The best completely free AI note takers in 2026, and what free really includes

The best completely free AI note taker in 2026 depends on which limit you can live with, because every free plan we read holds something back. Going by each vendor's own pages in October 2026, Fathom's Free plan lists recordings and transcriptions with no cap, Otter's Basic plan gives 300 transcription minutes a month, Granola's Basic plan shows 30 days of meeting history, and Fireflies' Free plan stores 400 minutes per seat. Barside, the free desktop app we make, transcribes calls on your own computer without counting minutes, and its summaries use an AI account you connect, which can bill you.

Everything here about Otter, Fireflies, Fathom, Granola and tl;dv comes from the pricing and help pages those companies publish, as we read them on October 11, 2026. We ran no hands-on tests of their products and took no screenshots, so treat each line as the vendor's statement and open the linked page before you decide. Barside gets the same treatment, including the parts that can cost money.

Which is the best completely free AI note taker in 2026?

The best completely free AI note taker in 2026 is the one whose free limit you will not reach in a normal month. Free plans limit different things: monthly minutes, the length of one call, how much is stored, how far back you can look, or which AI features run. The table sums up what each vendor's page states, as of October 2026.

Read by need, the choice looks like this:

• You record many calls and want to pay nothing: Fathom's Free plan lists no cap on recordings and transcriptions.
• You want to read the transcript live in short meetings: Otter Basic, within 300 minutes a month and 30 minutes per conversation.
• You want notes with no bot in the call and only need recent meetings: Granola Basic, with 30 days of history.
• You want your notes to land in other apps: Fireflies says all integrations are available on its Free plan.
• You want no minute count and the audio kept on your own computer: Barside, on Windows, Linux and Mac.

What do the free plans of Otter, Fireflies, Fathom, Granola and tl;dv include?

Each free plan below is described from the vendor's own page, with the limit that matters most in daily use. Paid prices change often, so we quote only one of them and send you to each pricing page for the rest.

Otter.ai. Otter's pricing page calls its free plan Basic and lists “300 monthly transcription minutes” and “3 lifetime audio/video file imports” on the card. Its comparison table gives Basic at most 30 minutes of transcription per conversation, against 90 minutes on Pro, and a conversation history of the “25 most recent”. A footnote there says the monthly minutes are a shared pool across all transcription types. Otter AI Chat is part of Basic, with 20 queries a month per user and 3 per conversation. The card also lists live transcription, speaker identification, and Zoom, MS Teams and Google Meet, which makes Otter a strong choice when you want to read the words while people talk.

Fireflies.ai. Fireflies explains its free plan in a help article, What's included in the Fireflies Free plan. It says you get 400 minutes of storage per seat, and that when you hit the limit you delete older files to store new ones. Auto-join transcription has no cap on the Free plan, but a summary uses a transcription credit, and a new account starts with 3 credits from the website, 5 from the Chrome extension or 10 as a new user of the mobile app. The plan also includes 20 AI credits a month for features such as AskFred.

The same article says all integrations are available on the Free plan, which is generous, and that downloading transcripts requires a paid plan. Its closing recap also says “3 meetings are included on the Free plan” and does not explain how that fits with the auto-join line. We found no line in it about what happens when the transcription credits run out, so ask Fireflies before you plan around summaries.

Fathom. Fathom's pricing page lists a Free plan labeled “Free forever.” The card lists recordings and transcriptions with no cap, a choice of bot-free capture (in beta, and marked as a beta feature for Mac in the page's feature table) or a bot, instant AI call summaries, and clips, playlists and search across calls. The Premium card lists advanced call summaries, AI-generated action items and a conversational meeting assistant on top of everything in Free. The page's lookback note sits under account-wide Ask Fathom, the AI that answers across all your calls: paid plans have no lookback limit for “my calls”, and no figure is given for Free. Fathom's help article Free vs. Premium for Individuals gives one number the card does not: Free accounts get advanced summaries for their first 5 calls each month.

Granola. Granola's pricing page lists Basic as its free plan, with AI meeting notes, AI chat within and across meetings, customized note templates and capture of your device's audio with no bot. The compare table gives Basic 30 days of meeting history and marks follow-up emails and integrations such as Notion, Zapier and HubSpot as not included, while Slack is included. Business, listed at $14 per user per month as of October 2026, shows meeting history with no day limit. We found no cap on the number of meetings on the Basic card, and Granola is a polished pick when recent meetings are all you need.

tl;dv. tl;dv's pricing page lists a Free plan next to Pro and Business. On the page as it opened for us, the plan names loaded but the Free plan's feature list did not, so we could not confirm how many meetings, AI notes or months of storage it includes on a page we could open. Read the Free card there before you rely on it.

Which free AI note taking tool fits the way you work?

To pick the best completely free AI note taking tool in 2026 for your own work, count your meetings before you compare features. The three people below are made-up examples, and the arithmetic uses the limits quoted above.

• Example 1: Maya, a freelance designer, has four 60-minute client calls a week. That comes to about 960 minutes a month, more than three times Otter Basic's 300 monthly minutes. The plan also transcribes at most 30 minutes of each conversation, so going by that limit, the second half of each call would go untranscribed. A plan with no minute cap, such as Fathom Free, or an app that does not count minutes, such as Barside, fits her month better.
• Example 2: Jonas, a team lead, has one 45-minute meeting a week and wants the notes in his project tool. Fireflies Free offers all integrations. If its 400 minutes of storage are counted in minutes of recorded meetings, which the article does not spell out, they hold eight of his meetings, which is 360 minutes, and the ninth needs an older file deleted first. His summaries also depend on the transcription credits his account started with.
• Example 3: Aiko, a consultant, wants to check in June what a client said in March. Granola Basic shows 30 days of meeting history, and Otter Basic lists a history of the 25 most recent conversations. With Granola she needs a paid plan, with Otter the March call must still be among her 25 most recent, or she picks a tool that keeps everything within reach. In Barside the transcript and the audio stay in a note on her computer for as long as she keeps the note.

