Is Circleback or Spinach AI cheaper?

Circleback starts at $20.83 per user per month (Individual, billed annually) (7 days trial). Spinach AI starts at $0 (Starter), then $2.90 per meeting hour (Pro) (free plan available).

Circleback vs Spinach AI

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Editorial assessment

Spinach AI compared with Circleback

Circleback is bot-free, writes better notes, covers 100-plus languages, and has a deep automation layer, at roughly $21 to $25 a seat. Spinach puts a bot in the room but has a free company-wide plan and an hourly tier that can cover an entire small firm for less than one Circleback seat. Circleback for note quality and client-facing discretion; Spinach for budget coverage across a whole team.

Choose Circleback if

Teams of 2 to 50 who care more about note quality and post-meeting automation than about paying nothing, especially multilingual teams and anyone in healthcare or another regulated field who needs HIPAA without buying an enterprise tier.

Choose Spinach AI if

Engineering and project teams who want standups, retros, and planning meetings turned into tickets automatically, and small teams with a modest number of important meetings a week who would rather pay by the hour than per seat.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Circleback	Spinach AI
Category	Meeting Notes	Meeting Notes
Starting price	$20.83 per user per month (Individual, billed annually) (7 days trial)	$0 (Starter), then $2.90 per meeting hour (Pro) (free plan available)
Pricing model	Per-seat subscription across three tiers with no free plan; a 7-day full-access free trial precedes payment. Displayed rates are annual-equivalent monthly.	Three self-serve structures in one table: a free company-wide plan, a pay-as-you-go tier billed at $2.90 per meeting hour with unlimited users and no seat minimum, and a per-seat Business tier with a 50-seat minimum. Enterprise is quoted.
Free plan	No	Starter is free and company-wide: recordings, transcripts, basic AI summaries, 100-plus languages, Google or Microsoft Calendar and Slack integration, and seven days of recording retention.
Free trial	7 days with full access to all features	No fixed-length trial; the free Starter plan is company-wide and serves as the evaluation
Best for	Teams of 2 to 50 who care more about note quality and post-meeting automation than about paying nothing, especially multilingual teams and anyone in healthcare or another regulated field who needs HIPAA without buying an enterprise tier.	Engineering and project teams who want standups, retros, and planning meetings turned into tickets automatically, and small teams with a modest number of important meetings a week who would rather pay by the hour than per seat.
Setup time	Ten minutes to first notes: connect a calendar, install the desktop app if you want bot-free capture, and take a meeting. Building the automation rules that justify the price is a further afternoon.	Ten minutes. Sign in with Google or Microsoft, connect the calendar, add Slack, and choose which meetings the bot attends. Configuring the project management and CRM connectors takes another half hour and is where the product's actual value is unlocked.
Learning curve	Low for capture and notes. The automation layer rewards someone who thinks in terms of triggers and fields, and the CLI and API assume a technical user, though nothing requires them.	Low for capture. The part that takes deliberate work is deciding which meetings should create tickets and where, because an over-eager integration will fill a Jira board with noise faster than a human ever could.
Platforms	Web app, Desktop app for macOS and Windows, Mobile apps, Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, Discord, RingCentral, and Slack huddles, In-person recording	Web, Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and Slack Huddles (beta), In-person capture
Compliance	SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA (positioned within the Enterprise tier)	SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA (BAA available on Enterprise)
Founded	2023	2021
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, United States	Remote-first; the operating company is StayIn, Inc., incorporated in the United States
Ownership	Venture-backed (Y Combinator)	Venture-backed, Y Combinator alumnus

Strengths and limitations

Circleback

Strengths

Note quality is the best-regarded in the category, polished enough to send to a client without editing, which is what most of the 500-plus testimonials on the site are actually about.
Action items are assigned and organized rather than merely listed, which is the prerequisite that makes the automation layer worth anything.
More than 1,000 integrations plus an API, webhooks, a CLI, and an MCP endpoint gives it more programmatic surface than any comparably sized vendor here.
Bot-free desktop capture works across Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Webex, Discord, and RingCentral, and bot-based joining is still available when you need to send it somewhere you are not.

Limitations

No free plan at all, and a 7-day trial is a short window to evaluate a tool whose value compounds with archive size.
The company is roughly ten people with $2.5M raised, which makes vendor risk a legitimate concern for anyone standardizing a whole organization on it.
No sales coaching layer: no call scoring, no playbook adherence, no rep analytics, so revenue teams will need a second tool.
HIPAA is positioned within Enterprise rather than the self-serve tiers, so the regulated-industry pitch requires a sales conversation after all.

