AI Meeting Notetakers Compared: Otter, Fireflies, Fathom and Teams

Why a meeting notetaker earns its keep

An AI notetaker joins your call, transcribes it and produces a summary with action items before the meeting has faded from memory. For a small business juggling discovery calls, project catch-ups and supplier negotiations, that is hours of admin recovered every week, plus a searchable record for the day a client asks what exactly was agreed back in March.

We compared the four tools UK small businesses ask us about most: Otter, Fireflies, Fathom and the notetaking built into Microsoft Teams. We judged them on the things that matter in daily use rather than on feature lists: how well each copes with UK regional accents, the quality of the action items produced, the privacy controls you actually get, and what you pay once the free tier stops being enough.

Accuracy on UK accents

Every tool here handles clear, standard speech well; the gap opens up with fast talkers, people speaking over each other and stronger regional accents. We ran the same set of recordings, including Black Country, Glaswegian and Welsh-accented speakers, through each tool and compared the transcripts by hand. None was flawless, but they failed in different ways.

• Otter: quick live transcription and decent speaker separation, but it stumbles on unusual names and industry jargon unless you add them to its custom vocabulary first.
• Fireflies: dependable across most accents we tested, and its custom vocabulary and topic-tracking features help it catch recurring product and client names.
• Fathom: consistently tidy transcripts on clean audio, with fewer garbled sentences on fast speech than we expected, though it offers less vocabulary tuning than the others.
• Teams: strong when everyone joins on a decent microphone, because it can attribute speech to each participant from their own audio channel in Teams-to-Teams calls.

The honest headline: microphone quality moves accuracy more than tool choice does. A £30 USB headset and a shared glossary of client names and jargon will do more for your transcripts than switching vendors ever will.

Action items and summary quality

A transcript is raw material; the summary is what your team actually reads. Here the four tools diverge more sharply than they do on accuracy.

• Fathom produces the most readable summaries out of the box, organised by topic with action items clearly flagged and assigned to a named speaker.
• Fireflies is the strongest for follow-through: action items can be pushed automatically into HubSpot, Salesforce, Asana or Trello, which suits sales teams who live in a CRM.
• Otter's summaries are serviceable but flatter; its real strengths are the live transcript you can highlight during the call and its chat assistant for querying past meetings.
• Teams' intelligent recap is genuinely good if you have Copilot: it ties action items to speakers and timestamps, and you can question Copilot about the meeting afterwards.

Whichever you choose, treat AI action items as a first draft. All four occasionally assign a task to the wrong person or soften a hard deadline, so a sixty-second human review before any summary goes to a client is non-negotiable.

Privacy, consent and where recordings live

Meeting recordings are personal data under UK GDPR, so you need a lawful basis for recording and you must tell participants it is happening. The bigger day-to-day risk, though, is default settings. Otter and Fireflies can auto-join every meeting on your calendar and email summaries to all attendees, including external guests. More than one business has had an internal debrief accidentally shared with the very client it discussed.

Fix these settings before your first external call

• Turn off auto-join for external or unlisted meetings
• Disable automatic summary emails to all attendees
• Check whether your plan lets you opt out of your recordings being used for model training
• Set a retention period so old recordings are deleted rather than hoarded indefinitely
• Confirm where data is stored; Teams keeps recordings inside your own Microsoft 365 tenant, which is the simplest story for regulated or confidential work

Pricing and value

All four have a free way in. Fathom's free plan is unusually generous for individual users, which is exactly why it spreads through small teams so quickly. Otter's free tier caps monthly transcription minutes and Fireflies limits credits and storage, so both nudge regular users towards paid plans fairly fast.

Across this category, paid plans typically land somewhere between £10 and £25 per user per month depending on tier and billing period; check current pricing before you commit, because vendors adjust it often. Teams is the odd one out: basic transcription is included in most business Microsoft 365 plans, but the AI recap requires Teams Premium or Microsoft 365 Copilot, a noticeably bigger per-user commitment that only stacks up if you will use Copilot well beyond meetings.

Our pick for each team size

• Solo founders and freelancers: start with Fathom's free plan; it covers Zoom, Google Meet and Teams, and its summaries need the least editing.
• Teams of two to ten: Fireflies if your world revolves around a CRM and task boards; Otter if you want high transcription volume at a low price.
• Ten to fifty staff already on Microsoft 365: pilot Copilot with your heaviest meeting users first; keeping recordings inside your own tenant simplifies compliance conversations.
• Regulated or highly confidential work: use Teams, or skip cloud notetakers entirely and transcribe locally with an on-device tool.

Run a two-week trial on real meetings before committing, and involve whoever looks after your data protection from day one. If you would like help choosing a notetaker or wiring one into your CRM and workflows, our team can help.