The best free AI notetakers in 2026 — real free-tier limits compared

Reline has the best genuinely free AI notetaker plan in 2026: unlimited notes, 1 hour per note, 10 hours of transcription per month, and 2 GB of storage — renewing every month, with no credit card and no bot joining your calls. Most rival free tiers are lifetime-capped trials or tightly metered minutes; the table below compares the real limits.

Because "free" hides four different fine-print games, and most ranked lists — many written by the vendors themselves — compare headline features instead of limits. Every notetaker in this post has a real free tier you can sign up for today. What separates them is what happens in week three. Before trusting any list (including this one), check four things on the vendor’s live pricing page:

• Does the cap renew monthly, or is it a lifetime allowance? A "free forever" plan with a lifetime AI cap is a trial with better marketing.
• What exactly is metered — recording minutes, transcription minutes, AI summaries, or storage? Different tools cap different stages of the same workflow.
• Do your recordings or notes expire? Some free tiers auto-delete recordings after a few months, or hide notes after a set window.
• Does free-tier capture require a bot to join your call? Several tools reserve bot-free recording for paid plans.

Every limit below comes from the vendor's own pricing page at the time of writing. Pricing pages change — verify the live page before you commit a team.

Here is the spine of this comparison: the audited free-tier limits, side by side. No "generous free plan" adjectives — just what each vendor’s pricing page states.

The ranking criterion is simple: can you do the whole job — record, transcribe, get an AI note — for free, forever, without hitting a lifetime wall? That rewards monthly-renewing caps and complete workflows, and penalizes disguised trials. Reline is our product, so we put our reason for ranking it first in writing, along with its caveats — and each entry below says when a rival is the better pick.

Reline's free tier renews every month with no credit card: unlimited notes, 1 hour per note, 10 hours of transcription per month, and 2 GB of storage — with the full workflow included, not a slice of it. Capture is local and bot-free, transcripts are speaker-separated (Me vs Other), AI summaries cite the exact transcript segment, and everything lands in a Notion-style collaborative notepad, in 60+ languages. The honest caveats: the 1-hour-per-note and 10-hour monthly caps are real (heavy meeting schedules will hit them), there are no mobile apps yet, and it records audio, not video. Pick something else if you need more than 10 free hours a month of raw recording — Fathom and tl;dv are stronger there.

Fathom's free plan includes unlimited recordings, transcription, and storage, per Fathom's pricing page — the most generous raw-capture allowance on this list, and a genuinely polished product. The catch is the part that makes it a notetaker: AI summaries are capped at 5 per month on the free tier, and the product is recorder-first — the notepad is a sidebar, not a document your team co-writes. Pick Fathom over Reline if free recording volume matters more than AI notes, or if your sales team lives in HubSpot, Salesforce, and Slack.

tl;dv's free tier is genuinely unusual: unlimited recordings and transcription in 30+ languages, per tl;dv's pricing page. The fine print is the AI: roughly 10 AI-summarized meetings for life — after that, only the first 10 minutes of each meeting gets summarized — and recordings auto-delete after about three months. Credit where due: tl;dv publishes SOC 2 Type II compliance, offers EU data residency, and its paid tiers are strong for revenue teams. Pick tl;dv if you want free raw transcripts at volume and can live with short retention.

Otter's free plan renews monthly — 300 transcription minutes with a 30-minute cap per meeting, per Otter's pricing page — and it comes with a mature engine and mobile apps for iOS and Android. Two things to know: the 30-minute cap ends before most meetings do, and OtterPilot joins your calls as a visible participant by default (a bot-free desktop/Chrome option exists). Otter has also historically used customer data to improve its models, per its privacy policy. Pick Otter if you want the most established mobile-first transcriber and don't mind the bot.

Jamie records bot-free like Reline and is the strictest privacy pick on this list: a German company that hosts all data in Frankfurt and deletes audio after transcription, per Jamie's site, with 100+ languages. The free tier is 10 meetings per month with a 30-minute cap, per Jamie's pricing, and Jamie has historically kept full transcripts on paid tiers, emphasizing summaries instead. Pick Jamie over Reline if strict EU data residency is a hard requirement.

Krisp records bot-free, and its free plan includes unlimited transcription with daily caps on AI meeting notes, per Krisp's pricing page. Its flagship is what made it famous: real-time noise and voice cancellation across every meeting app, plus on-device transcription for English. The notes themselves are basic next to a dedicated notepad — its AI chat is scoped to a single recording. Pick Krisp if live call audio quality is your first problem and notes are the bonus.

Fireflies' free tier meters something different: 800 minutes of storage, per Fireflies' pricing page — it fills up rather than renewing. Free-tier capture is also bot-joined meetings only; the desktop app and local recording are reserved for paid tiers. As a paid product it is a strong automation platform — AskFred chat, 100+ integrations, conversation intelligence for revenue teams. Pick Fireflies if you already know you'll upgrade: Pro is $10/seat/month billed annually, per Fireflies' pricing.

Notta is a capable bot-based transcriber — around 58 languages, a polished mobile app, and published SOC 2 Type II compliance. Its free tier is the thinnest monthly allowance here: 120 minutes per month with a 3-minute cap per file, per Notta's pricing page — enough to test the accuracy, not to cover your meetings. Pick Notta if you want a bot-based transcriber with broad exports and plan to pay for Pro (roughly $8–14/month, per Notta's published pricing).

Granola pioneered the bot-free, enhance-your-own-notes model, and the product is genuinely lovely on Mac and iPhone. But its free Basic plan carries a 30-day visibility window for notes, per Granola's pricing — which makes it an extended trial rather than a plan you can stay on. Pick Granola over Reline if you're an individual on Mac and iPhone who will pay for Business ($14/user/month) and wants its polished mobile capture, native CRM integrations, and SOC 2 Type 2 certification.

Bluedot shares Reline's bot-free capture philosophy — no bot, no calendar access, per their site — and adds real strengths on paid tiers: video recording with clip editing, CRM/ATS auto-sync, and a claimed 100+ languages. The free plan, though, is 5 meetings total — lifetime — with a 1-hour cap per recording, per their pricing page. That is an evaluation, not a free tier. Pick Bluedot if you need video recordings and are ready to pay from week one.

The same honesty we asked of everyone else: Reline's free tier caps notes at 1 hour each and transcription at 10 hours per month, with 2 GB of storage. Unlimited recording requires Professional at $15/user/month ($12 billed annually); SSO, audit log, and org-policy controls require Enterprise at $32/user/month ($26 billed annually). There are no mobile apps yet, no video recording, and no import of notes from other tools. And to be precise about the architecture: capture runs locally on your machine, while transcription, AI summaries, and storage run in our cloud under a data-processing agreement — your meetings are never used to train models.

Platform-wise, the free plan covers macOS and Windows plus the full web app in any browser; Linux support is in beta — microphone capture works today, and system-audio capture is in testing.

Match the plan shape to your actual constraint:

• You want the whole workflow free, forever — recording, speaker-separated transcript, cited AI summary, shared notepad: Reline.
• You record far more than 10 hours a month and can live with 5 AI summaries: Fathom.
• You want raw transcripts at volume and accept short retention plus a lifetime AI cap: tl;dv.
• You want a mobile-first transcriber and don't mind a bot in the call: Otter.
• EU data residency is non-negotiable: Jamie.
• The rest — Fireflies, Notta, Granola, Bluedot — are worth evaluating, but their free tiers are storage-capped, minute-thin, or time-boxed: plan to pay.

Whichever you choose, hold it to the same test: open the vendor's pricing page and find the renewal rule. If the cap never resets, it isn't a free plan — it's a countdown.