Teams AI Note-Taking Bots: Fathom, Otter, Fireflies and Microsoft 365 Admin Controls

TechRepublic makes clear it did not rank transcription accuracy, because the six products have never been tested under one comparable independent benchmark. It compared pricing, free-plan limits, capture methods, platform support, integrations and admin controls instead. Treat its "best for" labels as editorial opinion, not measured results. This article checks those claims against each vendor's pricing page, points out where the details differ, and explains how the recent Teams bot controls affect a deployment.

The six contenders at a glance​

TechRepublic gives each tool a use-case label. The prices below are the annual-billing figures shown on the vendors' pricing pages when this article was checked. They change often, so confirm them before you buy.

Key point: the word "free" means something different for each vendor. It might mean unlimited use with a storage limit, a monthly minute allowance, a lifetime quota, or a short history window. Those limits decide whether a pilot tells you anything.

Tool by tool: the fine print​

Fathom​

Fathom's free plan is generous: unlimited recordings and transcription, instant summaries, clips, playlists and search. Its feature grid, though, marks items such as advanced summaries and AI action items as "limited use" or paid-only. Annual pricing is $16 for individual Premium, $15 per user for Team and $25 for Business. Monthly billing is $20, $19 and $34, so the annual discount is large. Enterprise pricing comes from sales and adds SSO, Okta SCIM provisioning, custom retention and a signed HIPAA BAA. The pricing page also lists Claude and ChatGPT integrations and a public API with MCP support. The bot-free capture option is Mac-only and still in beta, so Windows users should expect Fathom to join as a bot for now.

Fireflies.ai​

Fireflies' "unlimited transcription" on the free plan comes with a limit. The 400 minutes of storage is shared by the whole team and is a total, not a monthly allowance. The pricing table also shows a recording cap: two hours per meeting on Free and Pro, rising on higher tiers. Pro costs $10 per seat and Business $19. Enterprise is $39 per seat, annual only, and adds SSO, SCIM, audit logs through the API, HIPAA, private storage, custom retention and a "transcript + summary only" mode that should interest records managers. The Chrome extension can record without the Fireflies bot joining the call.

Otter.ai​

There is a discrepancy here. TechRepublic lists Otter Business at $19.99 per user per month and says the 6,000-minute figure now applies only to imported files. Otter's own plan summary shows Business at $20 per month billed annually and simply says "Includes 6000 monthly minutes," alongside three concurrent meetings and up to 25 team members. Check the current Business terms with Otter before you sign. The free Basic tier stores only your 25 most recent meetings and allows three file uploads for the life of the account. Pro lifts the limits to 1,200 minutes a month and unlimited stored meetings.

Granola​

Granola does not send a bot. It captures audio from your own device, and its pricing page says the audio is deleted after transcription on every plan. Free history is limited to 30 days. Two details matter for Microsoft shops:

• HIPAA-compliant workspaces, SSO, SCIM and an audit API are Enterprise-only ($35/user). TechRepublic's summary cites HIPAA programs in Granola's Trust Center, but on the pricing page HIPAA workspaces appear only in the top tier.
• Enterprise also lists MDM/Intune app wrapping for iOS, plus an organization-wide notification, which admins can enforce, telling participants that Granola is in use.

Fellow​

Fellow is built around the meeting itself: agendas, action items, recurring meetings. The AI notes are one part of that. The free lifetime quota of five notes and five recordings is enough to try it out, not to run a team on. The pricing page also sets seat caps: 5 users on Free, 20 on Team and 50 on Business, with Enterprise unlimited. Monthly billing costs more: Team is $11 instead of $7, and Business is $23 instead of $15. Enterprise starts at $25 per user with a 10-user minimum and adds transcript redaction and advanced recording permissions.

Notta​

With a three-minute cap per conversation, Notta's free tier is a demo, not a meeting tool. Pro is one seat at $97.99 a year. The translation features that earn TechRepublic's "bilingual" label come with limits. Paid plans include a few free uses each month (four bilingual sessions and two monolingual real-time translations). After that you need add-ons: bilingual transcription and translation costs $9 a month billed annually. Notta lists Outlook Calendar, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams among its integrations. Its FAQ warns that if you downgrade to Free you can see only the first three minutes of old transcripts, so export them before you cancel.

