Do you meet online, in person or both?
Most AI notetakers are plugins for Teams or Zoom: a bot joins your online meeting. If your conversations happen in person, you need an app that records the audio on your phone. That's a fundamentally different product.
Notuly covers both. In the room, your phone on the table is enough; online, the desktop app for macOS and Windows takes the notes straight from your laptop, in Teams, Zoom and Google Meet, with no bot in your meeting.
Hybrid works too: Daniël sits in the meeting room with the desktop app running, while Sam and Leila join through Teams. One recording, one report, in all three inboxes within ten minutes.
Otter, Fireflies and Fathom are built around the online meeting; an in-person conversation only works through their mobile app or an audio upload. Copilot takes notes exclusively inside Teams.
Where does your data go?
Otter, Fireflies and Fathom process your conversations on US servers and keep the recording in an archive by default. Copilot keeps the recording in your Microsoft environment. Three questions to ask of every tool: is the audio kept, is your data used for training, and is there a data processing agreement?
Credit where it's due: Fireflies doesn't train on your conversations and has 0-day retention agreements with its AI vendors to back that up. Otter does train, on de-identified data. And a data processing agreement is not the same as data that never leaves the EU: an American company falls under American law.
Notuly processes on its own servers in Amsterdam, deletes the audio within a minute of processing and never trains on your data. If you work with client data, personal data or commercially sensitive information, also read how to judge whether an AI tool is GDPR compliant and the guide to secure notetaking.
Transcript or summary?
All five deliver something after the meeting, but not the same thing. Some tools mainly give you a verbatim transcript; others turn the conversation into a structured report, with the summary, the decisions and the action points. For most teams, the latter is far more useful.
With Notuly, every conversation ends in the report: the summary, the decisions taken and the action points, each with a name and a deadline; if you want the full transcript as well, it comes as an attachment. Straight to your inbox, including for participants outside your organisation. No dashboard, no app to open: the report is there before you reach your car.
You can read more about how that works at automatic meeting notes. Everything about writing a conversation out word for word is in the guide to the transcription app.
What does an AI notetaker cost?
Most AI notetakers have a free plan and a paid subscription, but what you get for free varies a lot. And with some free tools, you pay with your data.
Notuly Starter is free: three conversations per month, no payment details needed; the current Notuly prices are in the comparison table above. Fireflies Pro costs $10 per month (billed yearly), Fathom Premium $16 per month (billed yearly), and Copilot comes as part of a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence from $21 per user per month. Otter charges in dollars; the current prices are on its own pricing page.
Choosing for a whole organisation?
Not just choosing for yourself but for a team or a whole organisation? Then run through the procurement checklist for minute-taking software before you compare. Different things matter for an organisation than for an individual, from administration to the data processing agreement.
When do you choose Otter, Fireflies, Fathom or Copilot?
If you mostly meet online in English and want a searchable archive of all your meetings, Otter and Fireflies are good choices. Otter transcribes live during the meeting; Fireflies connects to more than a hundred tools, from CRM to Slack.
Fathom fits if you want a free meeting bot and don't mind your data sitting in the US. Copilot fits if your organisation lives in Microsoft 365 and nearly everything runs through Teams; it helps there beyond notetaking too, in email and documents.
When do you choose Notuly?
When your conversations should not be stored anywhere at all, whatever language they're in. Or when your meetings are a mix of in-person, hybrid and online and you want one notetaker for all of them.
And when privacy carries real weight: Dutch servers in Amsterdam, our own AI, the audio deleted after processing and no searchable archive. For healthcare, local government and legal services, that route is often decisive.