Granola vs Fathom vs Otter: what actually decides it

Three AI notetakers come up every time founders compare meeting tools: Granola, Fathom and Otter. They do roughly the same job. The difference that decides the purchase shows up before either side says a word.

Bot or no bot

Granola records audio from your own computer and keeps transcripts local to your machine by default. Nothing joins the meeting, so nobody sees a recorder in the participant list.

Fathom and Otter mostly send a bot in. Some buyers don't care. Some notice immediately, and a customer asking who is recording is a cost you can't undo.

If your calls include people who distrust bots, that single split shortlists you to Granola and Fathom.

What they cost

From their own pricing pages:

• Fathom: free tier with unlimited recordings and instant summaries; paid per-user plans from $15 per month billed annually ($19 monthly).

• Otter: free Basic tier with 300 monthly transcription minutes; Pro at $16.99 per user per month ($8.49 billed annually); Business at $24 to $30.

• Granola: free download, macOS, Windows, iOS and Android.

Paid plans cluster between $10 and $30 a month, so price rarely decides it.

A founder-side comparison of the three puts Otter's live captions in front and Fathom's free tier as the most generous.

Where they all stop

Every one of these tools ends at the summary. The summary is a record of the meeting, and the useful part of a meeting is rarely the recording.

The notes that still matter weeks later are the 2 lines typed on the way out of the room: what we decided, what I owe them, what surprised me. That thinking lands in whichever notes app is open, with no link back to the call it came from.

Meeting transcripts and meeting decisions are two different artifacts. The first is solved, and all three tools solve it well. The second is the seam Compass is built for.