Earkeep
The Avoma alternative for one person, not a sales team
Last updated: · Reviewed quarterly
Avoma is a revenue-intelligence platform: a bot joins from the calendar invite, the cloud transcribes and scores the call, and the notes land in Salesforce. Earkeep records your whole working day on your own device, and you mark the meetings afterwards. Both transcribe conversations. Almost nothing else is shared.
14-day full trial, no account required.
- No bot on the invite, no bot in the room
- Audio processed on your device, never uploaded
- €39 once, not $19 to $77 per seat per month
The short answer
These two tools are built for different people, and that is the answer. Avoma is bought by a VP of Sales or a RevOps lead for a team of reps, and what they are buying is call scoring, coaching, CRM hygiene and a forecast; its rivals are Gong, Chorus and Clari. Earkeep is bought by one person for their own device, and what they are buying is a complete record of their own day, transcribed locally into plain files. If you need Salesforce write-back and a scorecard, Earkeep is not a smaller Avoma, and you should stay where you are.
Why people look for an Avoma alternative
Nothing to invite, nothing on the calendar
Avoma's record starts when its Notetaker bot dials into a link it read out of a calendar invite, or when a call comes through a connected dialer. A conversation nobody scheduled, a huddle at someone's desk, a call that began before the invite: no bot, no record. For in-person meetings Avoma's own help centre is candid that this is a workaround, and warns that with a single microphone it "will identify the host as the speaker for the entire meeting".
Earkeep has no invite to miss. It listens to your microphone and your system audio from the moment it is running, and you (or your calendar) mark which stretch of the day was the meeting once it is over. One Capterra reviewer calls Avoma "a fundamental tool across our organization to keep us true to the customer voice", which describes it exactly: a team outcome, produced from scheduled customer calls. If the conversations you lose are the unscheduled ones, none of that machinery reaches them.
Transcribed on your device, not on servers in another country
Avoma is cloud end to end. Recording, transcription and summarisation all happen on its AWS infrastructure in the USA, with no published EU region, and the recording stays there and replayable, with custom retention only on Enterprise. The posture around it is well documented for a company that size: SOC 2 Type II, ISO/IEC 42001, signed DPAs and HIPAA on Enterprise.
A G2 reviewer puts the value of that architecture fairly: "automatic transcription and AI-generated summaries save me a huge amount of time". Server-side processing is what makes real-time transcription, instant summaries and a replayable recording possible at all, and Earkeep gives up all three. In exchange, audio is transcribed in memory by Whisper or Parakeet on your own machine and never written to disk or sent anywhere.
A record that outlives the subscription
Avoma's pricing is anchored against Gong, and reviewers repeat the point back: "cheaper than both Gong and ChorusAI" (Ryan O., Customer Success Manager, Capterra). That tells you whose budget this is, and the record belongs to the same account: your meetings are rows in Avoma's database reached through its API, and when the 14-day trial ends without a purchase the account drops to a Viewer role that reads old recordings and records nothing new.
Earkeep writes one .jsonl file per day into a folder you pick, with meetings marked inline. grep reads it, your editor reads it, and it will still open in ten years with no app running. Ten ACP agents run in-app against the meeting you are looking at, and a read-only MCP server exposes two tools over those files.
Side by side
| Capability | Earkeep | Avoma |
|---|---|---|
| Always-on capture | No start/stop | Calendar or dialer triggers it |
| Bot-free | No bot ever joins | Its Notetaker bot is the architecture |
| Records a meeting you can't attend | Only what your device hears | The bot goes without you |
| Captures in-person meetings | Any app, in person too | Mobile recording, a workaround in its own docs |
| Audio processed on your device | Never leaves the computer | AWS in the USA, no EU region |
| Keeps a recording you can replay | Audio is never written to disk | Stored and replayable |
| Retroactive spans | Define the meeting afterward | A meeting is whatever the invite said |
| AI summary when it ends | No, but an agent you connect writes them from the transcript | Templated notes in about two minutes |
| Labels who said what | Not yet | Speaker-identified transcript |
| Logs to your CRM | No CRM integration at all | Salesforce, HubSpot and four more |
| Call scoring, coaching and forecasting | Nothing of the kind | Scorecards, trackers and forecasts, on add-ons |
| Share with people who weren't there | No, but your agent files the notes where your team already reads | Shared workspace, playlists, comments |
| Team roles, SSO and HIPAA | One device, one licence, no admin | Roles on every plan; SSO and HIPAA on Enterprise |
| Mobile app | Desktop only | iOS and Android |
| Your own agents can read it | ACP agents plus MCP, over local files | Four read tools, but over Avoma's cloud, and API access starts on Organization |
| A record that outlives the subscription | Plain .jsonl on your disk | Viewer role once the plan lapses |
| One-time purchase | €39, one device | Per seat, per month |
| Pricing | €39 one time, one device | $19-39/seat/month annually, plus add-ons |
| Platform | macOS 13+ | Web app, mobile, Chrome extension |
Built inNo, but an agent you connect canPartlyNot available
What each one costs by year five
Switching takes an afternoon
- Check first whether the CRM sync is what you are paying for. If your reps' calls have to land in Salesforce with MEDDIC fields populated, or your managers review calls against a scorecard, do not switch: Earkeep has no answer to either and is not trying to build one. That disqualifies most of Avoma's actual buyers, and it belongs first.
