Best Free Meeting Transcription for Mac (2026)

Short answer - which free one should you use?

• Want meeting notes, on a Mac, with who-said-what, without paying anyone: Humla. Free, open source, runs on your machine, and speaker labels are in the free version rather than behind a plan.
• Want zero setup and don't mind the cloud: Fathom's free plan. Unlimited recordings and transcripts, summaries included, nothing to configure. Your meetings live on their servers - that's the deal, and it's a real deal.
• Want to transcribe files you already have: MacWhisper Free. Drag, drop, done, and it exports subtitles. It won't record the other side of a call, but that isn't the job.
• Want nothing new installed at all: open Notes, hit record. Apple's on-device transcription is free, already there, and good - if you're on an M1 or newer and your Mac's language is one of the ten it supports.
• Need Windows too: Meetily Community. Free, MIT, cross-platform. No speaker identification in the free edition.

Bias, up front: I make Humla, which is on this list and which I'm going to argue for. Everything below is a limit you can check yourself - every price, cap and feature gate here was read off the vendor's own pricing page or docs in September 2026, and I've said where the other tools beat mine, including where they beat mine on the exact thing I'm selling.

The question that actually matters

Every list like this ranks free tiers by size, which is the wrong axis. A free tier isn't a smaller version of a paid product. It's an on-ramp with a wall at the end, and the interesting part is which wall you hit and when.

There are three kinds.

A meter. Otter's Basic plan gives you 300 transcription minutes a month per user. That's five hours. Five hours is one busy Tuesday. When it runs out you wait for the calendar to flip or you pay.

A horizon. Granola's free plan doesn't cap what you record - it caps what you can still see. Meeting history on Basic is 30 days. Older notes aren't deleted (Granola's help centre is clear that they keep them stored, and you can export everything to CSV on the free plan), they're just not in the app any more. It's a working set, not a hostage situation, and I gave them credit for that in my Granola review. It's still a wall.

A feature wall. This is the sneaky one, because you don't hit it on day 30. You hit it on day one and don't notice for a month. MacWhisper's free version records your microphone but not your Mac's audio - so a Zoom call transcribes as a monologue of you going "mhm, yeah, totally" while the person actually saying things is silent. Meetily's free Community edition transcribes beautifully and has no idea who spoke. anarlog's free tier lists speaker labelling as manual.

Notice what all three of those have in common. On the free tier of three separate, genuinely good Mac apps, "who said what" is the paid feature.

Then there's the fourth kind, which is no wall, because there's no meter to read. If transcription runs on your own GPU, there is no per-minute cost to anybody. Nobody is subsidising you. The economics that make free tiers expire simply don't exist, and "unlimited" stops being a marketing word and becomes an accounting fact.

How they compare

Prices and limits read from each vendor's pricing page, September 2026. They drift - check before you commit.

The ones with no meter

1. Humla - free because there's nothing to bill

Mine. MIT licence, no account, no sign-up, no tier above it for the app itself.

It records your microphone and your Mac's system audio as two separate streams, which is the unglamorous engineering that makes everything downstream work - your voice never gets mixed with theirs, so "you said vs. they said" isn't a guess. No bot joins the call. Transcription runs through local Whisper on Apple Silicon's GPU after a one-time model download (the default, Large v3 Turbo quantised, is about 574 MB from HuggingFace; there's also a Norwegian-tuned model from Nasjonalbiblioteket if you need it). Then a speaker pass runs on your machine - two engines, Community-1 which works out how many people are in the room by itself, and Sortformer which handles rapid back-and-forth but caps at four speakers. Both free, both offline.

Summaries need a model. Point it at Ollama or LM Studio and that's free and local too; point it at OpenAI with your own key and you pay OpenAI cents, not me.

Tradeoffs, honestly, and there are several. macOS 13+ on Apple Silicon only - no Intel build, no Windows, no Linux, no mobile app. No Slack or CRM integrations. And getting a summary means you have to set something up, which is a real cost that I'd like to pretend is a philosophy. Fathom's free tier hands you a summary thirty seconds after you sign up and mine doesn't. If what you want is notes with zero configuration, that is a fair reason to pick something else, and I'd rather say so than let you find out on your first call.

The optional paid thing is Humla Cloud at $5/user/month if you want sync or shared workspaces - or run your own sync server, where every team feature is free because the billing code only wakes up when Stripe keys are set. The app on your Mac stays free either way.

