I Tested 7 AI Meeting Note Tools So You Don't Have To

Meeting note AI promised to end post-meeting writeups forever. After testing seven tools across 50 meetings, I found massive differences in quality and huge gaps between marketing claims and reality.

Otter.ai remains the best all-rounder—transcription accuracy is excellent, speaker identification works well, and summaries capture key points. The catch is privacy: everything goes to their cloud, which some enterprises can't accept. Fireflies offers similar quality with better integrations but worse privacy terms.

The surprise winner for privacy-conscious users is Fathom. It processes locally where possible and offers strong data controls. Accuracy is slightly lower, but the tradeoff is worth it for sensitive conversations. My recommendation: Otter for general use, Fathom for anything confidential, and skip the tools that require you to read a transcript rather than generating usable summaries.