Most lists of the best AI meeting assistants make one mistake: they rank two different products as if they were one. A note taker that summarizes your meeting after it ends and an assistant that helps you answer questions while the call is still going solve different problems. Ranking them on one scale helps nobody.
So this list is split by the only question that matters: do you need help during the call, or after it? We build Flintalk, one of the tools below, so read our entry knowing that. Every price here was checked on the vendor's own pricing page on August 24, 2026.
The short version
| Tool | Helps | Bot joins? | Starts at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flintalk | During the call | No | Free 30 min, then $12/mo |
| Cluely | During the call | No | Free, Pro $19.99/mo |
| Fathom | After | Bot (bot-free beta on Mac) | Free, unlimited |
| Granola | After | No | Free tier, $14/user/mo |
| Otter | Live transcript, no answers | Bot | Free 300 min/mo |
| Fellow | After | Bot | Free (5 notes lifetime) |
| tl;dv | After | Bot | Free tier, Pro from €18 |
If you need help during the call
1. Flintalk (our product). It listens to the call on your machine, spots real questions, and streams a suggested answer about a second later, pulled from your own PDFs and notes with the source file named under it. The overlay stays out of screen shares, and you can verify that yourself: press Cmd-Shift-T and it takes a real screenshot of what others would see. No bot joins, so it works on Zoom, Meet, Teams, Slack, Discord, anything that plays audio. Runs on Mac (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Windows. Free 30 minutes, then $12 or $39 a month. Screen-share invisibility is included in every plan.
2. Cluely. The other genuine real-time assistant, and a capable one: it reads your screen as well as the audio, and runs on Mac, Windows, and iOS. Two things to weigh before paying. Hiding from screen-share software costs $149.99 a month on their "Pro + Undetectability" tier, and answer citations are not documented, so you cannot see where a suggestion came from before you say it out loud. We wrote a full Cluely review and a list of Cluely alternatives if you are comparing.
If you need notes after the call
3. Fathom. The best free tier in the category, and it is not close: unlimited recordings, transcription, and summaries at no cost, with the summary arriving about thirty seconds after the meeting ends. If your problem is remembering meetings and your budget is zero, start here.
4. Granola. The best-quality notes of any tool on this list, and no bot in the room: it captures audio on your device and blends the transcript with whatever you type during the meeting. People who love it really love it. Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android.
5. Otter. The most accurate transcription in independent comparisons and the most mature product here. You can read the live transcript during the call, which is halfway to real-time help. The trade-off is the OtterPilot bot joining your meetings visibly, which is also the most common complaint from its own users.
6. Fellow. Less a note taker than a meeting management system: collaborative agendas, action items with owners, calendar-linked notes. Great for teams whose meetings are chaotic. The free tier is five AI notes total, not per month, so treat it as a trial. Full thoughts in our Fellow review.
7. tl;dv. Built for sales teams that live in recordings afterwards: CRM sync, highlight clips you can share, AI reports across many meetings and 30+ languages. The bot is intrusive and the value is entirely retrospective, which is fine if that is what you want.
How to actually choose
Ask what failed last week. If you left a meeting and could not remember what was agreed, get Fathom or Granola and you are done. If someone asked you a question you half knew and the answer was in a file you could not reach in time, notes will not fix that; you need a real-time AI meeting assistant, and the honest shortlist is two tools long. Both have free tiers. One call with each will settle it faster than any list, including this one.
Prices verified on each vendor's pricing page, August 24, 2026. Flintalk is our product; tell us if a price has changed and we will correct it.