Fathom is yet another AI meeting tool on the market. So, as usual, we set to discover what it has to offer, and what are Fathom’s best alternatives.
Fathom’s primary benefit, and what drove a lot of people to it in the past year, is that it strips out a lot meeting “frills”, allowing simple, one-click highlighting directly from your calls.
If you are an individual on the hunt for a forever free note taker, not ever considering adopting it in your team, well Fathom is the tool for you.
Yes, that’s right – Fathom’s price is totally gratis if you use it for personal use.
Now some say, there are no free lunches. Where’s the catch you ask?
That’s what we wanted to find out.
Table of Contents
Fathom Pricing and Features
Fathom’s pricing was a bit of an incognito to me. There’s no Pricing page on their website, so I did a bit of digging, and talked with a couple of their customers. Here’s what I found out.
There are 4 (four) plans in the Fathom sphere:
Free Plan – a generous plan that offers unlimited meeting recordings and transcriptions, chronological topic-segmented meeting notes, the above mentioned live-meeting highlights and CRM integrations from the get-go.
Premium Plan ($19/month) – on top of the free plan features, it offers AI-generated Action Items, AI-generated Follow-up Emails and the Zapier Integration.
Team Standard Plan ($24/month/user) – if you are part of a team, Fathom thought it would be “nice” to offer a “team” plan. It offers the ability to invite others into your workspace and has the same features as the individual Premium plan.
Team Pro Plan ($29/month/user) – on top of the above, it offers a shared call library, meeting analytics, advanced settings and team-wide integrations.
There are some drawbacks to Fathom’s software, and the limitations could be what prevents entire swathes of businesses from using it.
Lets take deeper look at the pros and cons in our AI notetaker review. We’ll also offer some suggestions on Fathom alternatives and competitors that offer the same features (and more!) for free.
Fathom Pros
- Automatically generates summaries of meetings, including action items
- CRM integration on the Free plan
- Create highlights mid-call and then get AI to summarize them with a simple click
- Meeting transcripts are available to download instantly
- Free for personal use, a 14-day free trial for the Teams version
- Searchable transcript for keywords
- Little checkboxes for follow-up items
Fathom Cons
- Very confusing pricing and plans
- Can’t download your videos
- No AI to prompt meetings
- Only 6 languages supported (apart from English)
- You aren’t able to organize recordings into folders
- Can’t join multiple meetings at the same time
- No way to tell if someone watched the recording
- Can’t tag other people in notes
- UI is a little clunky
Top 3 Fathom Alternatives
1. tl;dv
Driven by AI, tl;dv is the most notable competitor to Fathom. This award-winning meeting recorder, based out of the EU, offers a very generous free plan with the following:
- Unlimited recordings and transcriptions from Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Zoom.
- Email & Slack integrations.
- Unlimited creation of Clips from the transcript, and combine them into Reels.
- Unlimited AI meeting moments (highlight moments during a call).
- Limited AI meeting notes grouped by topics and action items.
- Limited Ask tl;dv AI prompts on single meetings.
- Limited AI Meeting Reports on multiple meetings at the same time. You can schedule them too to run at a recurring frequency.
- Limited uses of their coaching and playbooks features – letting you create your own playbooks (or choose from a library of existing ones) – and evaluate any meeting (or set of meetings) against that framework.
- Limited uses of an objection-handling feature that provides an evaluation on how the user performed when they had to handle objections.
While many AI recorder or summarizing tools are Sales-orientated, tl;dv offers a broad range of functionalities that hit several marks INCLUDING SALES.
So whether you’re in Product, Customer Success, User Research, Sales or HR, the tool’s AI-driven features make life easier for every team member. Plus, it’s a highly intuitive platform that takes only seconds to set up.
Everything is geared toward helping organizations work more efficiently. The way tl;dv does this is by helping reduce the overall time team members need to spend attending, documenting, catching up, or following up on meetings.
With new features constantly being launched, and over a million happy users, tl;dv is a safe bet if you’re looking to boost meeting productivity and improve your (or your team’s) meeting performance.
While tl;dv is an obvious choice for UX, Product and Marketing teams wanting to bring the voice of their customer closer to their roadmap (Clips from user interviews or customer calls are easily shared via tl;dv), with the recent Coaching Hub and Objection Handling feature, tl;dv positioned itself as a great solution for Sales teams too.
tl;dv’s base plan includes everything you’ll find in Fathom’s priced and free models plus a taste of all of their AI features. Then there’s a Pro version for teams that want advanced features (like CRM or Zapier integrations).
In short, tl;dv takes what Fathom has and edges it from just a note-taking product to something with a lot more oomph.