Spinach AI

Strengths

The pay-per-meeting-hour tier with unlimited users and no seat minimum is unique here and is the right shape for a small team that records selectively.
The free Starter plan is company-wide rather than single-user, so a whole team can evaluate or even operate on it if seven-day retention is enough.
Ticket creation into Jira, Monday, Asana, Linear, ClickUp, and Trello is deeper than any other notetaker on this list, reflecting the product's agile origins.
Slack Huddles support, even in beta, covers a conversation surface almost nobody else in this category captures.

Limitations

The $19 Business tier carries a 50-seat minimum, which reads as a small-business plan and is not one. This is the most misleading thing in the pricing table.
At $2.90 per meeting hour, Pro becomes expensive quickly; a single heavy calendar can cost more than three seats of a flat-rate competitor.
Bot-based capture only, with a vendor-named participant visible in every call and no local silent path for client-facing work.
Free-plan recordings are deleted after seven days, and there is no cheap middle tier between that and hourly billing.

Pricing compared

Circleback

Per-seat subscription across three tiers with no free plan; a 7-day full-access free trial precedes payment. Displayed rates are annual-equivalent monthly.

Individual$20.83
Team$25
EnterpriseCustom

Circleback is priced like a premium tool and mostly earns it, but the absence of a free plan changes the calculus for early-stage teams. At about $21 a seat you get 100-plus languages, bot-free capture, and a full automation layer with API, webhooks, CLI, and MCP, which Fireflies charges $19 a seat for and Fathom gates behind a $25 Business tier. Where it loses is the floor: Fathom gives away unlimited recording and Granola charges $14 for unlimited history, so a cost-driven founder has cheaper options that are good enough. Buy Circleback when note quality and post-meeting automation are the point, not when you are shopping on price.

Spinach AI

Three self-serve structures in one table: a free company-wide plan, a pay-as-you-go tier billed at $2.90 per meeting hour with unlimited users and no seat minimum, and a per-seat Business tier with a 50-seat minimum. Enterprise is quoted.

Starter$0
Pro$2.90
Business$19
EnterpriseCustom

The hourly meter is the whole story and it cuts both ways. Someone in 20 meetings a week averaging 45 minutes consumes about 65 meeting hours a month, which at $2.90 an hour is roughly $190 a month for that one person's calendar. That is more than three seats of Granola Business, or nine seats of Krisp Core. Pro is therefore a bad deal for a busy calendar and an excellent one for a team with, say, six recorded hours a week: about $75 a month covering unlimited users, with advanced summaries, MCP connectors, CRM and Jira integration, and a year of retention. Because the meter counts meeting hours rather than people, a ten-person agency that only records client calls can cover everybody for less than the cost of two seats elsewhere. The free Starter plan is also unusually good for a whole company to sit on if seven-day retention is acceptable. Just do the multiplication before you sign up, because $2.90 an hour compounds fast.

Editorial verdict on each

Circleback

Momentum

Circleback is the connoisseur's pick in this category: the notes read better than anything else here, the action items are assigned rather than listed, and the automation surface, with 1,000-plus integrations plus API, webhooks, a CLI, and MCP, is deeper than companies twenty times its size ship. The two honest objections are the absence of a free plan, which puts it out of reach for a founder with no budget when Fathom and Granola exist, and the fact that ten people and $2.5M is a thin foundation for an organization-wide standard. Buy it if meetings generate real downstream admin you want automated away, if you work across languages, or if you need notes polished enough to forward to a client. If you just want decent notes for free, this is not the tool to argue yourself into.

Read the full Circleback profile

Spinach AI

Spinach is worth shortlisting for one of two reasons and dismissing for everything else. The first reason is agile ceremonies: nothing else on this list turns a standup into Jira, Linear, or Asana tickets as directly, and if your meetings are engineering rituals that should produce work items, that is a real advantage. The second is the pricing shape: a free company-wide plan and a $2.90 per meeting hour tier with unlimited users lets a small firm cover everybody for the price of a couple of seats elsewhere, provided you record selectively. Do the multiplication first, though, because a full calendar costs about $190 a month on that meter, and the $19 Business plan that looks like the sensible answer carries a 50-seat minimum that puts it out of reach. Add a visible bot in every call, Enterprise-gated API and SSO, and a company that has not announced funding since 2022, and Spinach becomes a good fit for a narrow set of teams rather than a general recommendation.

Read the full Spinach AI profile

Circleback profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Spinach AI last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.