Free AI Meeting Transcription in 2026: Meetly vs Otter vs Fireflies

I’ve been digging into the free meeting transcription space lately — mostly because I’m tired of manually typing up notes after every project call. For 2026, there are more free options than ever, so I tested a handful to see which one actually saves time without the upsell. Here’s how **meetly** stacks up against two common alternatives: Otter.ai (free tier) and Fireflies.ai (free plan).

Transcription accuracy: closer than I expected

Otter’s free tier gives you 300 monthly minutes, which isn’t bad. But I noticed it sometimes drops speaker labels during longer meetings, especially with multiple overlapping speakers. Fireflies handles speaker detection better, but its free version limits you to 800 minutes total (not monthly) which runs out fast.

Meetly’s transcription was surprisingly clean — speaker attribution stayed stable through a 45-minute call with four participants. It caught mid-sentence corrections more reliably than Otter. Minor friction: there was a noticeable delay of about 5 seconds before the live transcript appeared. Not a dealbreaker, but if you follow along in real-time, it might feel sluggish.

Summary quality: different strengths

I ran the same recorded meeting through all three. Fireflies produced a neat bullet list but sometimes merged different speakers’ points into a single action item, which was confusing. Otter’s AI summary felt generic — it listed “key topics” but skipped specific owner assignments.

Meetly’s summaries are clearly designed around action items and follow-ups. It picked up “Alex will draft the Q3 report by Friday” and formatted it as a clear owner + deadline. That’s genuinely useful. But I noticed it also occasionally hallucinated a task that was mentioned casually (“maybe we should revisit pricing by next month”) and turned it into an action item. So you still need to glance at the transcript to verify.

For a completely free tool, this is a worthwhile tradeoff. You get near‑useful summaries, but you can’t fully trust them without a quick sanity check — same as any AI meeting note app.

Setup and integrations: meetly wins on simplicity

I installed the **meetly** Chrome extension and connected it to Google Calendar. It automatically joined my Zoom calls (no extra bots). Otter requires you to add its virtual assistant to the invite, which is an extra step. Fireflies needs a dedicated email invite or calendar forwarding.

One thing I wish **meetly** had: better in‑app search. If you have 30+ saved meetings, filtering by speaker or date takes a few clicks. Otter lets you search full transcripts instantly. Fireflies has the deepest search. So if historical lookup matters a lot, **meetly** might feel a touch underpowered.

Which free AI meeting transcription and summary tool should you use in 2026?

If you just need a solid **free ai meeting transcription and summary app** without the upselling noise, **meetly** is my current recommendation. It gives you enough minutes for a small team’s weekly calls, produces cleaner action items than the competition, and the integration effort is minimal.

If your meetings are heavily technical with unusual jargon or you rely on real‑time collaborative editing, stick with Otter. If full-text search across months of meetings is critical, Fireflies free tier might still be worth the shorter quota. For everyone else trying to move faster on meeting follow‑ups? Start with meetly.