Earkeep
The Fathom alternative that captures more than calls
Last updated: · Reviewed quarterly
Fathom is a genuinely good bot: it joins your Zoom, Teams or Meet call and hands you a structured summary minutes after it ends. Earkeep solves the other problem: capturing everything rather than only the scheduled video calls, with no bot, no upload and no subscription.
14-day full trial, no account required.
- Captures in-person meetings, not just video calls
- No bot joins as a participant
- €39 once, not $15-20 per seat each month
The honest answer
If your meetings are almost all scheduled Zoom, Teams or Google Meet calls, and you are fine with a named bot in the room and your audio on Fathom's servers, Fathom is the stronger product today: it holds the highest G2 rating in the category (4.9 stars) and the most generous free tier around, with unlimited recordings, transcriptions and storage at no cost. Earkeep is built for the meetings that never reach a bot: it runs quietly on your device, records mic and system audio continuously, transcribes locally with Whisper or Parakeet, and lets you mark a span on the timeline as "the meeting" after it happened, or lets your calendar do that for you.
Why people look for a Fathom alternative
Everything you hear, not just the scheduled calls
Fathom only exists inside a scheduled Zoom, Teams or Google Meet call. It has to be invited in, or set to auto-join, and it shows up as a named participant for the whole call. Its unit of work is that one call, so there is no way to retroactively decide that the last twenty minutes of an ad-hoc conversation was a meeting worth keeping: nothing was recording until the bot joined.
Fathom's own reviewers call the bot out as the recurring complaint: joining visibly "can feel awkward," and in Fathom's own Reddit threads users specifically defend the tool against "DO NOT USE AI NOTETAKERS THAT JOIN YOUR CALLS" criticism.
Earkeep never joins anything, because there is nothing to join. It records mic and system audio continuously in the background, gated by voice-activity detection so it only transcribes when someone is actually speaking, and you or your connected calendar (Google, Apple, Outlook or any ICS URL) decide afterwards which stretch of the day counts as the meeting. That covers what Fathom structurally cannot: in-person conversations with the laptop open, ad-hoc syncs nobody scheduled, and anything outside those three platforms.
Transcribed on your device, never uploaded
Fathom is cloud-only end to end: audio is captured through the bot, uploaded, transcribed and stored on Fathom's servers, with no offline mode. Its own reviews name this as a limitation for privacy-sensitive users.
It isn't suited to external or confidential meetings because, in one Reddit user's words, "your confidential call… is now on Fathom servers."
Earkeep processes audio only in memory, on your device, with Whisper or Parakeet models running locally, hardware-accelerated on Apple Silicon. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and no API call carries your conversation to a third party.
A record in plain files, that your agents can read
Fathom's record lives in Fathom. Its roadmap is CRM and workflow integrations: deep HubSpot sync, Salesforce and Close support, and deal-intelligence signals for sales teams, all cloud-side. There is no local API and no MCP server.
Earkeep's transcripts are plain local files you own outright, one per day, that you can open, grep, back up or hand to any tool. Coding and knowledge agents run against that history inside the app, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor Agent, Gemini CLI, Hermes, Kimi CLI, OpenClaw, opencode, Pi, Qwen Code, or any ACP-compatible agent, and a built-in MCP server lets external tools like Claude Desktop or Cursor read your meetings too.
Side by side
| Capability | Earkeep | Fathom |
|---|---|---|
| Always-on capture | Continuous, no start/stop | Invited, or joins a scheduled call |
| Bot-free | No participant joins | "Fathom Notetaker" joins as a bot |
| Records a meeting you can't attend | Only what your device hears | The bot goes without you |
| Audio processed on your device | Transcribed on-device, never uploaded | Fully cloud-processed |
| Captures in-person meetings | Any audio on the device | Only inside Zoom, Teams or Meet |
| Retroactive spans | Mark the meeting after it happened | One recording per scheduled meeting |
| AI summary when it ends | No, but an agent you connect writes them from the transcript | Structured, with action items |
| Your own agents can read it | ACP agents plus an MCP server | No local API or MCP server |
| Share with people who weren't there | No, but your agent files the notes where your team already reads | AI-detected highlight clips, comments, @mentions |
| Mobile app | Desktop only | iOS |
| Free tier that doesn't expire | 14 days free, then €39 once | Its most-praised feature in reviews |
| One-time purchase | €39, one device | Per user, per month |
| Pricing | €39 once, one device | Free tier, then $15-20/user/month |
| Platform | macOS 13+ | Web, Mac, Windows; iOS for viewing past recordings |
Built inNo, but an agent you connect canPartlyNot available
What each one costs by year five
Switching takes an afternoon
- Install it, then forget about it for a day. Earkeep starts listening as soon as it is running, so a first day of real meetings is captured before you have configured anything. There is no import tool: Earkeep cannot migrate your Fathom recordings, transcripts or summaries, and they stay where they are.
