Best Free AI Note Takers in 2026: Free Plan Limits Compared

Toolradar data: Toolradar evaluated 192 note-taking tools for its note-taking ranking, and 9 of the 10 tools on that list have a free plan.

This page is narrower: seven AI note takers whose free plans we could read on the vendor's own pricing page, with the monthly or lifetime cap that stops you first.

A free AI note taker records or joins a call, writes a transcript and turns it into notes.

The free plan is where the decision happens. A plan can look generous on the pricing page and still stop at the fifth call of the week, so the table below sets each cap next to its price instead of burying it in a feature list.

For a feature-first ranking of the paid tools, see the best AI note-taking apps guide.

An AI note taker turns a meeting into a record you can search later: a transcript, a summary and the action items. Most free plans give that work away with a limit, and the limit is what separates one tool from another.

The common caps are minutes or meetings per month, a maximum length per conversation, storage per team, and lifetime counts that never reset.

Two more things decide whether a free plan fits your week. One is whether a bot joins the call, which some buyers do not want in a client meeting.

The other is how long transcripts stay in the app, because a short history can end before you need the record. Transcript accuracy also depends on audio quality, and the noise removal guide covers that.

Tools built around documents rather than calls, such as NotebookLM, sit outside this list.

The cap that stops you first is the one to plan around. Read AI gives 5 meeting transcripts a month and records meetings up to one hour on Free.

Someone with three client calls a week uses up the five in under two weeks, and a 90-minute workshop is cut off at the hour mark.

Otter.ai has the largest monthly minute allowance with a stated number: 300 transcription minutes a month, with no rollover.

Its Basic plan transcribes at most 30 minutes of any one conversation, so a one-hour call keeps only half of its audio. Notta lists 120 minutes a month and up to 3 minutes per conversation, which covers a few short uploads and not a week of calls.

For the wider transcription field, the free transcription tools guide compares engines and file uploads.

Fellow works differently.

Its 5 AI notes and 5 AI recordings are counted per user for the life of the account, so the free plan is a trial of the product, not a monthly allowance. Fireflies lists unlimited transcription on Free but caps team storage at 400 minutes, so the storage limit decides how much history a team can keep.

Every price and allowance on this page was read on the vendor's own pricing page in October 2026, in dollars as each page shows them: Fathom, Granola, Otter.ai, Fireflies, Notta, Read AI and Fellow.

Monthly and yearly prices differ on most paid plans, so compare the same billing basis on each side.

Read the free plan as a monthly budget, not a headline. Otter.ai's 300 minutes look larger than Notta's 120 until a 30-minute cap per conversation cuts off a long call.

A free plan with no stated cap, like Fathom's, puts the limit on the features and the history instead, so check retention before you depend on it.

Fellow's allowance never resets, which makes it the tightest cap in the table over time.

Methodology: we ranked the seven tools by how much of a normal week each free plan covers, least restrictive first, and used the vendor's own pricing page as the only source for each price and allowance.

The 192-tool count is from Toolradar's note-taking ranking. The vendor links point to their pricing pages, and the prices are re-checked every 60 days. We have not tested these tools ourselves, so every price and allowance above is a vendor's published figure.