Expert Guide

Best Free AI Summarizers in 2026: Word and Page Limits

Eight free summarizers compared on the minutes, pages, summaries and text length their free plans print, plus the next paid price where the vendor prints one.

Louis CorneloupFounder, Dupple · 24,000+ AIpresso subscribers · Updated Oct 2026

Product links may be affiliate links. How we rate 8 tools compared

TL;DR

Short answer: Notta has the most specific free plan here, with 120 transcription minutes and 10 AI summaries a month at $0. For PDFs, Humata covers 60 free pages a month. For pasted text, Claude prints no fixed message count, though its usage resets on a rolling five-hour window.

None of the eight prints a word cap. Resoomer is the only one that mentions a character limit, and its page says there is none. The caps that decide the choice are pages, minutes and monthly summary counts.

Key facts8 tools compared: Notta, Humata, Fathom, Otter, Tactiq, Claude, Resoomer, Gemini

Updated: October 16, 2026
Top pick: Notta (best for: Students and professionals who summarize recorded meetings, lectures or uploaded audio on a zero budget)
Top pick price as of October 16, 2026: Notta: Free: 120 transcription minutes and 10 AI summaries a month. Pro is $8.17 a month billed annually.

8 tools compared: Notta, Humata, Fathom, Otter, Tactiq, Claude, Resoomer, Gemini
Humata (best for: People who summarize PDFs and reports and want a free page allowance before they pay for more pages): Free: 60 pages a month. Expert is $9.99 a month for up to three users, with 500 free pages a month.
Fathom (best for: Anyone who summarizes sales calls and meetings and wants recordings with no minute cap on the free plan): Free forever: unlimited recordings and transcriptions, with AI call summaries included. Paid plans are per user.
Otter (best for: People who record live meetings and want the largest numeric minute allowance on a free plan, with automated summaries): Basic is free: 300 transcription minutes a month, shared across types, with a 30-minute cap per conversation.

Most free AI summarizers look alike until you compare their caps. Free plans differ in what they cap: the pages of a document, the minutes of a recording, the number of summaries a month, or the text you can paste. The eight tools below are the ones whose free terms we could read on their own pages in October 2026.

Each entry names the unit the vendor prints, because a cap in minutes says nothing about a cap in pages.

Toolradar data: Toolradar tracks 1,084 AI and automation tools, and its Notta listing files the transcription tool with six alternatives, pricing checked on September 30, 2026.

Toolradar also has tool pages for Humata and Otter, which we used to cross-check tool names. Toolradar is a cross-check here, not a source of prices.

Top Picks

Based on features, real-world fit, and value for money.

#1 Top pick

Notta

The free plan with the most specific printed caps: 120 minutes, 3 minutes per transcription, 50 file imports and 10 summaries a month.

Pricing

Free: 120 transcription minutes and 10 AI summaries a month. Pro is $8.17 a month billed annually.

Best for

Students and professionals who summarize recorded meetings, lectures or uploaded audio on a zero budget.

Visit Notta Details

Humata

The only free plan here that prints a page cap: 60 pages a month for documents, with 500 pages on Expert.

Pricing

Free: 60 pages a month. Expert is $9.99 a month for up to three users, with 500 free pages a month.

Best for

People who summarize PDFs and reports and want a free page allowance before they pay for more pages.

Visit Humata Details

Fathom

Unlimited recordings and transcripts on the free plan, with AI call summaries, but built for calls rather than documents.

Pricing

Free forever: unlimited recordings and transcriptions, with AI call summaries included. Paid plans are per user.

Best for

Anyone who summarizes sales calls and meetings and wants recordings with no minute cap on the free plan.

Visit Fathom Details

Best Free AI Summarizers in 2026: Word and Page Limits: 8 tools compared, updated Oct 2026
Tool	Pricing	Best for
Notta	Free: 120 transcription minutes and 10 AI summaries a month. Pro is $8.17 a month billed annually.	Students and professionals who summarize recorded meetings, lectures or uploaded audio on a zero budget.
Humata	Free: 60 pages a month. Expert is $9.99 a month for up to three users, with 500 free pages a month.	People who summarize PDFs and reports and want a free page allowance before they pay for more pages.
Fathom	Free forever: unlimited recordings and transcriptions, with AI call summaries included. Paid plans are per user.	Anyone who summarizes sales calls and meetings and wants recordings with no minute cap on the free plan.
Otter	Basic is free: 300 transcription minutes a month, shared across types, with a 30-minute cap per conversation.	People who record live meetings and want the largest numeric minute allowance on a free plan, with automated summaries.
Tactiq	Free: 10 transcripts and 5 AI credits a month. Pro is €6.67 per user a month, billed annually, in euros only.	Users who need a few meeting transcripts a month and an AI summary from each, on a free allowance.
Claude	Free with no fixed message count. Pro is $17 a month on annual billing ($200 up front), or $20 billed monthly.	Anyone who summarizes pasted text, PDFs or notes in a chat and can wait out a five-hour reset when busy.
Resoomer	Free: no character limit on pasted text and no usage cap printed. The page prints no paid plan.	Students and writers who paste long text or upload a PDF, DOCX or EPUB, with no account needed.
Gemini	Free, with usage refreshed every five hours until a weekly cap. Paid plans are priced in euros on the page.	Google users who summarize in a chat and accept a weekly cap they cannot measure in advance.

