Granola vs Fathom vs Otter vs Fireflies vs tl;dv
Five AI notetakers fight for your meetings — which one earns the seat? Scores from the RXed AI Periodic Table v1.0 — identical 20-element scale, deterministic overall. How we audit →
At a glance
Scope = elements of the AI stack in the tool’s stated scope (dashed = honestly out of scope, never a penalty). Quality = how well it scores on what it covers. No single number — both axes, always.
The verdict
Five notetakers, five trade-offs. Granola (Scope 13/20 · Quality 7/10) is the pick for solo operators and small teams: bot-free, MCP on every plan and context engineering the others can't match (Cx 8.5) — but speaker attribution degrades at 3+ participants and the free tier caps at ~25 notes. Fathom (Scope 9/20 · Quality 6/10) is the most generous free tier in the category with an MCP hook into ChatGPT and Claude, but the genuinely useful AI gates behind paid and your data lives in the US. Otter (Scope 13/20 · Quality 6/10) brings 35M users and a two-way MCP hub — and quietly cut Pro's minutes 5x with no price drop, with its sales agent locked behind Enterprise. Fireflies (Scope 12/20 · Quality 5/10) has the widest adoption and 200+ integrations, eroded by an AI-credits system that auto-subscribes to a credit tier unless paused. tl;dv (Scope 18/20 · Quality 5/10) owns the best EU-hosting story in meeting AI at €18/seat — sold with an intrusive bot everyone names. EU data residency → tl;dv. Meetings feeding Claude/ChatGPT → Granola. Free forever → Fathom.
Where the quality sits
Family mean over covered elements only — a dash means the family is honestly outside that tool’s scope.
| Granola Scope 13/20 · Quality 7/10 audited 2026-07-20 | Fathom Scope 9/20 · Quality 6/10 audited 2026-07-23 | Otter.ai Scope 13/20 · Quality 6/10 audited 2026-07-17 | Fireflies.ai Scope 12/20 · Quality 5/10 audited 2026-07-14 | tl;dv Scope 18/20 · Quality 5/10 audited 2026-08-07 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Granola Inc. | Fathom Video Inc. | Otter.ai, Inc. | Fireflies.ai Corp | tldx Solutions GmbH |
| Origin | GB | US | US | US | DE |
| Pricing | Basic free (limited meeting history, ~25 notes) · Business ~€13 ($14)/user · Enterprise ~€32 ($35)/user per month; desktop app (Mac/Windows) or iOS required, no web app | Free €0 (unlimited recording, transcription and storage; instant summaries; ~5 advanced AI calls/month) · Premium ~€18/mo ($20, unlimited AI summaries, action items, Ask Fathom) · Team ~€17/user/mo ($18, SSO, custom vocabulary, keyword alerts, global search; 2-user min) · Business ~€26/user/mo ($28, Deal View, CRM field sync, coaching scorecards). Billed in USD; tiers restructured in early 2026 — verify on the vendor page. | Basic: Free (300 min/mo, 30 min/meeting cap) · Pro: ~€14.85/mo or ~€7.30/mo billed annually (1,200 min/mo, 90 min/meeting) · Business: ~€26/user/mo or ~€17.50/user/mo annually (unlimited minutes, 4 hr/meeting) · Enterprise: custom (third-party estimates ~€13k-30k/yr) | Free · Pro ~€9/seat/mo · Business ~€18/seat/mo · Enterprise ~€36/seat/mo (annual billing) | Free €0 · Pro €18/seat · Business €29/seat per month billed annually; Enterprise custom. Monthly billing costs up to 40% more. |
| Pr Prompts | 7 | 6 | 6 | 5 | 8 |
| Em Embeddings | 6 | 4 | 5 | — | 5 |
| Cx Context | 9 | 6 | 9 | 6 | 7 |
| Tr Tracing | 6 | 5 | 6 | 5 | 7 |
| Lg LLM | 8 | 6 | 6 | 5 | 8 |
| Fc Function calling | 5 | — | 7 | 4 | 7 |
| Vx Vector store | — | — | — | — | — |
| Rg RAG | 8 | 7 | 8 | 6 | 8 |
| Gr Guardrails | 7 | 5 | 6 | 5 | 7 |
| Mm Multimodal | 7 | 7 | 6 | 6 | 6 |
| Ag Agents | 4 | — | 8 | 6 | 6 |
| Ft Fine-tuning | — | — | — | — | 2 |
| Fw Frameworks & harnesses | 6 | — | 5 | 5 | 6 |
| Ev Evaluations | — | — | — | 3 | 2 |
| Sm Small models | — | — | — | — | 2 |
| Ma Multi-agent | — | — | 4 | — | 2 |
| Sy Synthetic data | — | — | — | — | — |
| Pc Protocols | 8 | 7 | 8 | 7 | 8 |
| In Interpretability | — | — | — | — | 4 |
| Th Thinking models | 7 | — | — | — | 3 |
Hover any score for the written reason. Full detail: Granola passport → · Fathom passport → · Otter.ai passport → · Fireflies.ai passport → · tl;dv passport →