# Mt · Meeting Capture — element 17 of 58 > Every call, remembered. Turns conversations into searchable decisions. - **Group:** 4 · Knowledge & Memory - **Necessity:** Essential - **Price band:** $ · under $30/mo - **Maturity:** Stable - **Edition:** v2026.Q3 · verified 2026-09-13 ## Leading tools (v2026.Q3) - **Granola** — the founder favorite - **Fathom** — unlimited free tier - **Fireflies** — meeting automation at scale - **Otter** — transcription workhorse - **Read AI** — meetings, email, everywhere ## Our take Reclaims 45–60 minutes a day of note cleanup. One of the fastest paybacks on the table. ## Combines with Kw, Cr - Guide: [Best AI meeting notetaker for founders (2026)](https://elems.ai/best/best-ai-meeting-notetaker-for-founders.html) ## The top 5 — deep dossier (verified 2026-09-13) Granola, for the founder in back-to-back calls — the bot-less notepad became the category's momentum leader ($125M Series C at $1.5B, Mar 2026) and is turning meeting capture into an enterprise memory layer with Spaces, APIs, and an MCP server. Fathom wins when free-and-unlimited matters — its no-cost tier has no recording or transcription caps and it added a Granola-style bot-less mode in April 2026. Fireflies wins for org-wide automation — every call auto-filed into CRM and tasks across a claimed 1M+ companies. Otter remains the transcription workhorse at scale ($100M ARR, 25–35M users) but carries a 2025 consent lawsuit. Read AI wins when you want meeting intelligence following you into email and Slack. The 2026 subplot: capture itself is commoditizing — Google bundles Gemini notes into Workspace while Zoom repackaged its free AI Companion into credit-metered ZoomMate — so pick the vendor whose search-and-memory layer you actually trust. 1. **Granola** (Granola) — Basic free (limited history) · Business $14/user/mo · Enterprise $35/user/mo. Best for: Founders and product teams who refuse to send a bot — it captures system audio silently, enhances your own rough notes, and makes every past meeting chat-queryable. Why: The category's defining product bet — no bot in the room — became the standard everyone else copied (Fathom, Notion, Grain, Krisp all shipped bot-less modes by 2026). Raised $125M at a $1.5B valuation (Mar 25, 2026, Index leading; up 6x from $250M in May 2025) and is converting founder love into enterprise deals: Vanta, Gusto, Asana, Cursor, Lovable, Mistral AI. Business tier ships API access and MCP so agents can read your meeting memory. Watch: It won't attend meetings for you — no bot means no capture of calls you skip. No video recording, and the free tier's limited history is a deliberate squeeze. User and revenue numbers are undisclosed; the $1.5B price is a bet on trajectory, not reported ARR. [https://www.granola.ai](https://www.granola.ai) 2. **Fathom** (Fathom Video) — Free (unlimited recording + transcription) · Premium $15 · Team $19 · Team Pro $29/user/mo. Best for: Zero-budget teams that want unlimited capture — the most generous free tier in the category, with paid tiers only for team views, CRM sync, and compliance. Why: The free tier is genuinely unlimited — recordings, storage, transcription in 25 languages, AI summaries, action items — where every rival meters minutes or meetings. In April 2026 it answered Granola directly with a bot-less capture mode (video, audio-only, or transcript-only, with speaker diarization). The freemium wedge makes it the default 'just try one' recommendation. Watch: The company discloses almost nothing — no user counts, revenue, or funding since a $4.7M round in 2022 — so its scale is taken on faith. Advanced summary templates, team search, and unlimited CRM sync all sit behind the $19–29 tiers, and the bot-less mode is barely four months old. [https://fathom.video](https://fathom.video) 3. **Fireflies** (Fireflies.ai) — Free · Pro $10 · Business $19 · Enterprise $39/seat/mo (annual; $18/$29 monthly). Best for: Teams that want every call auto-filed — transcripts into CRM, action items into task tools, analytics across the whole org, with the deepest integration catalog in the category. Why: The breadth play: claims usage across 1M+ companies and positions as 'the preferred platform for CIOs across the Fortune 500', with 138 documented integrations, AI skills, voice agents, and conversation analytics layered on top of capture. Unlimited transcription on every tier including free; enterprise tier adds HIPAA, SSO/SCIM, private storage, and a rules engine at a price ($39) below most rivals' equivalents. Watch: Vendor-claim-heavy — the 1M-companies and Fortune-500 numbers are its own marketing, and the widely reported $1B secondary-sale valuation (Sept 2025) has no primary source we could re-verify. 