A sales rep at a mid-sized SaaS company told me their prospect asked, “Who’s MeetGeek?” halfway through a discovery call. The rep had forgotten the bot was visible in the participant list. That was the last call MeetGeek was on.
That story isn’t unusual. MeetGeek works well enough for internal standups where everyone knows the setup. But the visible bot participant, the 5-meeting-per-month free tier, and the lack of anything useful happening in real time have pushed a lot of teams to look elsewhere. I’ve spent time with five alternatives and here’s what I actually found.
Why people leave MeetGeek
MeetGeek’s free plan caps you at 5 meetings per month with 30-minute transcription limits. For a recruiter, a customer success team, or really anyone running back-to-back external meetings, that cap hits fast. The paid plans start at $15/user/month, which is reasonable, but you’re still getting a tool that joins your calls as a named participant.
The transcript quality is solid. The summaries are passable. The problem is positioning: MeetGeek was built for people who want a record after the fact, not for people who want help during the meeting itself. If your use case is “show me what was decided,” MeetGeek is fine. If you need real-time assistance, it won’t do that.
There’s also the privacy angle. According to Pew Research data from 2023, 67% of Americans are concerned about how companies use their data collected from meetings. Participants who see a bot join without warning often assume the worst.
The 5 alternatives worth considering
Fathom. Fathom is the simplest swap. It records Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams calls, generates highlights and summaries, and has a genuinely unlimited free tier for individual users. The summaries are cleaner than MeetGeek’s in my experience, and Fathom has invested heavily in CRM integrations (Salesforce, HubSpot) that sales teams care about. The tradeoff: it’s still a passive recorder. Nothing happens in real time.
Otter.ai. Otter gives you 300 minutes per month on the free tier and is probably the most recognizable name outside MeetGeek. Its search function is genuinely good. You can search across all your meeting transcripts for a specific topic, which is useful if you’re trying to track what you said to a specific client three months ago. Otter’s accuracy varies noticeably with heavy accents or technical jargon, and it used to be significantly worse at speaker diarization than it is now. It’s improved, but it’s not perfect.
tl;dv. If cost is the main driver, tl;dv’s free plan includes unlimited recordings with AI highlights. The paid tier is $29/user/month and adds integrations and team features. I find the interface slightly cluttered compared to Fathom, but the unlimited recording alone makes it worth a look for small teams. The highlight-clipping feature, where you can cut a 90-second clip from a meeting to share with someone who wasn’t there, is genuinely useful for async teams.
Fireflies.ai. Fireflies is the most enterprise-facing of the group. It supports 47 languages, which matters if your team spans regions. The free tier stores 800 minutes and the Pro plan is $18/user/month. Fireflies also has a conversational search layer called “Ask Fred” that lets you ask questions about past meetings in natural language. It works reasonably well, though I’d call it useful rather than impressive. The feature that often wins teams over is the ability to share meeting libraries across the whole organization, not just with individuals.
Craqly. Craqly is different from the other four in a meaningful way: it’s designed to assist you during the meeting, not just record it. On sales calls and job interviews, Craqly can surface relevant talking points, suggested responses, and context in real time without appearing as a visible bot participant. If your use case is external-facing meetings where you need in-meeting support rather than just a post-meeting transcript, the positioning is genuinely different from MeetGeek and the other tools here.
A quick feature comparison
| Tool | Free tier | Visible bot? | Real-time help? | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MeetGeek | 5 meetings/mo | Yes | No | Internal notes |
| Fathom | Unlimited (Zoom) | Yes | No | Sales + CRM sync |
| Otter.ai | 300 min/mo | Yes | No | Search-heavy workflows |
| tl;dv | Unlimited recordings | Yes | No | Async teams, clipping |
| Fireflies.ai | 800 min storage | Yes | No | Enterprise, multilingual |
| Craqly | See craqly.com | No | Yes | External calls, interviews |
How to pick
If most of your meetings are internal and you need a paper trail, Fathom or tl;dv will cover you without much friction. If you’re on a team that does a lot of external sales or customer calls where a visible bot is awkward, that list narrows considerably. If you need real-time help rather than post-meeting summaries, Craqly is the only one here built for that.
I don’t think there’s a single right answer. I’d pick based on what breaks first: for most people, it’s either the free-tier limits or the moment a prospect asks “who’s that bot?”
The TechCrunch coverage of meeting bots from 2023 described this tension well: the tools that work best for the notetaker often create the most friction for everyone else in the call. That tradeoff hasn’t gone away.