2. anarlog - free tier, now with a Pro above it

anarlog (the MIT, macOS-only successor to Hyprnote) has one of the better free tiers here: unlimited on-device transcription, local recordings with an audio player, bring-your-own keys for both transcription and AI, notes and folders and templates, chat, exports, and a local API/CLI/MCP surface that's genuinely nice if you live in a terminal.

The thing to know, as of September 2026, is that their pricing page now lists Manual Speaker Labeling as the free feature and Better Speaker Identification as a Pro one. Pro is $15/month or $150/year and also brings dictation, hosted transcription, cloud LLM, sync across three devices and E2EE. Team is $20/person/month.

If you'd told me a year ago that the two most similar projects to mine would both end up with the speaker pass on the paid side, I'd have assumed I was missing something about how expensive diarization is. I'm still not ruling that out.

3. Meetily - free, MIT, and it runs on Windows

The one to reach for if you're not on a Mac, or not only on a Mac. Community edition is MIT and free forever by their own statement, does local transcription with Whisper or NVIDIA Parakeet, and points summaries at Ollama, Claude, Groq, OpenRouter or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. macOS and Windows, Linux from source.

A correction to what most lists still say: Meetily's speaker diarization is no longer vapour. It shipped in Pro v1.9.2 - their Pro page leads with "Speaker identification, a refreshed interface, and steadier recordings" and the comparison table now reads Community: No, Pro: Yes. Anything still telling you Meetily has no diarization in any tier is out of date. What remains true, and is the relevant fact for a post about free: the free Community edition still has no speaker identification, along with no custom templates, no PDF/DOCX export and no Windows GPU acceleration. Pro is $10/user/month billed annually, which they list as 60% off a $25/month regular price.

Full Humla vs Meetily if you're picking between the two open-source ones.

4. MacWhisper Free - the best file transcriber on this list

I want to be careful here, because MacWhisper is excellent and the free version is more generous than people expect: recording from your Mac's microphone, drag-and-drop transcription of mp3/wav/m4a/ogg/opus/mov/mp4, 100 languages, subtitle export to .srt and .vtt, plain text export, and system-wide dictation. All on-device. For turning an interview recording or a lecture into text, it is better at that specific job than anything else here, mine included.

For meetings, the free tier has a hole in the shape of the other participants. Reading the free/Pro table on macwhisper.com in September 2026: App Audio, automatic meeting recording for Zoom/Teams/Webex/Skype/Chime/Discord, automatic meeting start and end detection, and automatic speaker recognition are all in the Pro column. Pro is €64, paid once, lifetime updates - which, and I say this as someone whose business model is subscriptions-are-for-the-cloud-bit, is an honest price and a rare one in 2026. Their docs also note the meeting recording is still in beta, and that the automatic detection doesn't exist in the Mac App Store build (the one called Whisper Transcription).

So: free MacWhisper transcribes what you give it. €64 MacWhisper transcribes your meetings. Both statements are fine, they're just not the same product.

5. Apple's built-in transcription - the one you already paid for

Everybody forgets this one. Open Notes, add an audio recording, and macOS transcribes it live, in the note, searchable and copyable. Voice Memos transcribes too. No install, no account, no model download, nothing leaves the Mac.

The limits are specific and worth knowing before you rely on it, straight from Apple's Notes user guide (macOS 27, checked September 2026): transcription needs a Mac with M1 or newer, and it only works when the device language is set to one of English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese. Ten languages. My own device language isn't one of them, which is a fun thing to discover at the start of a meeting. Summarising the recording needs Apple Intelligence on top.

And it records the room, not the call. For an in-person conversation on a table, that's genuinely enough and you should use it. For a Zoom call, the other side is coming out of your speakers, and Notes isn't listening to your speakers - it's listening to your mic, which is hearing a slightly muffled version of your speakers, if it hears them at all. That's what system audio capture is for, and no Apple app does it.

The cloud free tiers

Different bargain entirely. These are good products funded by the people who upgrade, and the free tier's job is to make you one of them. That's not a criticism, it's just what it is - and you should read the boundary before you build a habit on top of it.

