choose between Fathom and relly is to look at where the pain in your meetings actually lives.
- If the pain is "we keep losing the record," Fathom solves it. A clean recap and a searchable transcript on every call ends that pain.
- If the pain is "we keep deciding things and then losing them between the call and the cleanup," that is a during-shift problem and a relly job. The decision needs to be captured at the moment it happens, with the owner and the date attached, and posted to the doc the team already trusts.
- If the pain is "we keep stopping the meeting to look things up," that is also a during-shift problem. Fathom cannot help with it because Fathom is silent during the call. relly is built for it.
The first pain is common in sales and customer-facing teams. The second and third are common in product, engineering, and leadership teams. The right answer follows the shape of your week, not a feature matrix.
Pricing and language, briefly
Pricing changes too often to quote here. The category pattern: Fathom's free tier is its calling card, with paid plans for team features, longer recordings, and CRM integrations. relly is priced for teams from the start, with seat-based and usage-based components, and is in early access with 50% off the first year for teams that join before public launch.
Language coverage on Fathom's transcription side is broad. relly is English-first today, with more languages on the roadmap. If your team meets in a language Fathom supports and you mostly need a recap, that's a real Fathom advantage today. Check both products' live pricing and language pages before you commit.
Can you run both?
Yes, and a few teams do for a stretch while they figure out the right line. A common pattern is Fathom on customer-facing calls where a clean recap is the deliverable, and relly on internal team meetings where shared decisions and live follow-up are the deliverable. After a few weeks, most teams collapse to one tool per meeting type.
Running both on the same call is the mistake. You'll get two bots in the room, two transcripts, two recaps, and a small but real overhead deciding which note is canonical. Pick one per meeting type and let the others go.
How to choose this week
Three short questions cover the call.
- Is the AI's job a clean recap, or live participation? Recap: Fathom. Participation: relly.
- Does the meeting need the AI to speak or act, or just listen? Listen: Fathom. Speak and act: relly.
- Where does the pain live, after the meeting or during? After: Fathom. During: relly.
If you answered all three for relly, the simplest next step is to put it on your next live team meeting and watch what changes. Early access is open with 50% off the first year for teams that join before public launch.
Common questions
What is the main difference between relly and Fathom?
Fathom is an AI meeting recorder that delivers a recap, a transcript, and action items after the meeting ends. relly is a voice teammate that joins the meeting live, can be addressed by name, and gets shared work done while the team is still talking. Fathom is a recap product. relly is a participant product.
Is Fathom better than relly for free recordings?
Fathom is well-known for a generous free tier on recordings, transcripts, and summaries, which makes it a strong pick if you only need a record of what was said. relly is built around live participation and shared team output, not a free recording tier. If you only need a recap to read later, Fathom fits. If you want the work done before the call ends, relly fits.
Does Fathom speak in the meeting like relly does?
Fathom joins as a notetaker bot but does not speak or interact with the room. It listens and records. relly joins as a named participant on Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams, can be addressed directly, and can answer or pull research while the conversation continues.
Should I switch from Fathom to relly?
Switch when your bottleneck is no longer the recap, but the cleanup and follow-up that happen after every meeting. If your team writes the recap themselves anyway, or if research interrupts every meeting, the during-meeting work matters more than the post-meeting summary. That is the moment relly pays back.
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