REPORT · 5 PLAYERS · 5 DIMENSIONS · PUBLIC DATA
AI Meeting Assistants: the competitive landscape
Five leading AI meeting assistants scored across five dimensions. Where each wins, where the market is moving, and the gap a new entrant can still own. Every score traceable to a public source.
Portfolio sample
A demonstration built on public data. Your delivered report goes deeper: your market, your competitors, with tailored annotations and recommendations for your decision.
The terrain, in numbers.
Every data point went through PRISM.
The score leader, on file.
the field
Every dimension, side by side.
| Player | Transcription | Summaries | CRM sync | Free tier | Native feel | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fathom | 4 | 5 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 22 |
| tl;dv | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 20 |
| Granola | 4 | 5 | 3 | 3 | 5 | 20 |
| Otter.ai | 5 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 3 | 18 |
| Fireflies.ai | 4 | 4 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 18 |
Scale 1 to 5. Scores are the analyst's judgment over public evidence (official pricing pages, G2 ratings, press), not first-party measurement. Transcription accuracy treated as a tight tie: public benchmarks disagree (Otter ~95% vs Fireflies 91.3% in one test, 94.2% word-level in another), so G2 reputation was the tiebreaker. Snapshot: May 2026.
What the data says.
FINDING 01
The axis moved from accuracy to capture
Accuracy converged (~90 to 95% for all, inside the noise). What moves clients now is how the tool captures. Granola's bot-free model is displacing incumbents: users adopt it and drop the others, rarely the reverse (YipitData).
FINDING 02
Every free tier has a different gotcha
Fathom caps summaries (5/mo), tl;dv caps AI notes (10/mo), Otter caps minutes (300), Granola caps history (25 notes). No free tier is generous on AI, history, and integrations at once. That trade-off is structural.
FINDING 03
Real CRM is paywalled at the top
Field-level CRM sync needs a Business tier almost everywhere (Fathom $25, Fireflies $19, tl;dv $59). Fireflies is the only true moat (12+ CRMs) but pays for it with cluttered UX. Nobody ships depth and simplicity together.
Where to enter. Where the risk lives.
- Bot-free wins on UX and momentum, proven by Granola's displacement signal.
- No player owns free CRM, uncapped history, and true cross-platform at once.
- Otter's consent lawsuit opens a privacy-and-compliance angle for a bot-free entrant.
- Granola has momentum and a $1.5B war chest.
- Fireflies owns the sales-team distribution through CRM depth.
- Incumbents can bundle toward parity if the entrant is slow.
Granola proved bot-free wins, but it is Apple-first, has no video, no native Salesforce, and locks integrations and history behind the paywall. The open flank: Granola's native feel, but on Windows and web, with at least one CRM working on the free tier.
The recommendation, by buyer.
The displacement signal (clients drop rivals on adoption) is the strongest PMF indicator in a fragmented category.
Every claim, traceable.
Anchor sources used for pricing, integrations, and ratings:
Official pricing — fathom.ai/pricing · otter.ai/pricing · fireflies.ai/pricing · granola.ai/pricing · tldv.io/pricing
Ratings — G2 (Fathom 5.0 / 6.7k reviews, Fireflies 4.7 / 746, Otter 4.4 / 462)
Momentum — YipitData notetaking analysis · TechCrunch (Granola $125M / $1.5B, Mar 2026)
Cross-checks — Zapier "best AI meeting assistant" · vendor knowledge bases
Declared, not invented — items the research could not fully verify: Granola and tl;dv annual prices (official pages did not expose USD); native Salesforce on Granola; Granola Windows/web support; current status of Otter's class action; exact Fireflies free-tier AI credit cap; isolated WER benchmarks for tl;dv and Granola.