Pricing read from each vendor's own pricing page, checked Oct 2026. Every vendor here publishes a price.

Top Pick

Notta

The free plan with the most specific printed caps: 120 minutes, 3 minutes per transcription, 50 file imports and 10 summaries a month.

Pricing: Free: 120 transcription minutes and 10 AI summaries a month. Pro is $8.17 a month billed annually.

Best for: Students and professionals who summarize recorded meetings, lectures or uploaded audio on a zero budget.

Pros

The free plan prints four caps: 120 minutes, 3 minutes per transcription, 50 file imports and 10 AI summaries a month.
Pro is $8.17 a month billed annually, or $97.99 for the year, and it lifts the caps to 1,800 minutes and 100 summaries a month.
The free plan includes meeting transcription and speaker identification, according to the pricing page.

Cons

A 3-minute cap on each transcription rules out most full meetings on the free plan.
Ten summaries a month runs out quickly for a team, so the free plan suits one person better than a group.

Humata

The only free plan here that prints a page cap: 60 pages a month for documents, with 500 pages on Expert.

Pricing: Free: 60 pages a month. Expert is $9.99 a month for up to three users, with 500 free pages a month.

Best for: People who summarize PDFs and reports and want a free page allowance before they pay for more pages.

Pros

The free plan prints its unit in plain terms: 60 free pages a month for the basic features.
Expert lists 500 free pages a month for up to three users, and each extra page costs $0.02.
Team is $49 per user a month for up to 10 users, with 5,000 free pages a month and extra pages at $0.01 each.

Cons

The free allowance is 60 pages a month, so a single 60-page report uses the whole month.
The page does not print a file-size limit for the free plan.

Fathom

Unlimited recordings and transcripts on the free plan, with AI call summaries, but built for calls rather than documents.

Pricing: Free forever: unlimited recordings and transcriptions, with AI call summaries included. Paid plans are per user.

Best for: Anyone who summarizes sales calls and meetings and wants recordings with no minute cap on the free plan.

Pros

The pricing page says the free plan is free forever, with unlimited recordings and transcriptions and no minute cap printed.
AI call summaries are included on the free plan, so meeting summaries do not need a paid upgrade.
Clips, playlists and search across calls are included on the free plan as well.

Cons

The page prints no monthly summary count, so the number of summaries the free plan allows is unknown.
It is built around calls and meetings. The page does not present it as a tool for summarizing PDFs or pasted text.

Otter

300 free minutes a month, but each conversation stops at 30 minutes, and no monthly summary count is printed.

Pricing: Basic is free: 300 transcription minutes a month, shared across types, with a 30-minute cap per conversation.

Best for: People who record live meetings and want the largest numeric minute allowance on a free plan, with automated summaries.

Pros

Basic prints 300 transcription minutes a month, the largest numeric minute allowance in this list.
The free plan includes 20 AI Chat messages a month per user, capped at 3 per conversation.
The free plan lists automated summaries with action items and outlines, which is useful after a long meeting.

Cons

Each conversation is capped at 30 minutes on Basic, so a long meeting has to be split or moved to a paid plan.
The 300 minutes are a shared pool across all transcription types, so uploads and live meetings draw on the same allowance.

Tactiq

Ten transcripts and five AI credits a month, with one credit covering one action such as a meeting summary.

Pricing: Free: 10 transcripts and 5 AI credits a month. Pro is €6.67 per user a month, billed annually, in euros only.

Best for: Users who need a few meeting transcripts a month and an AI summary from each, on a free allowance.

Pros

The free plan prints 10 transcripts a month and 5 AI credits, so the allowance is easy to count.
Tactiq's FAQ states that one AI credit covers one action, such as generating a meeting summary.
The free plan lists AI generated insights as well as transcripts.

Cons

The page prints no transcript length limit for the free plan, so the longest meeting it accepts is unknown.
Paid prices are in euros only, so the US dollar cost of Pro is not printed.

Claude

No fixed message count on the free plan, with a rolling five-hour usage window in place of a monthly cap.

Pricing: Free with no fixed message count. Pro is $17 a month on annual billing ($200 up front), or $20 billed monthly.

