Fathom 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 assessmentSpinach AI compared with Fathom
Fathom's free tier gives unlimited recording and summaries for one user, where Spinach's free tier is company-wide but deletes recordings after seven days. Fathom is stronger for individuals and sales use; Spinach is stronger for spreading a free plan across a whole team and for creating tickets in engineering tools.
Choose Fathom if
Startups and small GTM teams that want a competent notetaker with zero budget on day one and a credible upgrade path to call coaching and CRM sync as the sales team grows past a couple of reps.
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 | Fathom | Spinach AI |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Meeting Notes | Meeting Notes |
| Starting price | $0 (Free plan, unlimited recording and transcription) (free plan available) | $0 (Starter), then $2.90 per meeting hour (Pro) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Freemium, with individual plans and separate per-seat team plans (minimum two users); annual billing discounts run 20 to 26 percent depending on tier. | 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 | Unlimited recordings and transcriptions, bot or bot-free capture, instant AI summaries, clips, playlists, and search, with no monthly minute cap. | 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 | Free trial available on paid plans, plus a 90 day guarantee advertised across tiers | No fixed-length trial; the free Starter plan is company-wide and serves as the evaluation |
| Best for | Startups and small GTM teams that want a competent notetaker with zero budget on day one and a credible upgrade path to call coaching and CRM sync as the sales team grows past a couple of reps. | 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 | Under ten minutes. Sign up, connect Google Calendar or Microsoft 365, install the desktop app if you want bot-free capture, and the next meeting on your calendar is covered. | 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 | Minimal for individual use. The Business features (CRM field mapping, scorecard rubrics, custom summary templates) need someone to think about the sales process for a few hours, but nothing here requires a specialist. | 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, macOS and Windows desktop apps, iOS app, Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, Public API, MCP server | Web, Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and Slack Huddles (beta), In-person capture |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR, Passed Zoom's vendor security review | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA (BAA available on Enterprise) |
| Founded | 2020 | 2021 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States | Remote-first; the operating company is StayIn, Inc., incorporated in the United States |
| Ownership | Venture-backed | Venture-backed, Y Combinator alumnus |
Strengths and limitations
Fathom
Strengths
- The free plan is genuinely unlimited on recording and transcription, which removes the usual notetaker adoption barrier entirely for early-stage teams.
- Three capture modes including two bot-free options, with speaker attribution preserved, gives real flexibility for client-facing work where a visible bot is a problem.
- Ask Fathom returns citations that link back to specific transcript moments, so answers are checkable rather than plausible-sounding summaries you have to trust.
- Team pricing at $15 to $19 per seat undercuts the individual Premium plan, an unusual structure that makes small-team adoption cheap.
Limitations
- 38 transcript languages is materially narrower than Fireflies or Circleback, both of which advertise 100-plus, so multilingual teams should verify their languages first.
- The features that make Fathom useful to a sales org (CRM field sync, Deal View, scorecards) all live on the Business tier, so the cheap reputation stops applying the moment you buy it for revenue reasons.
- Conversation intelligence depth is mid-tier: it will tell you talk-time ratios and score calls against a rubric, but it does not do pipeline-wide forecasting or deal-risk modelling.
- No published data residency options outside the US, which is a blocker for some EU buyers regardless of GDPR compliance statements.
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
Fathom
Freemium, with individual plans and separate per-seat team plans (minimum two users); annual billing discounts run 20 to 26 percent depending on tier.
- Free$0
- Premium$20
- Team$19
- Business$34
- EnterpriseCustom
Nobody in this category matches Fathom's price-to-capability ratio at the bottom. Unlimited recording and transcription for zero dollars means the burden of proof is on every competitor charging for the same thing, and a two-person startup on the Team plan gets shared search and playlists for $30 a month. The economics get ordinary at the top: Business at $25 to $34 per seat is priced against real conversation intelligence tools, and the coaching and deal features, while decent, are lighter than a dedicated revenue intelligence platform. Buy Fathom for the free and Team tiers with clear eyes; evaluate Business on its merits rather than on brand loyalty earned downstream.
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
Fathom
Best ValueFathom won the bottom of this market by refusing to charge for the thing everyone else charges for, and the strategy still holds: unlimited free recording and transcription, two credible bot-free capture modes, and a Team tier that costs less per seat than the individual plan. For a startup choosing a notetaker this week, it is the default recommendation and the burden falls on rivals to justify their price. The picture is less commanding higher up: 38 languages is thin, the Business tier is priced against tools with deeper revenue intelligence, and there is no data residency story for EU buyers who need one. Start free, upgrade to Team when there are two of you, and evaluate Business on evidence rather than habit.
Read the full Fathom profileSpinach 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 profileFathom 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.