Meetly: Best Free AI Meeting Summarizer Better Than Otter

If you've used Otter.ai's free plan for any length of time, you've probably hit the wall – the 300 monthly transcription minutes vanish fast, especially when you're in back-to-back calls. I started looking for something that could do the same job without constantly reminding me to upgrade. That's when I spent a few weeks testing Meetly, partly because a teammate swore by it, partly because I wanted a best free AI meeting summarizer better than Otter that didn't feel like a trial.

What makes it a strong Otter alternative

I went in skeptical. Otter's free tier has name recognition and decent accuracy, but Meetly's free offering is genuinely different. Here's what stood out after running it through about a dozen internal and client calls:

• Completely free, no minute cap. This is the headline. Otter gives you 300 minutes a month on the free plan. Meetly's free tier doesn't have a per-month limit that I could find – I used it for roughly 10 hours of meetings in two weeks without hitting any warning. That alone makes it the best free AI meeting summary app 2026 could offer, assuming they keep this model.
• Summaries that actually strip out filler. Otter tends to give you a slightly cleaned-up transcript. Meetly generates a concise summary with bulleted key points, decisions, and follow-ups. One client call about a product roadmap produced a summary that saved me 15 minutes of note-taking. The action items were pulled correctly, too – not just "John said he'll do X" but a clean list with assignees.
• Transcript is still there if you need it. Unlike some summarizers that only show an AI rewrite, Meetly lets you toggle between the full transcript and the summary. I needed the raw transcript once to verify a disputed timeline, and it was accurate enough – maybe 95% on names, which is better than I expected for a free tool.

Where it falls short – and why that matters

Meetly isn't flawless, and I don't want to oversell it. The first meeting I processed had speaker labels slightly off – it merged two voices on a Zoom call when one person had a bad connection. Otter handles speaker separation a bit more consistently. Also, the integrations list is shorter: it works with Google Meet, Zoom, and Teams, but I missed the Zapier connector Otter has. For a team that automates heavily, that's a real tradeoff.

I'm also not sure how well it handles heavy accents or very long meetings (over 90 minutes). On a 75-minute brainstorming session, the summary started to feel repetitive – it seemed to lose track of the thread after the first hour. That said, for standard 30-60 minute team calls, it's solid.

Should you switch from Otter?

If you're on Otter's free plan and constantly fighting the minute limit, Meetly is the best free AI meeting summarizer better than Otter for that use case alone. The summary quality is close enough that you won't feel like you downgraded. If you need heavy integrations or perfect speaker detection, Otter's paid plan might still win. But for a free tool that actually works day-to-day without nagging you to upgrade, Meetly does the job.

I'd call it the frontrunner for best AI meeting notes app 2026 in the free category – assuming they keep the current pricing model and polish the speaker recognition a bit. If you're tired of rationing your meeting minutes, it's worth a test drive.