6. Fathom Free - the most generous free tier here, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise

Unlimited recordings. Unlimited transcriptions. Unlimited storage of both. Instant AI summaries, clips, playlists, search across calls, and as of now a choice between bot capture and bot-free capture, which their pricing page marks as beta on Mac. Free forever, per their own page, September 2026.

If your objection to meeting notetakers is "I don't want to pay", Fathom answers that with fewer asterisks than anyone. Credit where it's due.

The trade is the obvious one: it's cloud. Your meetings, transcripts and recordings live on their infrastructure, and the free tier's real boundary isn't minutes, it's features - AI action items and the conversational assistant are marked limited-use on Free, with Premium at $20/month ($16 annual), Team at $19 ($15 annual) and Business at $34 ($25 annual). So the honest framing is: unlimited capture, metered intelligence, and a copy of every meeting somewhere that isn't your laptop. If that last part is fine with you, Fathom's free plan is a strong choice and you don't need me. If it isn't fine with you, no free tier fixes it, because the storage is the product. Here's Humla vs Fathom.

7. Otter Basic - five hours a month

300 monthly transcription minutes per user, 3 lifetime audio/video file imports (lifetime, not monthly - the three you get are the three you ever get), a workspace capped at 5 members, plus live transcription, speaker identification, AI chat and now an Otter MCP server. Pro is $16.99/month, or $8.33/user/month if you pay annually; Business is $30/month, $19.99 annual.

300 minutes is the number to sit with. If you take four half-hour calls a week you are out of minutes in the third week of every month, permanently, for as long as you use it. That's not a knock on Otter - it's a well-built product and I wrote a whole review of it - it's just what a meter does. Humla vs Otter, and the switch guide if you're already there.

8. Granola Basic - unlimited notes, 30 days of memory

Bot-free capture, AI notes, chat within and across meetings, shared folders, templates, model-training opt-out. The cap is on history: 30 days on Basic, unlimited on Business at $14/user/month. MCP access on the free plan is likewise scoped to your personal notes from the last 30 days.

For a lot of people 30 days is the whole useful life of a meeting note and this will never bite. For anyone whose job involves the sentence "what did we agree with them back in spring", it bites hard, and it bites exactly when you need it to not. Humla vs Granola.

"Free" isn't free of everything

Two honest asterisks on my own argument, because a post that says on-device is free without saying what it costs is an advert.

Disk and download. Local models have to live somewhere. Humla's default Whisper model is ~574 MB; the Norwegian one is about 1.1 GB. And if you turn on audio retention so you can replay meetings, that's just under 2 MB per minute per channel - roughly 230 MB an hour for a two-source call. I wrote about that trade here.

Your own machine does the work. A cloud tool's transcription happens on somebody else's GPU. An on-device one happens on yours, during or after the call, and on a fanless Air with a screen share running you can feel it. That's not hidden - it's just the bill arriving as heat instead of an invoice.

Neither of those is a subscription, and neither of them expires. But "free" here means "no recurring payment to a vendor", not "no cost", and I'd rather be the person who told you.

How to choose in one minute

1. Mac, meetings, want who-said-what without paying: Humla. That's the pitch and it's the honest one.
2. Want it working before your next call with no setup: Fathom Free, accepting the cloud.
3. Files, not calls: MacWhisper Free.
4. In-person conversation, nothing installed: Apple Notes, if your Mac speaks one of the ten.
5. Windows in the mix: Meetily Community, accepting no speaker labels until Pro.
6. Terminal-native, want a local API and MCP: anarlog Free.
7. Already inside Otter or Granola and it works: stay. A tool you've built a habit around beats a marginally better one you haven't.

The pattern underneath all of this, if there is one: the free tiers that never expire are the ones where the vendor isn't paying for your usage. Everything else is a loan against a future upgrade, priced according to how confident the company is that you'll take it. Otter is confident you'll run out of minutes. Granola is confident you'll want last quarter back. Fathom is confident enough to give away the storage and charge for the thinking, which is either the smartest bet on this page or the most expensive one, and I genuinely don't know which.

Try Humla

Download Humla for macOS - free, MIT, no account, no bot, no minute counter, and the speaker labels are in the box. If you want to watch on-device transcription work before installing anything, the local page runs a model in your browser tab and uploads nothing. The source is on GitHub, including the self-hosting instructions.

Related reading: the best local AI notetakers for Mac, the open-source roundup, and how to record a meeting on Mac if the capture side is what you're stuck on.