5 Best Fellow Alternatives in 2026
Fellow is an enterprise-grade AI meeting assistant. It records, transcribes, and summarizes meetings across Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, and Slack huddles, builds collaborative agendas and pre-meeting briefs, and surfaces decisions and action items. Its AskFellow agent lets you query past meetings and can draft follow-up emails and push CRM updates. It’s SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR compliant — clearly built for regulated, security-conscious organizations.
That enterprise focus is also the reason people look elsewhere. Fellow can be more tooling than a small team needs, and like most notetakers it stops at producing the notes — the follow-up work still lands back on you. If you want something lighter, or something that actually executes the action items, here are five alternatives.
1. Carly
Most meeting tools end when the recap is generated. Carly is an AI executive assistant that records and summarizes the meeting and then does the follow-ups — it drafts the emails, schedules the next meeting, updates your contacts and CRM, and creates the tasks. You reach it over email and text, so the action items move without you reopening a meeting app.
What makes it different from Fellow: Fellow captures the meeting and hands you the action items. Carly captures the meeting and then acts on those action items across your inbox, calendar, and CRM. It works on Outlook and Gmail, sends you daily briefings, and handles scheduling — including a free group-availability grid — so the work that comes out of a meeting actually gets done.
Best for: People who want the meeting notes and the resulting work handled, not just a transcript.
Pricing: Starts at $35/month
2. Otter.ai
One of the best-known transcription tools — live transcripts, speaker labels, AI summaries, and an in-meeting chat assistant. Strong real-time captioning and a generous free tier.
What makes it different from Fellow: Otter is transcription-first and lighter on the agenda and team-workflow side that Fellow emphasizes. Great if you mainly want accurate transcripts and summaries. See Otter.ai alternatives.
Best for: People who want strong live transcription and summaries.
Pricing: Free tier; paid plans available
3. Granola
A Mac notetaker that records the meeting locally without sending a bot into the call, then merges your own typed notes with an AI transcript into a clean recap. Minimalist and well-loved by founders.
What makes it different from Fellow: Granola is deliberately simple and botless, focused on the personal notes experience rather than enterprise agendas, permissions, and compliance. See Granola alternatives.
Best for: Individuals who want quiet, botless meeting notes on a Mac.
Pricing: Free tier; paid plans available
4. Fathom
A free-friendly AI notetaker that joins your calls, records, transcribes, and produces summaries and action items, with quick highlight clipping and CRM sync on paid tiers. Known for a genuinely useful free plan.
What makes it different from Fellow: Fathom is consumer-friendly and fast to adopt, without Fellow’s heavier agenda and enterprise-governance layer. See how it stacks up in Fathom vs Otter.
Best for: Individuals and small teams who want a strong free notetaker.
Pricing: Free tier; paid plans available
5. Fireflies
A notetaker bot that joins meetings across platforms, transcribes and summarizes, and offers an AI assistant to search across all your past calls, plus integrations into CRMs and other tools. Built to scale across a team’s meeting history.
What makes it different from Fellow: Fireflies centers on a searchable archive of every meeting and broad integrations, with less emphasis on Fellow’s collaborative agendas and compliance posture.
Best for: Teams that want a searchable, integrated library of all their calls.
Pricing: Free tier; paid plans available
How to choose
If you mainly want accurate transcripts, Otter or Fathom are the easiest starting points. For quiet botless notes on a Mac, Granola. For a searchable team meeting archive, Fireflies. Fellow itself is the pick if you specifically need enterprise agendas plus compliance. But if the real goal is “the things we agreed to in the meeting actually get done,” a notetaker alone won’t close that loop — Carly records the meeting and then executes the follow-ups over email and text.
FAQ
Does Fellow do more than take notes? Yes — its AskFellow agent can draft follow-up emails and push CRM updates. Carly goes further by also scheduling, creating tasks, and acting across your inbox and calendar over email and text.
Which Fellow alternative is best for a small team on a budget? Fathom and Otter both have strong free tiers. Granola is the minimalist Mac option.
Do these work with Outlook and Gmail? Carly works with both Outlook and Gmail. The notetakers mostly attach to your meeting platform (Zoom, Meet, Teams) rather than your email client.
More on meetings: Otter.ai alternatives · Granola alternatives · Fathom vs Otter
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"Before Carly, I relied on a Calendly link, but the whole process felt impersonal and not very professional. Carly changed that by handling all the back-and-forth, so I'm no longer stuck in endless email threads trying to line up schedules.
Now Carly reaches out to candidates, shares my real-time availability, lets them pick a slot, then sends a Zoom link and drops it straight into my calendar. She sends reminders to both of us before each call, which has significantly reduced no-shows and last-minute confusion.
On top of scheduling, Carly acts like a full executive assistant, sending me my schedule the night before so I can prepare for each call. It reminds me of the old x.ai assistant, but Carly is noticeably smarter, faster, and better suited to my healthcare recruitment business."