To run your own numbers, multiply your meetings a week by their minutes, then by four. Compare the result with each plan's monthly minutes, its limit per call and its storage.

What is free in Barside, and what can cost money?

Barside is a free desktop app for Windows, Linux and Mac, and for meeting notes it splits the work in two parts. Turning the call into text costs nothing and needs no AI key, no subscription and no account. Turning that text into a summary uses an AI account that belongs to you.

Free:

• Call transcription. Transcribe a call records your microphone and the sound your computer plays, and Whisper turns it into text on your computer. Barside does not count minutes. The one-time speech download is about 150 MB, with 141 MB more for 34 other languages.
• The audio and the transcript. Both stay in a note in your library, with a time and a You or Others label on each line.
• Finding it again. The search bar finds a transcript by any word in it, with no AI.
• Video meetings. Barside's own video meetings are free for up to 6 people, with live captions written on each person's computer when a host turns them on, and a meeting note with the transcript and the chat at the end. Barside users sign in with a free Spaces account for these.

Can cost money:

• Summaries and action items. Barside has no AI of its own. Meeting follow-through sends the transcript to the AI you connect in Settings → AI: Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or OpenRouter. That company bills you for what you use, and Barside charges nothing for AI. What one follow-through costs depends on the model you pick and the length of the call.
• A plan you already pay for. With My plan in Settings → AI, Barside can run Codex or Claude Code on your computer, signed in with your ChatGPT or Claude account, so that plan's limits apply instead of a bill per use. Anthropic and OpenAI have not said that apps may use a plan this way, so an API key is the safer choice.
• Barside Plus. It is optional, at US$20 a month or US$200 a year plus sales tax, and adds encrypted cloud backup, cloud sync and cloud agents. Transcription and meetings do not need it.

To keep the AI part small, open Settings → AI and, under AI spending limit, turn on Limit what Barside's AI spends with a daily, weekly or monthly amount.

How to get free meeting notes in Barside, step by step

1. Download Barside and open the assistant with Ctrl+Shift+A. Select Assistant settings and choose Install speech. It downloads Whisper and its English model, about 150 MB, and needs no AI key.
2. For a language other than English, choose Install more languages · 141 MB under Speech language, pick a language or Detect automatically, then choose Save assistant settings.
3. Before a call, choose Transcribe a call at the bottom of the assistant, click the microphone on the desktop bar, or press Alt+Shift+Space and type call.
4. Tell the people on the call. The card reminds you: “Let call participants know before recording.”
5. Press Start recording. New lines appear every 30 seconds in a note called Call transcript, labeled You and Others.
6. Choose Stop & save when the call ends. The transcript and its Call audio clips are in your note, with no AI involved so far.
7. For a summary, connect an AI in Settings → AI, click Meeting follow-through next to the note's title and press Analyze meeting. You get a Meeting summary, Decisions with quotes, Proposed tasks with owners and a Follow-up draft, and you check each item before it saves.

The full walkthroughs are transcribe calls on your computer and meeting follow-up and action items. Weeks later, with an AI connected, you can ask your library something like “What did we decide about the pricing page?”, which is an example question, and AI search answers from your transcripts with the passage cited.

Where Barside falls short, and where the other tools do more

• It has to be your call. Barside sends no bot, so it cannot attend a meeting you are not in. A note taker that joins as a bot can go without you.
• Speakers are You and Others. Barside labels each line by audio channel and does not name the other people. Otter's Basic card lists speaker identification.
• No phone app, no shared team library of calls and no CRM sync. If your notes must flow into other apps, Fireflies says all integrations are available on its Free plan.
• Live calls only. Barside transcribes a call as it records it, and it does not transcribe an audio file you already have. Otter Basic includes 3 lifetime file imports, and Fireflies takes uploads of up to 100MB and 150 minutes per file for one transcription credit each.
• Compact speech models. Barside uses Whisper's compact base models, which can mishear names, numbers and crosstalk. The audio clip next to each passage makes checking quick.
• On a Mac. Recording the computer's sound in Barside for Mac needs macOS 14.2 or later.
• Summaries are a second step. Fathom's Free card lists instant AI call summaries, and Granola's Basic card lists AI meeting notes. In Barside you connect an AI first, and that account pays for the summary.

Privacy: where your meetings end up

For the other five tools, where recordings and transcripts are stored is set out in each vendor's own privacy pages, which we did not review for this guide. Read them before you record anything sensitive. One detail the pricing pages do show: Granola's compare table marks “Audio deleted after transcription” as included on Basic.

With Barside, speech turns into text on your computer, and the call audio and the transcript are saved in your note, in your own library. Nothing is uploaded to transcribe them. A transcript leaves your computer when you give it to an AI: Meeting follow-through sends it to the AI company you connected, and that company's data policy applies. A Call audio clip leaves only if you make a share link for it, and Barside Plus cloud backup and sync upload only when you turn them on.

Your notes and ordinary backups are not encrypted by Barside, so protect your computer like you would any file. Always tell people before you record, because recording rules differ between countries and states, and some require everyone's consent. Read how recordings and transcripts work and what goes to the AI you connect.

How it compares

This page looks only at what is free. For the wider picture, with paid plans, capture methods and languages, read the best AI meeting assistants. If a visible bot is what you want to avoid, see the best AI note takers without a bot. The Otter.ai alternative and Granola alternative guides compare Barside with each of those two feature by feature, and the best transcription apps covers tools that turn existing files into text.

Works well with

Free transcription is the start. These guides cover the steps after the call, and Barside's own meetings.