- 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.
- Stop paying for seats once you trust it. The trial runs 14 days with no account and no card, long enough to compare two weeks of real meetings. If a few sales calls still want the bot's shared summary, Fathom's free tier stays free, so what you drop is the per-seat bill rather than the tool.
Which one fits you
Choose Earkeep if
Your meetings don't all happen inside a video call, and the record should stay yours.
- Plenty of what matters is said in person, or in internal syncs nobody wants to start a bot for
- Confidential and external conversations mean the audio must not leave the device
- You want to decide after the fact which stretch of the day was the meeting
- Your own agents should be able to read your meeting history directly
- You'd rather pay €39 once than a per-seat bill that scales with headcount forever
Choose Fathom if
Fathom is well-liked for real reasons, and several of them are things Earkeep does not attempt.
- Your meetings are exclusively Zoom, Teams or Google Meet calls and you want AI-generated summaries and action items with zero local setup
- You need deep HubSpot or Salesforce sync and deal-intelligence signals for a sales or customer-success team. Earkeep doesn't attempt those.
- You want a shared team workspace with admin controls, comments, mentions and playlists of clips
- You want an iOS app to review recordings on the go, and a free tier you can stay on indefinitely before ever paying
Fathom's core users are sales reps, customer-success teams, executive assistants and consultants: people whose meetings are almost entirely scheduled external video calls where a CRM-synced, AI-written summary is the deliverable. Earkeep's audience is different: product managers, product owners and engineering leads with 8-15 meetings a week across video calls, in-person conversations and everything in between, who already run their own AI agents and want their meeting history to feed those agents directly.
Other tools people weigh this against
Anyone shopping for a Fathom alternative usually has a few other tabs open. Each of these gets the same treatment as this page: Granola, Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, tl;dv, Jamie, MacWhisper, Limitless and Plaud, or all nine side by side.
Frequently asked questions
Is Earkeep a good Fathom alternative?
It is, if what you want covered is everything Fathom's bot can't reach: in-person conversations, unscheduled syncs, and calls outside Zoom, Teams and Google Meet, all captured without anything joining and without your audio leaving the device. What Earkeep doesn't do is write the summary for you, sync to a CRM, or send a bot to a meeting you can't attend. If a CRM-synced AI summary of scheduled sales calls is the deliverable, Fathom is still the better fit.
Does Earkeep have a free tier like Fathom's?
Not a permanent free tier. Earkeep offers a 14-day free trial with full functionality, no email and no account required, after which a one-time €39 purchase unlocks the app for that device permanently, with a 14-day no-questions money-back guarantee. Buying Earkeep 1.x includes all updates to that version line; if a future paid major version ships, the version you bought keeps working.
Fathom's free tier is real and genuinely generous: unlimited recordings, transcriptions and storage with AI summaries and basic integrations, no credit card required. The features many teams actually want, AI-generated action items, CRM sync, advanced search and custom templates, sit behind Premium at $16/user/month ($15 billed annually). Team plans run $15/user/month, annual only, and Business, with SSO, deal intelligence and custom retention, is $20/user/month. Any of those scales with headcount and continues indefinitely.
Does Fathom's bot see everything Earkeep sees?
No. Fathom only captures audio from inside the call it's joined, so it can't capture in-person conversations or anything outside Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet. Earkeep captures mic and system audio continuously, on the device, regardless of platform.
Is my audio ever uploaded with Earkeep, the way it is with Fathom?
No. Earkeep processes audio only in memory and transcribes it locally with Whisper or Parakeet models; audio is never written to disk and never sent to any server or API.
Does Earkeep support the same languages as Fathom?
Earkeep transcribes with Whisper (99+ languages) or Parakeet-TDT v3 (25 European languages, including Czech). See the full supported-language list per model on languages and models.
Can I use Earkeep alongside Fathom?
Yes. Some people keep Fathom for CRM-synced sales calls and use Earkeep for everything else: in-person meetings, internal syncs, and any conversation they want kept privately and locally without a bot joining.
Try it on your own meetings
14-day full trial, no account required.