Earkeep vs Fathom

Fathom has the highest G2 rating in the category (4.9 stars) and the most generous free tier around: unlimited recordings, transcriptions, and storage at no cost. If most of your meetings happen on those three video platforms and you're fine with a bot in the room and your audio on Fathom's servers, it's a strong, well-liked product.

Earkeep 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 automatically. There's nothing to join and nothing to send. If you also have in-person meetings, back-to-back internal syncs nobody wants to start a bot for, or you don't want your call audio leaving your device, Earkeep is built for exactly that.

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. Fathom's own reviewers call this out as the recurring complaint: a bot 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's 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 decide after the fact which stretch of the day counts as the meeting. That also means Earkeep covers meetings Fathom structurally cannot: in-person conversations with the laptop open, ad-hoc hallway syncs, and anything outside those three platforms.

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, and 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's no account, and no API call carries your conversation to a third party. Transcripts are plain local files you own outright.

Fathom's unit of work is the scheduled call: it joins, records that call, and produces one summary for it. There's no way to retroactively decide that the last twenty minutes of an ad-hoc conversation was actually a meeting worth keeping, because nothing was recording until the bot joined.

Earkeep is always listening, so a meeting is just a span you select afterward, or one your connected calendar (Google, Apple, Outlook, or any ICS URL) starts and ends automatically. Nothing has to be scheduled or joined in advance for Earkeep to have captured it.

Fathom's roadmap is CRM and workflow integrations: deep HubSpot sync, Salesforce and Close support, and deal-intelligence signals for sales teams, all cloud-side. There's no local API or MCP server.

Earkeep runs coding and knowledge agents, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor Agent, Gemini CLI, Hermes, Kimi CLI, OpenClaw, opencode, Pi, Qwen Code, or any ACP-compatible agent, directly inside the app against your meeting history, and exposes a built-in MCP server so external tools like Claude Desktop or Cursor can read your meetings too.

Fathom's free tier is real and genuinely generous: unlimited recordings, transcriptions, and storage with AI summaries and basic integrations, no credit card required. But the features many teams actually want, AI-generated action items, CRM sync, advanced search, 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.

Earkeep is €39, once, for one device. No subscription, no per-seat pricing, no recurring bill. It comes with a 14-day free trial, full functionality, no email or account required, and a 14-day no-questions money-back guarantee after purchase. Buying Earkeep 1.x includes all updates to that version line; if a future paid major version ships, the version you bought keeps working.

• 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, without an account, without an upload, and without a bot sitting in every call.