1. How does it get into the meeting?
A participant bot, a desktop recorder, or capture from your own browser tab. This single choice decides more than any feature list: whether it works on your Workspace plan, whether IT will allow it, whether it can record an in-person conversation, and whether Microsoft’s 2026 Teams restrictions apply to it.
Bot-based tools are visible, which is good for consent and awkward in some client meetings. Desktop recorders are invisible, which is convenient and puts the whole disclosure burden on you.
2. Does the transcript arrive during the call or after it?
Live transcription is the most visible dividing line in a demo. Most established tools stream a transcript as the meeting happens; some, including us today, produce everything after the call ends. If you want in-call assistance of any kind, after-the-fact is a hard no.
3. What happens to the action items?
This is the question that separates products rather than features. Every tool extracts a list of tasks. Almost all of them stop there, and the list is copied by hand into whatever actually tracks work, which means the value of the tool depends on somebody doing that reliably, forever.
Ask what happens on the day the commitment was due. If the answer is "it’s in the summary", you are buying a document.
4. Where is the audio processed?
Not where the servers are. Ask where the speech-to-text and the summarisation actually run. For most products in this category the answer is the United States regardless of the marketing page, because that is where the speech engines are. If your data cannot leave the EU, this eliminates most of the market and leaves you with self-hosting.
5. What is the retention policy, and is it implemented?
These are two questions. A privacy page can promise a retention window that the product does not enforce. Ask to see the setting.
6. Which integrations exist, and which are on a roadmap?
For a revenue team the honest purchase reason is usually "the notes end up in the CRM". Otter and Fireflies both do that today and have done for years. If that is the requirement, that is the shortlist, and the newer entrants, us included, are not on it yet.
7. Can you get your data out?
Transcripts, summaries and recordings, in a format that is useful without the product. A tool holding two years of meeting history with no export is a tool you cannot leave.
8. What does the free plan actually let you do?
Free tiers in this category vary more than the paid ones. Some cap minutes per month, some cap total stored minutes, some give unlimited recording and cap the AI summaries. Vendor-published limits as of July 2026 are roughly: Otter around 300 minutes a month; Fireflies limited by total stored minutes; Fathom unlimited recording with a small number of AI summaries; Granola free with limited history. Check them yourself before you decide, because they move.
What not to compare
Word accuracy. The serious tools use one of a handful of speech engines, several of them the same one, so a benchmark comparison is measuring the vendor’s choice of supplier rather than anything they built. Every credible product is in the mid-90s on clean English audio and degrades the same way on crosstalk.
We build one of these, so treat this list as informed rather than neutral. It is written the way it is because the questions above are the ones we lose on when we lose, and we would rather you find that out on a comparison page than in week three.