5 Free AI Meeting Minutes Tools for Small Teams (2026), Plus Tiro’s Trial for Distributed Teams

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Best ongoing-free fit for a distributed team: Granola includes shared folders and cross-meeting AI chat on its Basic plan, with 30-day note visibility.

• Fireflies.ai: searchable transcripts and shared access are the main need.
• Otter.ai for live transcription when your calls fit its 30-minute and 300-minute monthly limits.
• Fathom for a small number of advanced summaries, or tl;dv for ongoing free recording and transcripts.
• Consider Tiro separately when real-time multilingual capture matters enough to evaluate a paid tool after a trial.

For a small distributed team that needs to share meeting notes without a subscription, Granola is the strongest fit among these five on the documented collaboration details: its Basic plan includes shared folders and AI chat across meetings, and its free meeting history is visible for 30 days. Fireflies.ai is relevant when colleagues need to retrieve transcript passages and share access to the meeting record. Tiro is not a continuing-free option; it offers a separate trial for teams that need multilingual capture.

Vendor pricing and help pages were checked October 12, 2026. The decision turns on four different kinds of limits: how long access continues, how much recording or transcription the plan allows, how many AI actions it includes, and how long the team can find older notes.

The linked official plan guides supply the comparison limits, checked on October 13, 2026. Evaluate the distributed team’s shared folders, visible history, and follow-up task against those documented conditions.

How to compare free plans with trials

An ongoing free plan can support a recurring team routine, while a trial is a fixed evaluation period.

Use these checks before moving a team’s weekly workflow into a free product:

• Monthly usage: Is the limit measured in recorded minutes, transcription minutes, meetings, or advanced-feature uses? Those units cover different parts of the workflow.
• Per-call cap: A monthly allowance may still cut off the transcript for one longer meeting.
• AI allowance: Transcription can continue when a limited pool for summaries, questions, or other AI features runs out.
• Shared handoff: Look for team folders, transcript sharing, searchable notes, or task export. Individual notes are less useful when colleagues need to find and act on them.
• History and storage: A note can remain in the account but become difficult to retrieve after a history window or storage cap.
• Seat rules: A free individual account may not provide free seats in a managed team plan.

Estimate monthly meeting volume by multiplying each meeting's length by the number of meetings, then compare it with the plan's stated usage unit. For example, two 45-minute team meetings each week for four weeks total 360 meeting-minutes.

Fathom: useful for occasional advanced summaries

Fathom fits a small team that mainly needs basic meeting records and only occasionally wants a more structured AI summary. Its free-plan support page lists advanced AI summaries for the first five calls each month; after that, the General or Enhanced template remains available. The practical tradeoff is a predictable monthly allowance for richer summaries while the team can use a simpler format for other calls.

A free Fathom account is easier to evaluate as an individual workflow than as a no-cost team deployment. Fathom’s Team Edition guidance, checked October 12, 2026, says its new Team and Business plans do not include free seats. A distributed team that wants managed sharing across multiple people should include paid seats in its budget; the free summary allowance is a better fit when one or a few users prepare notes for colleagues.

Fireflies.ai: shared transcripts within a storage limit

The Fireflies Free-plan guide describes keyword retrieval and sharing with teammates or guests. Its feature guide explains the starter transcription allowance and Auto Join for eligible meetings. Check that capture setup against the calls your team needs to record.

Free storage is 400 minutes per seat, pooled across the workspace according to the storage guide; teams reclaim capacity by removing older meetings. The Free-plan guide includes sharing with teammates or external guests and up to three additional public channels; unlimited private channels require Business. Transcript downloads require a paid plan.

The Fireflies comparison covers meeting transcription, ordinary keyword search, sharing, and stored meeting minutes. Advanced AI assistants, AI-generated highlights, and custom AI skills are outside this comparison. Assess whether colleagues can locate and open the meeting record using the capture, search, and access conditions described here.

Otter.ai: live transcription for calls under 30 minutes

Otter.ai suits a team that wants words to appear while people are speaking and can keep individual meetings short. Its live transcription page describes real-time transcripts that can be edited and shared after the call. Otter’s Basic-plan limits set a 300-minute monthly transcription allowance and a 30-minute limit for each conversation and import.

Otter's export guide limits Basic exports to TXT; DOCX, PDF, and SRT require a paid plan.

On Basic, a 50-minute planning session yields only 30 minutes of accessible transcript even though recording continues; split the agenda into shorter meetings when the full discussion needs a transcript, or choose a plan that fits. Basic also allows three audio or video imports per account, and the 25 most recent conversations remain directly visible while older ones are archived.

tl;dv: ongoing free recording and transcripts

tl;dv's official Free-plan limits separate ongoing capture from finite AI allowances. The Free plan permits unlimited numbers of recordings, transcripts, and manually timestamped notes, with a three-hour ceiling per recorded or uploaded meeting. The first 10 meetings receive full-meeting automatic AI notes; later meetings receive automatic notes for their first 10 minutes. The account also receives 10 AI prompts and 10 AI reports. These allowances apply over the account's lifetime rather than resetting each month.

Video storage has two stages: after three days, recordings move to archived storage, while transcripts and notes stay accessible. Watching an archived video requires restoring it, which can take up to 90 minutes. Free recordings are retained for three months before deletion; users receive four weeks' notice and can download recordings during that window. Pro or Business unlocks features such as unlimited single-meeting AI summaries and instant access to older storage. For a free workflow, plan around the first 10 full-meeting summaries and export the records your team needs before the retention deadline.

Granola: shared notes and cross-meeting chat, with a 30-day window

Granola is the clearest fit here when colleagues need to share meeting history and ask questions across multiple discussions. The Granola Basic plan page lists AI chat within and across meetings; Granola’s plan guide says Basic is free with no meeting limit and includes shared folders. That combination supports a practical handoff: one person records a meeting, colleagues use a shared folder to revisit the notes, and cross-meeting chat helps retrieve context across conversations.

Granola’s plan guide says notes older than 30 days are stored but no longer visible in the Basic app. Teams that need an active, searchable month of shared meeting context may find that window workable; teams maintaining a longer decision archive should budget for a plan with the history they need. Granola also lists customizable note templates on desktop, which can help a team keep recurring meeting formats consistent.

Tiro: a separate trial for multilingual meetings

Tiro's free-trial guide gives a new eligible account 100 minutes at signup. Within the three-week trial, four onboarding tasks each add 50 minutes: create a first note, connect a calendar, install the desktop app, and install the mobile app. Completing all four raises the total to 300 minutes. The allowance is shared across live recording, offline recording, and audio uploads, is granted once per account, and ends after three weeks or when a paid plan starts.

The trial limits viewing to the first 50 minutes of each note and allows recording up to 120 minutes per note, subject to the remaining trial balance. Recording continues past minute 50; text beyond that point stays blurred until a paid upgrade. Recording stops at minute 120, so later audio is not captured. A paid upgrade unlocks the recorded text beyond minute 50.

For cross-language meetings, the live-recording guide explains how to select Multilingual for Listen In, choose a supported Write In language, and enable the live Translation display. Use representative meetings to assess translated decisions, specialist terms, and action owners before deciding on a paid plan.

Which tool fits your team’s limit?

For a strict $0 recurring workflow, start with Granola if shared folders and cross-meeting chat are the priority, or Fireflies.ai if transcript search and shared access are more important. Pick Otter for short live-transcription sessions, Fathom for occasional advanced summaries, and tl;dv for ongoing capture and transcripts. Evaluate Tiro separately when multilingual live meetings are the deciding need and a paid plan is a realistic next step.