Six tools, one honest table. We compare Fieldnotes against Granola, Otter.ai, Fathom, Fireflies, and Apple's built-in Voice Memos — by pricing model, where your audio lives, whether diarization works in person, and who each one is genuinely the best fit for.
| Feature | Fieldnotes | Granola | Otter.ai | Fathom | Fireflies.ai | Voice Memos |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | $14.99 once | $14–18 / user / mo | $16.99 / mo (Pro) | Free tier + $19 / mo | $18 / mo (Pro) | Free with macOS |
| 5-year cost (1 seat) | $14.99 | ~$840 | ~$1,020 | ~$1,140 | ~$1,080 | $0 |
| Where audio is processed | On your Mac | Their cloud | Their cloud | Their cloud | Their cloud | On your Mac |
| Which AI summarizes | The one you already pay for | Theirs | Theirs | Theirs | Theirs | Apple Intelligence |
| Real speaker diarization on Mac | Yes (Pyannote, on-device) | No — Me/Them labels only | Yes (cloud) | Yes (cloud) | Yes (cloud) | No |
| In-person meetings | Yes — with diarization | Yes, but diarization is iPhone-only | Yes (mobile app) | No — video calls only | No — video calls only | Yes, no diarization |
| Zoom / Meet / Teams calls | Yes (system audio capture) | Yes | Yes | Yes (joins as bot) | Yes (joins as bot) | Yes, mic only |
| Joins meetings as a visible bot | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| Works offline | Yes | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| Calendar-aware | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Team workspaces / shared search | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Export format | Plain markdown files | Their app + copy/paste | Their app + integrations | Their app + CRM sync | Their app + integrations | .m4a + transcript |
| Who owns the data | You (files on disk) | Their account | Their account | Their account | Their account | You |
| Platform | macOS 14+, Apple Silicon | macOS, iOS | Web, iOS, Android | Web bot | Web bot | macOS, iOS |
Prices are pulled from each vendor's public site as of May 2026 and may shift. "Real diarization" means separating speakers by voice; Me/Them labels track audio source (mic vs. speaker), not who's speaking.
Each of these is the right answer for someone. Here's the one-paragraph take, with the honest trade-off attached.
Best for: people who already pay for an AI subscription (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor) and take meetings — especially in-person — on a Mac. Records mic + system audio, runs Whisper and Pyannote locally on the Neural Engine, and writes speaker-attributed markdown to a folder you own.
Trade-offNo team workspaces, no built-in summarization (that happens in your agent), Mac-only.
Best for: small teams on Zoom that want polished, on-brand AI summaries with shared workspaces and templates, and don't mind a per-seat subscription or cloud processing.
Trade-offOn Mac, only the iPhone app does real speaker diarization — the desktop app falls back to Me/Them based on audio source. Cancel and you lose access to your meeting history.
Best for: people who need live captions and want their notes accessible across web, iOS, and Android, with deep Zoom / Meet / Teams integrations and AI chat over past meetings.
Trade-offCloud-based, the free tier is heavily metered, and speaker labels can drift in noisy rooms.
Best for: sales teams running back-to-back Zoom demos who want call recording, AI-generated summaries, and one-click CRM logging. The free tier is genuinely usable.
Trade-offJoins meetings as a visible bot (some attendees notice), video-call only — can't capture an in-person conversation, cloud-only.
Best for: ops or sales orgs that want every meeting automatically recorded across Zoom, Meet, Teams, and Webex and routed into a searchable team knowledge base with topic and sentiment tracking.
Trade-offJoins as a visible bot, cloud processing, the surface area is large enough to require some setup before it earns its keep.
Best for: occasional recordings — a single 1:1, a lecture, a voice note — where on-device transcription is enough and you don't need to know who said what. Already on your Mac.
Trade-offNo speaker diarization, no calendar awareness, no structured export. Workflow is fully manual.
We kept it to the six tools someone shopping for a Mac meeting-notes app is most likely to be choosing between. tl;dv is similar to Fathom and Fireflies (bot-based Zoom recorder). Cleft is a smaller indie Mac app with overlapping goals. Krisp focuses on noise suppression with notes bolted on. Happy to expand the list if there's a tool you'd specifically like compared — email hi@fieldnotes.fm.
They're pulled from each vendor's public pricing page as of May 2026. SaaS prices move — if something's drifted, check the vendor directly. The five-year totals assume one seat at the listed monthly rate without annual discounts; team pricing usually goes up, not down.
No. There are no affiliate links on this page. Every link points to the vendor's own site.
Yes. Fieldnotes writes plain markdown to a folder on your Mac — it doesn't intercept anything else. You could run it in parallel during evaluation, or keep a cloud tool for shared team notes while using Fieldnotes for sensitive 1:1s and in-person meetings.
Two: Fieldnotes (Whisper large-v3-turbo + Pyannote on the Apple Neural Engine) and Apple Voice Memos (Apple's own on-device transcription, Apple Silicon only). Granola, Otter, Fathom, and Fireflies all upload audio to their servers for transcription and summarization.
On Mac, Granola labels each line by which audio source it came from — your microphone ("Me") or your speakers ("Them"). That works for two-person Zoom calls but collapses every remote participant into "Them" and every in-person voice into whoever's mic picked it up. Real diarization separates voices by who's speaking, not by which stream the audio arrived on. Granola's iPhone app does real diarization; the Mac app, per their own docs, doesn't.
No — Fieldnotes is our product. We've tried to be specific and honest about where each competitor is stronger or weaker, and we recommend other tools by name when they're a better fit. If you spot something factually wrong, tell us and we'll fix it.
Pay once. Own it. Audio stays on your Mac, notes are plain markdown, and the AI you already pay for does the summarizing. 30-day refund if it's not for you.
