I Tested an Otter AI Alternative Free in 2026 — Meetly Notes Delivered

A few weeks into January, I hit the ceiling on Otter's free plan during a week full of client calls. I don't need meeting notes every single day, but when I do need them, I need them fast — and I wasn't ready to pay for another subscription. So I went hunting for an otter ai alternative free in 2026 that could handle real meetings without rationing minutes. Meetly Notes showed up early in that search, so I put it through a real work week.

Testing Meetly on a live team call

I started with our weekly team sync, the kind of call that usually runs 35 minutes of project updates with several people talking over each other. Getting set up took about five minutes:

1. Create an account and generate the meeting bot link.
2. Add that link to the calendar invite like any other attendee.
3. Let the bot join at the start of the call.
4. Wait for the transcript and summary to appear after the meeting ends.

The transcript was ready within a couple of minutes of the call wrapping up. Faster than I expected, honestly. It wasn't flawless — it mangled a client's last name twice and couldn't figure out our internal project codename — but it held up well enough to reconstruct the whole conversation. For a free tool, the word-for-word output is respectable.

The meetly ai meeting summary is where things got more interesting. Instead of a wall of text, it grouped the discussion by topic and separated decisions from action items, with owners attached. I copied one of those lists straight into our project tracker without cleaning it up. It also caught a follow-up I'd genuinely forgotten to assign during the call — that small save alone made the tool feel worth keeping.

Testing Meetly on a recording and a one-on-one

A few days later I uploaded a recorded client interview. That worked, but not as smoothly. The upload took longer than I wanted, and the transcription quality dipped compared to when the bot joined live. Fine as a backup option, less ideal if you work mainly from pre-recorded files.

I also ran it on a quick one-on-one with a lot of interruptions. Meetly's speaker labels got crossed during the overlapping parts — though I've seen that happen with every transcription tool, so I don't hold it against this one specifically.

Is Meetly a real otter ai alternative free in 2026?

For live calls under an hour, yes, mostly. Meetly does what a good free meeting assistant should: it records the call, produces a readable transcript, and hands you a summary you can forward to someone who missed the meeting. If your main need is capturing team syncs and client check-ins without paying, it covers the same ground that made Otter useful in the first place.

The tradeoff is nuance. On one call, the AI merged two related but distinct decisions into a single action item. Fine for a general recap, but if you're using the notes for contract talks or technical deep-dives, skim the transcript rather than trusting the summary at face value.

One thing to check before committing: the free tier's limits aren't clearly documented on the site, and I couldn't get a straight answer about where the ceiling sits. That kept me cautious about calling it a full replacement. It's a solid tool, but I'd want a few more weeks of use — and a clearer pricing page — before canceling Otter entirely.

If you're still searching for an otter ai alternative free in 2026, Meetly is worth a trial run. It's genuinely useful as an ai meeting summary app free of charge, and it holds its own among the free ai meeting transcription and summary 2026 options I've tried. Just go in with realistic expectations: let it join your live calls, check the transcript when the details matter, and keep an eye on your usage as the weeks go on. It won't do your thinking for you, but it will reliably capture what was said.