Six Fathom alternatives, priced from the vendors’ own pages
Fathom’s own pricing page on 6 September 2026 listed Premium at $20 per user per month, or $16 on annual billing. The team tiers sit at $19 and $34 monthly, which drop to $15 and $25 if you pay for the year, both with a two-seat minimum. That is the number most fathom alternatives get measured against, and it explains why this search exists at all. Fathom is cheap. The free tier records without a meeting cap. People who leave it are almost never leaving over price.
Every figure below came off the vendor’s own pricing page, pulled on 6 September 2026. Two vendors declined to show me one, which turned out to be the more interesting result.
Why teams leave a recorder this cheap
Three reasons come up repeatedly, and only one of them is about money.
The first is the bot. Fathom joins the call as a participant, and a growing share of calls happen in rooms where that participant gets removed, blocked by an IT policy, or quietly resented by the person across the table. Enterprise security teams switch off external app admission on Teams. Hospitals and law firms do it as policy. If half your week is spent talking to those organisations, a recorder that has to be admitted is a recorder that misses half your week, and no summary quality makes up for a missing recording.
The second is CRM writeback. On Fathom that sits on Business, $34 per user monthly or $25 annual, roughly double what a team paying for summaries alone expected to spend. Teams usually find this out in month three.
Third, and this is the one worth arguing about, people want different artefacts. Fathom writes a good account of what happened. Some teams want a document they edit live during the call. Some want deal fields populated without anybody retyping. Some want action items that arrive in a task tracker with owners attached. Those are four products sharing one category label, and price comparisons between them are close to meaningless.
Six fathom alternatives, with the prices I pulled
Otter is the oldest name here and still the cheapest way to get a lot of transcription. The Otter pricing page on 6 September 2026 showed Basic free with 300 transcription minutes a month, Pro at $16.99 per user monthly with 1,200 in-app recording minutes, and Business at $30 monthly. The annual figure for Pro rendered twice on the same page, once as $8.49 and once as $8.33, which I mention because it is the sort of thing that makes a price table go stale. Business annual read $19.99. Otter is built around the transcript. If what you want is searchable text of everything anyone said, it is hard to beat on cost.
Granola is the closest thing to an opposite philosophy. It runs on your Mac, listens to system audio, and merges what it hears with the notes you type yourself, so the output reads like something a person wrote rather than a machine transcript. Granola’s page listed Basic at $0 with limited meeting history, Business at $14 per user per month, and Enterprise at $35. No annual pricing appeared at all. It is popular with founders and solo operators for a reason, and much less popular with sales managers, because there is no coaching layer to speak of.
Circleback has the tidiest pricing page of the six fathom alternatives on this list. Circleback’s page read: Free at $0 with 30 days of history, Pro at $15 monthly or $11 annual, Business at $25 or $22, Enterprise at $35 or $33. Its pitch is action items that actually route somewhere, and the automation rules are better than the price suggests. Recording storage is tiered, one year on Pro and two on Business, which matters more than people think when a deal cycle runs eleven months.
Avoma is where the model changes shape. Its page prices a “recorder” seat separately from the intelligence layer: Startup at $29 monthly or $19 annual, Organization at $39 or $24, Enterprise at $39 either way. Then Conversation Intelligence and Revenue Intelligence sit on top as add-ons at $35 monthly or $29 annual each, with Lead Router at $25 or $19. An Organization seat with conversation intelligence therefore lands near $53 a month annually, which is a different conversation from Fathom’s $25. Avoma is not overpriced for that, it is simply solving a bigger problem.
Fireflies and tl;dv both belong on any honest list of fathom alternatives, and I could not price either one. More on that below.
Two vendors would not show me a number
I opened fireflies.ai/pricing on 6 September 2026 and got four plan names, Free, Pro, Business and Enterprise, with a full feature comparison and no prices anywhere in the delivered page. The figures are rendered by script after load. Whatever the reason, it means anybody quoting a Fireflies price in a comparison post is quoting it from somewhere other than the pricing page, and that is exactly how wrong numbers propagate.
tl;dv was worse. Both tldv.io/pricing and tldv.io/pricing/ returned HTTP 404 when I fetched them on 6 September 2026, and the homepage carried no pricing link, only a claim about a “Free Forever” plan and a swipe at Gong’s “$5,000+ upfront investment”. A 404 on a pricing URL is usually a routing change rather than anything sinister, and it may well have been fixed by the time you read this. Still: if you are evaluating tl;dv, get the number in writing from them and do not take mine or anyone else’s.
I would rather write that than invent a figure. If a competing roundup lists a confident price for both of these tools today, ask where it came from.
What the price spread is actually telling you
Line the annual figures up and the range runs from $11 to $53 for what search engines treat as one product category. That spread is not quality. It is scope.
At the bottom, roughly $11 to $16, you are buying a record of the meeting. Granola, Circleback Pro, Otter Pro, Fathom Premium. Around $25, the middle band, you add team features and some form of CRM sync. Above $30 you are buying analysis of the conversation rather than a copy of it: scorecards, deal risk, coaching. Sybill and Gong live up there, and Avoma reaches it by stacking add-ons.
Most teams over-buy. It is much easier to justify the coaching tier in a budget meeting than to admit that nobody on the team has opened a scorecard since March.
Where a bot-free desktop recorder fits
Craqly takes the problem from the other end. It runs as a desktop app that follows the call on Zoom, Teams or Google Meet from your machine, so nothing appears in the participant list and there is nothing for a host or an admin policy to admit or reject. Decisions and action items surface while the call is still running, not fifteen minutes afterwards.
That is a genuine trade-off rather than a free win, and it is worth being straight about which side you want. A bot records the meeting whether or not you are in it, which is useful for a manager reviewing calls they did not attend. Desktop capture only records what you are on, and it needs the app installed and running. If your problem is coverage across a team of thirty, a bot is a reasonable answer. If your problem is that the bot keeps getting thrown out of the calls that matter most, it is not.
The free Starter plan gives 20 credits a month, where one credit is one minute of live session, and credits reset monthly. Paid plans start at $19 a month billed yearly, or $38 month to month, checked on 6 September 2026. Stealth is on every plan including the free one. We wrote up the mechanics separately in the bot-free notetaker explainer, and there is a fuller category survey in the 2026 note-taking app roundup.
How to choose in an afternoon rather than a quarter
Pick three calls from last week that you would have wanted a record of. Not typical calls. The awkward ones: the customer whose IT blocks external apps, the interview you joined from a phone, the call that ran forty minutes over.
Then check, in this order, whether the fathom alternatives on your shortlist would have captured all three at all, where the output lands afterwards, and only then what it costs. Ordering it that way kills about half the shortlist before you have opened a single pricing page, which is the point. A $53 seat that captures the call beats an $11 seat that gets removed from the room.
One more thing worth doing, and it takes ten minutes. Ask your two largest customers whether their security team allows meeting bots. If both say no, the price comparison you were about to run does not matter, and neither does most of this post. Direct comparisons of the individual tools are in Fathom against Granola and Fireflies against Otter against Granola.
My guess, and it could be wrong, is that the bot-in-the-room model has about eighteen months left as a default before admission policies make it the exception. I would not sign a three-year contract on it.