Key point: HIPAA coverage, SSO and SCIM usually sit in the top tier. Budget for the plan you will actually need to deploy, not the one in the advertising.

The Teams factor: your admin may already have decided​

This is the part a shopping list leaves out. Microsoft has been tightening control over third-party bots in Teams meetings, and that affects four of these six tools directly.

Admins control external bots through the Teams Admin Center or with the Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy PowerShell cmdlet, using the ExternalBotAccessMode attribute. There are three values to choose from. AllowAllBots lets bots in without detection. RequireApprovalWhenDetected sends them to the lobby for approval and stays the default. BlockDetectedBots turns them away at the door. UC Today reports that Microsoft 365 roadmap ID 566201 covers the automatic block, with rollout starting August 2026.

The limits of that policy matter as much as what it does:

• This control targets third-party external bots only. It does not block Microsoft 365 Copilot. It also excludes bots registered as Entra ID applications inside the customer tenant.
• Policies can be scoped per user group as well. Legal, finance, HR, and executive teams can sit behind a hard block while everyone else stays on approval.
• Microsoft practises what it preaches. Tony Redmond of Office 365 IT Pros notes that some tenants (including Microsoft) have policies to instruct employees not to admit third-party bots to Teams meetings.

For buyers, the effect is simple. Under the default setting, bots from Fathom, Fireflies, Otter, Fellow and Notta may wait in the lobby until an organizer admits them. Under BlockDetectedBots they may not get in at all. This is our reading of the capture methods, not something Microsoft has stated: device-audio tools like Granola, and the bot-free modes some vendors offer, never join the call as a participant, so a bot policy has nothing to block. That is a technical fact, not permission. Recording a meeting from someone's laptop still raises the same consent, retention and data-residency questions Microsoft's policy is meant to address.

There is also a quieter identity issue. Practical365 found that AI notetaking apps use a mixture of the Teams bot framework and an Entra ID enterprise app. For example, if a user attempts to install the Otter.ai app, the installation process makes a request to create a service principal for the Otter enterprise app in the user's tenant. If users can consent to apps themselves, these tools may already be connected to your tenant's calendars without IT knowing.

Key point: in a Teams environment, pick a tool whose capture method fits the bot policy your tenant runs today. Switching policies later means changing your workflows too.

A practical evaluation checklist for Windows and M365 shops​

1. Check your tenant's ExternalBotAccessMode first. If it's set to block, bot-based tools won't work unless you create exceptions, so shortlist accordingly.
2. Audit Entra ID enterprise apps. Look for existing service principals from note-taking vendors and review your user-consent settings.
3. Confirm the platform you run on. Fathom's bot-free mode is Mac-only in beta. Make sure desktop capture is supported on Windows for any tool you rely on for bot-free recording.
4. Pilot on a paid trial, not the free tier. Notta's 3-minute cap, Otter's 30-minute cap and Fellow's lifetime quota will spoil any realistic test.
5. Map compliance needs to tiers. SSO, SCIM, audit logs, HIPAA and custom retention are Enterprise features at most of these vendors.
6. Plan your exit. Check export options and what happens to your data after a downgrade before the transcripts pile up.
7. Weigh the in-house option. Tenants already licensed for Microsoft 365 Copilot get meeting recaps that stay inside the tenant's governance boundary and aren't affected by the external-bot block.

The verdict​

TechRepublic's shortlist is reasonable, and it's honest that its rankings aren't based on accuracy testing. For Windows and Microsoft 365 organizations, though, the deciding factor is usually admin policy rather than features. Every tool here works with Teams. What differs is how each one joins the meeting, and whether your Teams policy will let it.

If you're choosing for yourself, the free tiers of Fathom and Fireflies give you the most room to experiment, as long as you watch Fireflies' total storage limit. If you're choosing for a whole organization, first sort out the bot policy, consent settings and top-tier compliance costs, then compare features.