Best for: Anyone who summarizes pasted text, PDFs or notes in a chat and can wait out a five-hour reset when busy.

Pros

The pricing page prints no fixed message count, so a light user can summarize as often as the window allows.
Pro gives at least 5x more usage per five-hour session than Free, as the page states.
The page gives the context window as up to 1M, varying by model, so the limit depends on which model you pick.

Cons

The page does not print a file-size or page limit for uploads on the free plan.
Usage resets on a five-hour window, so a heavy afternoon can stop the free plan until the window refills.

Resoomer

No character limit on pasted text and no usage cap printed, with PDF, EPUB, DOCX, ODT and TXT upload.

Pricing: Free: no character limit on pasted text and no usage cap printed. The page prints no paid plan.

Best for: Students and writers who paste long text or upload a PDF, DOCX or EPUB, with no account needed.

Pros

The page states there is no character limit, so long pasted text is not cut off by a text-length rule.
It accepts PDF, EPUB, DOCX, ODT and TXT files, so a Word or EPUB file does not need converting first.
The page says no account is required to use the summarizer.

Cons

The page prints no file-size figure for uploads, so a large document has no stated ceiling.
No usage cap is printed for the summarizer, so the ceiling of the free version is unknown.

Gemini

Limits refresh every five hours until a weekly cap is reached, and the page prints no number for either limit.

Pricing: Free, with usage refreshed every five hours until a weekly cap. Paid plans are priced in euros on the page.

Best for: Google users who summarize in a chat and accept a weekly cap they cannot measure in advance.

Pros

Usage refreshes every five hours, so a short burst of summaries does not use up the whole week.
The page says Plus gives twice the free usage, Pro four times and Ultra up to 20 times.
The page sets the free plan beside three paid tiers, so the step up is easy to compare on one screen.

Cons

The page prints no number for the free allowance, so you cannot size a monthly workload in advance.
Consumer plans are priced in euros on the page, so the dollar cost of the next step is not printed.

What it is

An AI summarizer reads a document, article, recording or block of text and returns its main points. Most free plans cap one of three things: the input, the monthly count of summaries, or the length of a recording. Claude and Gemini cap usage over time windows instead.

The distinction matters because a tool that prints minutes cannot be compared with a tool that prints pages.

None of the eight prints a word cap, so this page is built around the units the vendors do print.

If you want a general chat tool rather than a dedicated summarizer, our best AI chatbots guide compares the assistants, and our Claude pricing guide sets out the paid tiers behind Claude's free plan.

For writing help after the summary, see our best AI writing tools, and for keeping the notes themselves, our best AI note-taking apps guide.

Why it matters

The cap decides whether a free plan fits your work before you pay anything. Ten AI summaries a month is roughly two a week for one person. A team of five making one summary each a week would use it in two weeks. Sixty pages a month covers a few reports, not a stack of contracts.

Minutes work differently: Notta's 120 minutes and Otter's 300 are monthly totals, and a per-file cap can stop you before the monthly one does.

Notta caps each transcription at 3 minutes on its free plan, so a 30-minute call falls outside the free plan even with minutes left.

Otter caps each conversation at 30 minutes on Basic. For meeting tools that go further on a paid plan, see our best AI meeting assistants guide. For summaries built on your own sources, our NotebookLM review is the place to start.

Key features to look for

Caps by unit

Humata counts pages (60 a month), Notta and Otter count minutes (120 and 300 a month), and Resoomer prints no character limit. Compare the unit that matches your input before you compare the numbers.

Per-file limits

Notta caps each transcription at 3 minutes on the free plan, and Otter caps each conversation at 30 minutes. Both are tighter than the monthly figure suggests, and both stop long meetings.

Summary counts

Notta prints 10 AI summaries a month. Tactiq prints 5 AI credits, where one credit covers one action such as a meeting summary. Otter and Fathom print no summary count on their free pages.

Open-ended plans

Claude and Gemini print no fixed message count. Both reset on a rolling five-hour window, and Gemini also runs to a weekly cap, so a heavy week can run out before it ends.

Currency

Tactiq and Gemini print their paid prices in euros on the pages we read, and neither prints a US dollar figure for those plans.

Pricing

Every price here is the figure the vendor printed on its own pricing page in October 2026: Notta, Humata, Otter, Fathom, Tactiq, Claude, Gemini and Resoomer.

Notta prints its Pro price per month on annual billing, with the yearly total beside it. Tactiq and Gemini print euro prices only, and we do not convert them.

For the ChatGPT side of the question, see our ChatGPT pricing guide.

Methodology: we recorded each free plan's allowance in the unit the vendor prints, the cap per file and per month, and the cheapest paid step in dollars where the page gives one.

The order puts the most specific printed allowances first and the open-ended chat tools last. We left out tools whose free terms we could not read on their own pages in October 2026. We did not test the tools on files, so this page makes no accuracy or quality claim.

