Best Free AI Meeting Summarizer Better Than Otter (I Tested Meetly)

I’ve been using Otter’s free tier for a while, mainly for one-on-one interviews. But the 300 minutes/month cap and the way it sometimes splits speakers incorrectly started to annoy me. That’s when I started looking for a best free ai meeting summarizer better than otter. After testing a few options, I kept coming back to meetly. It’s not a perfect replacement, but for what I needed—clean summaries and reliable action-item extraction without paying—it worked better in several ways.

What to look for in a free meeting summarizer (and how meetly stacks up)

Instead of a generic feature list, here’s what actually mattered when I compared meetly to Otter’s free plan. I ran three team calls and two client meetings through both tools.

• Summary quality over verbatim transcripts. Otter’s free version gives you full transcripts, but they’re often messy with filler words. Meetly’s summaries were cleaner from the start—it condensed a 45-minute planning call into four bullet points with actual decisions. I didn’t have to edit much.
• Action items that are easy to find. With Otter, I often had to scroll through a long transcript to find “follow up on budget.” Meetly placed action items in a separate section right after the summary. That saved me a few minutes per meeting, which adds up.
• Fewer limits on free usage. Otter’s 300-minute cap forced me to pick which meetings to record. Meetly’s free tier at the time of testing gave me 500 minutes and didn’t cut off after 30-minute recordings. That alone made it the best free ai meeting summary app 2026 candidate for my use case.
• Setup was simple but not instant. I connected meetly to my Google Calendar and it automatically joined my Zoom calls. One friction: I initially thought I needed to manually add the bot to every meeting, but after a quick support doc read, I realized the calendar integration handles it. Not a huge deal, but the first call I was confused.

Where meetly still feels like a work in progress

The action-item detection isn’t flawless. In a brainstorming session, meetly tagged “think about user personas” as an action item—technically a task, but vague. I had to manually clarify it. Otter doesn’t even try to extract action items on the free plan, so I’d still call meetly better, but it’s not perfect.

Another tradeoff: meetly’s integration list is shorter. If you rely on Microsoft Teams or Slack huddles, you might need to check compatibility. Otter supports more platforms, even on free. For me, Zoom and Google Meet covered 90% of my calls, so it was fine.

Should you switch?

If you’re on a tight budget and need more than what Otter’s free tier gives you, meetly is worth a try. It’s not a polished enterprise tool, but for the price (free), it delivers the best free ai meeting summary app experience I’ve found so far. The summaries are structured, the minutes cap is generous, and you don’t have to fight with the interface. Just be ready to double-check action items occasionally. That small tradeoff is acceptable when you’re not paying anything.