Pros
- Supports Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet recording.
- Speaker recognition transcripts in over 30 major languages.
- Integrates with Slack, Salesforce, Zapier and a range of other top work tools.
- Recording and transcript immediately available after call.
- AI-driven summaries for single and multiple meetings at the same time.
- Clip and reel-making feature.
- Manual time-stamping and note-taking also available.
- Tag colleagues and stakeholders directly in call.
- AI-driven identification of questions, insights and action points.
- Meetings library with powerful search and category folders.
- Clear pricing structure with extremely generous Free Plan.
- Over a million users and used by top companies such as Zalando, Cloudflare, and HelloFresh.
- Fabulous coaching features (speech insights, objection handling and playbook scorecards).
Cons
- Sales teams looking for forecasting or deal progression features may want to look elsewhere.
Fathom got its hype and was coined as the “free notetaker”. We were curious about how it stacked up against tl;dv when used by teams, and were left with a bit of disappointment…
2. Chorus AI
Chorus.ai is one of the market leaders when it comes to AI-driven meeting note-taking and transcription.
Its features include team collaboration and integrations with Salesforce, Hubspot, and more. It also offers video summary clips for easy sharing of key moments.
The main differences between Chorus and Fathom is its intended purpose and cost structure.
Chorus is a SALES-driven tool.
While much of the functionality and features are super similar, the roadmap and additions for Chorus will always lean towards customer-facing, sales-generating features.
It’s also renowned to be expensive. There’s no clear pricing on the website and individuals need to contact Chorus to get a quote.
Also, Fathom has got better ratings than Chorus. However, it’s important to remember that these reviews all come from different types of businesses with different budgets, goals, and KPIs.
Pros
- Great for generating more sales with its AI-driven insights and monitoring
- Integrates with your email to include that in its analysis
Cons
- The pricing system isn’t transparent, and you have to reach out for a quote
- It is reported that it costs between $1,000 and $2,000 per year per employee
- No free tier is available
- No Google Meet integration
- Chorus can take WEEKS to set up
- Recordings can take days to appear in your interface
3. Otter.ai
Otter.ai used to be the first name that people thought of when it came to automatic note-taking and transcription.
While they have been beaten to the punch a few times since then, they are still one of the biggest players in the game.
The main difference between Otter and Fathom is the format both platforms use to take notes. Fathom focuses on video and text, while Otter simply relies on English speech-to-text transcription and note-taking.
On the other hand, Otter has recently jumped into the AI wagon with some advanced features (Otter Chat) that let you query one or multiple meetings about pretty much anything. However, there’s not option to select a subset of meetings to prompt about, nor you can schedule reports to run recurrently or at a set time into the future like tl;dv does.
Pros
- Live captions during Zoom calls
- Integrates with Zoom, Google Meet, and more
- Otter Chat offers AI prompting in single and multiple meetings.
- Multiple people can join the same account to collaborate.
Cons
- Only English
- No video
- Accents are still a struggle for Otter
- No chat support on the free plan
- Poor integration offering
Otter got in earlier and got its reputation in the meeting productivity space, but a lot has changed over the past years. We’ve paired it against tl;dv to see how it has stood the test
Fathom Alternatives: The Verdict
If we are being honest and comparing it with other tools in the market…
Fathom? It does have some good functionality that is really helpful and better than some free-level competitors out there.
Yes, pricing is confusing but still, for individual uses we have to say that it does a pretty good job with it’s ‘free’ solution, being not only cheaper than Chorus, but also more complete than Otter in terms of language availability and format (Otter doesn’t record video).
But it stops there.
On the AI front, it clearly misses out vs any of the competitors, plus one of the biggest efficiency gains of using an AI note taker is when used in teams.
So while the ‘free’ element is great, Fathom offers most significant value in its paid-for team package.
This package requires you to fill in a survey and cost you at lease $29 per user/month.
For a monthly rolling package you will need to pay more than tl;dv and for considerably less mojo.
After reviewing the options, if you need a free note-taking product to help with basic, personal documentation of calls, Fathom is a solid choice with no risk to purchase.
However, if you’re looking for something more powerful with solid AI-driven features, more language options or added functionality around coaching, a tool like tl;dv is far more suitable. The free plan includes everything Fathom offers and more. If you need a meeting tool for professional use, it’s a no-brainer – tl;dv is a proven favourite among tech teams, product managers and user researchers.
Ultimately, it will depend on the needs of your team and how much you are willing to spend. But with so many options available, we’re sure there’s something out there that can help meet those needs.
Happy note-taking!