Plan	Price	Best for
Notta Free	Free	120 transcription minutes, 3 minutes per transcription, 50 file imports and 10 AI summaries a month
Notta Pro	$8.17 a month, billed annually	1,800 minutes, up to 5 hours per transcription, 100 file imports and 100 AI summaries a month
Notta Business	$16.67 a month, billed annually	Unlimited transcription, 200 file imports and 200 AI summaries a month
Humata Free	Free	60 pages a month for the basic features
Humata Expert	$9.99 a month	Up to three users, 500 free pages a month, extra pages at $0.02 each
Humata Team	$49 per user a month	Up to 10 users, 5,000 free pages a month, extra pages at $0.01 each
Fathom Free	Free	Unlimited recordings and transcriptions, AI call summaries, clips and search across calls
Otter Basic	Free	300 transcription minutes a month shared across types, 30 minutes per conversation, 20 AI Chat messages a month
Tactiq Free	Free	10 transcripts and 5 AI credits a month, with one credit per action such as a meeting summary
Tactiq Pro	€6.67 per user a month, billed annually	Euro price only on the page, so no US dollar figure is printed
Claude Free	Free	No fixed message count, with usage that resets on a rolling five-hour window
Claude Pro	$17 a month on annual billing	Charged as $200 up front, or $20 a month billed monthly; at least 5x the free usage per session
Gemini Free	Free	No numeric usage cap printed; usage refreshes every five hours until a weekly limit
Gemini AI Plus	€4.99 a month	Euro price only on the page; twice the free usage
Resoomer Free	Free	No character limit on text, no usage cap printed, PDF, EPUB, DOCX, ODT and TXT upload

Mistakes to avoid

×Choosing by the monthly cap and ignoring the per-file cap. For a long recording, Notta's 3-minute cap per transcription bites before the monthly total does.

×Reading no fixed message count as no limit. Claude and Gemini both reset on a rolling five-hour window, so a busy afternoon can stop you until the window refills.

×Running a long report through Humata without checking the rest of the month. The free allowance is 60 pages in total, so one long report can use the whole month.

×Comparing euro and dollar prices as if they were equal. Tactiq and Gemini print euros on the pages we read, and a converted figure is not the vendor's price.

×Buying per-user plans without counting seats. Humata's Expert plan covers up to three users, so a team of four moves to Team at $49 per user a month, or $196 for four.

Expert tips

→Match the unit to the input: pages for PDFs, minutes for recordings, and a chat window for pasted text.

→Test one real file on the free plan before you rely on it, since several of these pages print no file-size limit.

→Count your monthly inputs first, then check that count against the cap printed in the same unit.

→Check any figure in a summary against the source before you quote it, because a summary drops detail.

The bottom line

For recordings on a zero budget, start with Notta: 120 minutes and 10 summaries a month, with a 3-minute cap per transcription. For PDFs, Humata gives 60 free pages a month. For pasted text, Claude prints no fixed count, so test its five-hour window before you rely on it.

For the paid step on the Gemini side, start with our Gemini pricing guide.

Cite this: AIpresso, "Best Free AI Summarizers in 2026: Word and Page Limits", October 2026.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best free AI summarizer in 2026?

It depends on the input. For recordings, Notta's free plan prints 120 transcription minutes and 10 AI summaries a month at no cost. For PDFs, Humata gives 60 free pages a month. For pasted text, Claude's free plan prints no fixed message count, but its usage resets on a rolling five-hour window.

How many pages can Humata summarize for free?

Humata's free plan covers 60 pages a month for the basic features, as its pricing page printed in October 2026. Its Expert plan at $9.99 a month for up to three users includes 500 free pages a month.

Is there a free AI summarizer with no word limit?

No tool in this list prints a word cap. Resoomer comes closest: its page states no character limit on text and prints no usage cap for the summarizer. It accepts PDF, EPUB, DOCX, ODT and TXT files but prints no file-size figure, so test one long input before you rely on it.

How much does Notta cost after the free plan?

Notta's Pro plan is $8.17 a month billed annually, or $97.99 for the year, with 1,800 transcription minutes and 100 AI summaries a month. Business is $16.67 a month billed annually, or $199.99 for the year.

Can I use free AI summaries for client work?

The pricing pages we read do not set out commercial-use terms for summaries. Read each tool's terms before you send a client a summary, because a pricing page covers the plan, not the rights to the output.

Is Claude's free plan enough to summarize documents?

Claude's free plan prints no fixed message count and no file-size or page limit for uploads. Usage resets on a rolling five-hour window. Pro gives at least 5x more usage per session, at $17 a month on annual billing.

Sources

Prices and plan details come from each vendor's own pricing page, re-checked by the Toolradar pricing tracker.