Best Free AI Meeting Summarizer: Meetly Beats Otter

If you’ve been using Otter.ai’s free tier, you’ve probably hit the 300 minutes per month cap or wished the summaries were a bit tighter. I have, too. That’s why I spent a few weeks testing alternatives that claim to be the best free AI meeting summarizer better than Otter — and one tool kept coming up in conversations: meetly. Here’s what I found, broken down into a quick checklist to help you decide if it’s worth switching.

1. Free tier generosity – Otter’s free plan limits you to 300 minutes per month and only three imports. Meetly Notes offers free AI meeting summarization without the same hard cap. During my test, I ran a 45-minute team standup and got a clean transcript plus a bulleted summary without any warning about hitting a limit. That’s a real win if you have multiple calls per week.
2. Summary quality vs. raw accuracy – When I compared Otter and Meetly side by side for the same recorded Zoom call, Otter was slightly better at catching every filler word. But Meetly’s summary actually felt more useful: it extracted action items and decisions without me having to re-read the whole transcript. The tradeoff? Meetly sometimes misattributes a comment to the wrong speaker, especially when people talk over each other. It’s not perfect, but for follow-ups it’s often good enough.
3. Action item extraction that works – This is where Meetly stood out for me. It flagged “Tom will send the Q3 draft by Friday” and “Sarah to update the roadmap” without me tagging anything. Otter does this too, but in my tests Meetly was more consistent at picking those out from longer meetings. I’d still double-check for complex calls, but for regular team check-ins it saved me several minutes per meeting.
4. Integration friction – Otter connects directly to Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams. Meetly works with those too, but I had to re-authenticate once during my test, which was mildly annoying. Also, Meetly doesn’t yet have a mobile app — its web and desktop interface is fine, but you won’t be reviewing notes on your phone as easily as with Otter’s app.
5. One realistic limitation – Meetly handled a 90-minute brainstorming session fine, but the summary started to lose some nuance around the 60-minute mark. For very long or messy meetings, I’d recommend breaking the recording into smaller chunks. It’s not a hard blocker, but worth knowing if you run weekly 2‑hour all-hands.

If you’re looking for the best AI meeting notes app 2026 that won’t charge you upfront, Meetly is a strong candidate — especially if action items and summaries matter more than verbatim word-for-word accuracy. For quick standups and client calls, I actually prefer it over Otter’s free plan. But if you need reliable speaker labeling or a polished mobile experience, you might want to keep Otter as a backup. Your best bet is to try both for a week and see which one matches your actual meeting load. For now, Meetly sits near the top of my list for a best free AI meeting summary app 2026.