Fathom Free is generous — but the bot still joins, recordings live in Fathom's cloud, and the AI you actually want is behind Premium ($24/seat/mo). Quietly captures on your Mac with no third party in the call, writes plain Markdown to your folder, and is $49 once.
Plain .md. Front-matter has attendees, calendar, duration. Body is clean, LLM-polished Whisper output.
“Fathom has joined the meeting.” Every customer call, every candidate, every legal sync — Fathom's bot is in the room.
Recordings live in Fathom's cloud. One TOS change, one breach, one acquisition away from being a problem you have to explain.
Free tier is a funnel. AI summaries, CRM push, ask-AI — all behind Premium ($24/seat) and Team Edition.
Closed exports. Notes open in Fathom and Fathom-integrated tools. Cursor, Codex, Claude — all need workarounds.
| Quietly | Fathom | |
|---|---|---|
| No bot joins the call | Bot in every call | |
| Where recordings live | Your Mac, Markdown | Fathom's cloud |
| AI summaries | BYOK Chat · your model | Premium tier only |
| MCP for Claude / Cursor / Codex | Shipping next | |
| Works fully offline | ||
| Open in VS Code / any editor | ||
| In-person / hallway capture | Mic + Transcribe a file… | Meeting links only |
| Pricing | $49 once | Free / $24 seat / $32 team |
Honest tradeoffs. If these matter more, stick with Fathom.
Fathom Team Edition writes call notes directly into CRM records. Quietly's path is Markdown → your scripts → wherever.
Fathom's free tier is unusually generous. If you can live with the bot, the cloud, and the upsell — it costs nothing.
Fathom runs everywhere. Quietly is macOS-only today.
No “Fathom has joined the meeting.” Quietly captures system audio + mic locally — the other side of the call has no idea anything is being recorded by anyone but the platform itself.
Audio, transcript, summary — all on disk. Fathom uploads every recording to its cloud and runs AI server-side.
Fathom Premium = $24/seat/mo to unlock summaries, ask-AI, CRM. Quietly = $49 once, every feature included, no per-seat math.
Fathom's “ask AI” runs on Fathom's servers with Fathom's prompts. Quietly's built-in Chat answers with your own key — Anthropic or OpenAI — cited to the transcript; or point Claude / GPT / Cursor / Codex at the Markdown yourself.
Hallway chat, customer dinner, conference panel, voice memo. Open Quietly and hit ⌘R for the mic; pick Transcribe a file… for any audio file. Fathom needs a meeting link.
Plain .md in your repo, your iCloud folder, any folder you pick. Fathom exports as a courtesy; Quietly was never closed.
Export from Fathom. Account → Export. You get a folder of summaries, transcripts, action items.
Drop into your Quietly folder. iCloud, your repo, any folder — whichever folder you point Quietly at.
Done. Cursor, Codex CLI, and Claude Desktop see your back catalogue immediately. New recordings save next to old ones.
Need help with a Fathom Team Edition export? Email support@meetquietly.com.
Free 7-day trial · No account, no card. 7-day refund. $49 once, no subscription.