Fathom vs Tactiq: pricing, features and which to choose

Fathom is a meeting-intelligence service founded in 2020 and led by Richard White. TechCrunch reported a $4.7 million seed round in 2022 and a $17 million Series A in 2024, led by Telescope Partners, including more than $2 million raised from users through Wefunder. In September 2026, Superhuman acquired Fathom, which remains an active meeting-notetaker product under changed ownership. Fathom said its product was used at more than 300,000 companies; TechCrunch reported more than 400,000 monthly active users and over one million people who had recorded meetings. It records conversations, creates transcripts and summaries, and converts discussion into searchable follow-up for individuals and teams.

The workflow begins by connecting Fathom to a calendar and supported meeting service. A call can be captured by its meeting bot or, on supported Mac desktop workflows, through bot-free capture. Afterward, Fathom produces a transcript, summary, action items, clips, and follow-up material. Users can search attendees and keywords, ask questions about a call, and organize highlights in playlists. Team features add shared search, comments, folders, keyword alerts, and account-wide meeting discovery. Integrations include HubSpot, Salesforce, Close, Slack, Notion, Asana, Zapier, ChatGPT, and Claude. Automatic CRM updates make Fathom especially useful when conversation notes must become records, tasks, or follow-up. The tradeoff is that setup and permissions matter, and recording consent remains the customer’s responsibility.

Fathom’s main limitations are that its richest team, coaching, CRM, and retention controls sit above the free product, while bot-free capture is identified as a beta Mac feature. Fireflies.ai offers broader capture options, including mobile, desktop, dialers, uploads, and 100-plus languages. Otter.ai is a familiar choice for live transcription and collaboration, Granola is a closer bot-free competitor, and Read AI emphasizes meeting analytics. Avoma is another alternative for meeting-centered business workflows. Fathom is the better pick for individuals and sales, customer-success, or project teams that value a generous free tier, polished summaries, searchable clips, and CRM follow-through. Choose competitors when dialer coverage, wider language support, or bot-free capture across more platforms matters more.

Tactiq is an Australian company that built its meeting assistant as a browser extension rather than a recording bot. When a Google Meet, Zoom or Microsoft Teams call starts in the browser, Tactiq captures the live captions and speech as text, with speaker names, without adding a visible participant to the call. Tactiq says it does not store audio, only text transcripts, which appeals to teams uncomfortable with bots recording meetings. It says it is used by more than 10,000 companies and over 1 million people. The extension works in Chrome and Edge, and Google Companion Mode support lets users transcribe from a second device in the room.

During a call, the Tactiq side panel shows the live transcript, and users can highlight key lines, add notes, take screenshots and ask questions about the meeting so far. After the call, the full transcript is saved to the Tactiq dashboard with search, tags, folders and sharing, and can be exported to Google Docs, Notion, Confluence or other tools. Tactiq supports more than 60 languages. Users can also upload recordings or transcripts from other sources. Team and higher plans auto-share transcripts with colleagues, and a Daily Digest summarizes recent meetings. Admins can pause automatic transcription or turn off the in-meeting notification on paid plans.

Tactiq's main advantages are bot-free capture and a low entry price. Its limits are that it works only for browser-based meetings, offers no audio or video recording to replay, and relies on meeting captions, so accuracy can trail tools that process audio directly. Otter and Fireflies join calls as bots and record audio and video with deeper search and analytics. Fathom offers a generous free recorder for Zoom, Meet and Teams, tl;dv records and clips video, and Granola transcribes from the device without a bot. Choose Tactiq if you want transcripts and AI notes from browser meetings without a bot announcing itself.