2026 pricing metered 'AI credits' (20–50/mo by tier) onto advanced AI features, and the bot-based capture model is exactly what Granola-style tools are eroding. [https://fireflies.ai](https://fireflies.ai) 4. **Otter** (Otter.ai) — Free 300 min/mo · Pro $8.33 · Business $19.99/user/mo (annual; $16.99/$30 monthly) · Enterprise custom. Best for: Raw transcription volume — live captions, interviews, lectures, and 4-hour meetings — from the oldest and largest pure-play in the category. Why: The scale incumbent: $100M ARR by March 2025 (up from $81M end-2024, per Sacra) and 25M+ users, with the company itself now claiming 35M users and 1B+ meetings transcribed. Nine years of transcription tuning still shows in live captioning and speaker ID, and 2026 additions (Live Assist real-time coaching, workplace analytics, a Notion connector) push it from notetaker toward what it calls a 'conversational knowledge engine.' Watch: A 2025 California class action alleges it recorded conversations without all-party consent for AI training, and UMass banned it under Massachusetts consent law — the category's consent risk made concrete. Growth (~23% YoY) is a fraction of Granola's trajectory, and its LLM-era summarization has lost the quality narrative to younger rivals. [https://otter.ai](https://otter.ai) 5. **Read AI** (Read AI) — Free 5 meetings/mo · Pro $15 · Enterprise $22.50 · Enterprise+ $29.75/user/mo (annual; +33% monthly). Best for: Teams that want meeting intelligence to leave the meeting — summaries and coaching that follow you into email, Slack, and Teams, plus an email 'digital twin' that schedules for you. Why: The fastest-growing bot-based player: 5M+ monthly active users adding 50k signups a day (Feb 2026), on $81M raised including a $50M Series B (Oct 2024). Its Ada 'digital twin' (Feb 2026) answers email, negotiates meeting times, and drafts replies from your meeting history — the clearest articulation of where capture goes after notes. Watch: The stingiest free tier of the five (5 meetings/month). Its engagement-scoring roots — measuring who talks too much — still read as surveillance to some teams, and spreading across meetings, email, and messaging risks doing none of them best-in-class. [https://www.read.ai](https://www.read.ai) ### How to choose - If You're a founder in back-to-back calls and refuse to send a bot into meetings → Granola — Business at $14 buys unlimited history plus API/MCP so agents can query your meetings. Accept that it can't attend calls you skip. - If Budget is zero, or you're trialing capture across a whole team → Fathom free — the only unlimited no-cost tier (recording, storage, transcription). Pay only when you need team views, CRM sync, or compliance. - If You want every call auto-filed into CRM, tasks, and org-wide analytics → Fireflies Business at $19/seat — the deepest integration catalog; watch the AI-credit meter on advanced features. - If Your job is volume transcription — interviews, lectures, 4-hour calls, live captions → Otter Business ($19.99, unlimited meetings) — but check your state's consent law first; Otter's 2025 class action is the category's cautionary tale. - If Your org lives in Google Workspace or Zoom and needs summaries, not memory → Try the native layer first — Gemini 'take notes for me' is bundled into eligible Workspace plans; Zoom's is now credit-metered ZoomMate. Graduate to a dedicated tool when you need cross-meeting search. ### The field (22 more) tl;dv, Krisp, Circleback, Grain, Avoma, Fellow, Jamie, MeetGeek, Sembly, Notta, Supernormal, Spinach, ZoomMate, Gemini in Google Meet, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Notion AI Meeting Notes, Limitless / Rewind (acquired), Bee (acquired), Airgram (dead), timeOS (renamed), Rewatch (acquired), Chorus.ai (acquired) Full dossier data: https://elems.ai/e/mt.json --- Source: [elems.ai](https://elems.ai/e/mt.html) — the periodic table of the AI-led startup. Data: https://elems.ai/elements.json (CC BY 4.0, cite elems.ai).