- Install it, then let a day run. Earkeep starts listening as soon as it is running, so a first day of real meetings, online and in person, is captured before you have configured anything. There is no import tool and nothing migrates: your Avoma recordings, notes and CRM history stay in Avoma.
- Mark yesterday, or connect a calendar. Drag a span across the timeline where a meeting was, or point Earkeep at Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook or any ICS URL and let every event title its own span. Avoma's entry seat is $19 a month billed annually, $48 with the conversation intelligence it is known for: several times Earkeep's one-off €39 in the first year alone. Keep the Avoma account as long as you need the old recordings, because Earkeep cannot bring them across.
Which one fits you
Choose Earkeep if
You want your own record of your own day, and you are not the person being coached.
- You carry no quota, so nobody is going to buy you a revenue-intelligence seat
- Much of your week is in person, or in conversations nobody put on a calendar
- Confidential discussions mean the audio must not leave your computer
- You want the transcript as plain files your own agents and scripts can read
- You'd rather pay €39 once than carry a per-seat bill your team renews forever
Choose Avoma if
Avoma is a serious platform for a serious job, and most people reading "Avoma alternative" should probably stay on it.
- Your calls have to end up in the CRM: Avoma writes notes and detected fields, MEDDIC, SPICED and NEAT included, into Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Copper, Zoho or Zendesk Sell. Earkeep has no CRM integration at all
- Managers need to review calls at scale: AI scorecards, Smart Trackers for objections and churn signals, talk-pattern analysis, playlists and snippets for onboarding reps, none of which Earkeep offers
- You are accountable for a forecast: deal and churn health scores, pipeline inspection and AI win-loss analysis are a whole product Earkeep does not have
- You need a team on it: shared workspace, roles, org-wide consent enforcement, SSO, HIPAA, signed DPAs, SOC 2 Type II and ISO/IEC 42001, against a single-device licence with no account at all
- You need speaker labels, a replayable recording, a mobile app, or a bot that attends the call you had to miss, and 1,352 G2 reviews at 4.6 stars are a fair reason to trust it
If any of those is you, buy the seats: this page is meant to help you pick the right tool, not to talk you out of a good one. Earkeep's reader is the person in the same meetings without a seat, because their job has no pipeline attached to it: the product manager, the researcher, the engineering lead. See Earkeep for product managers.
Other tools people weigh this against
Anyone shopping for an Avoma alternative usually has a few other tabs open, and the nearer comparisons are the bots and notetakers rather than the revenue platforms: Fireflies.ai, Otter.ai, Fathom, Read AI and MeetGeek, or all sixteen side by side.
Frequently asked questions
Is Earkeep a good Avoma alternative?
Only for a particular reader. If you want your own record of your own day, captured without a bot, transcribed on your device and kept in plain files, Earkeep does that and Avoma structurally cannot. If you want CRM write-back, scorecards, forecasting, speaker labels, a replayable recording or anything shared across a team, Earkeep has none of it and Avoma is the better buy.
Does Avoma have a free plan?
Not one that records. Avoma runs a 14-day trial of the Organization plan with the add-ons enabled and no card required. When it expires the account drops to a Viewer role: read access to what was already recorded, and nothing new recorded or transcribed. Earkeep's trial is also 14 days, with no email and no account, after which it is €39 once.
How much does Avoma actually cost per seat?
The advertised entry price is $19 per seat per month billed annually (Startup, capped at 25 seats), and that tier excludes conversation intelligence, revenue intelligence, custom AI templates, API access, SSO and HIPAA. With the conversation-intelligence add-on a seat is $48, and $77 with both. Organization is $24 and Enterprise $39, before add-ons. Quoting $19 alone misrepresents what a working sales seat costs.
Does Avoma work for in-person meetings?
Only as a workaround, and its own help centre says so: it suggests dialling a laptop into a virtual call, and notes that with one microphone it labels the host as the speaker for the whole meeting. There is no bot-free desktop capture of a virtual call either. Earkeep captures microphone and system audio continuously, so a huddle or an at-desk conversation with a laptop open is recorded the same way an online call is.
Do both have an MCP server?
Both do, and Avoma's is the bigger one: four read tools over its cloud store, with API access starting on the Organization plan. Earkeep's has exactly two, search_spans and read_span, both read-only, on loopback over the .jsonl files on your own disk. The difference is not the tool count; it is that one reads a vendor's database and the other reads your files.
Keep your own record
14-day full trial, no account required.