Best Zoom AI Companion alternatives in 2026

TL;DR

• Zoom retired the AI Companion brand in June 2026. The meeting features are still included on paid Zoom Workplace plans, now just called Zoom AI, and the agentic side moved into ZoomMate, a separate subscription at 20 dollars per user per month.
• That split is the reason teams look elsewhere. Summarizing your meeting is included. Doing anything with the result outside Zoom is a paid add-on, metered by credits, and currently limited to the United States and English.
• Zoom's included tier creates tasks in Zoom Tasks and nowhere else. If your work lives in Linear, Jira, GitHub or a shared record, the summary is where the automation stops.
• Otter, Fireflies, Fathom and Granola all capture better across platforms than Zoom's bundled option. Tana goes furthest on the part Zoom leaves out: it turns the conversation into typed records and files them into your own tools as proposals you approve.

If you searched for Zoom AI Companion alternatives, one thing is worth knowing first: the product is not called that anymore. Zoom retired the AI Companion brand in June 2026 and split it in two. The name still appears on Zoom's own pricing page, so the confusion is not yours. This guide explains what actually changed, then ranks the alternatives by the question that sends most teams looking in the first place: can the meeting produce work in the tools we already use? For the wider category, see Best AI meeting assistants 2026.

What happened to Zoom AI Companion?

Zoom retired the AI Companion name in June 2026 and reorganized the features into two things. Zoom AI is the built-in set, meeting summaries, transcription, chat compose, call summaries, still included on eligible paid Zoom Workplace plans. ZoomMate, launched on 1 June 2026, is the separately priced agentic product that replaced Custom AI Companion, at 20 dollars per user per month including 2,200 AI credits.

The rename matters for a practical reason rather than a branding one. The dividing line between the two products is exactly the dividing line most teams care about. Summarizing the meeting is included. Taking action on it across your other tools is the paid tier.

What Zoom's included tier actually does

Credit where it is due, because the included features have grown a lot. Zoom AI produces a meeting summary with key points and next steps, transcribes the call, and lets participants ask catch-up questions mid-meeting. My Notes captures meetings held outside Zoom, including Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and in-person conversations, using your device's own audio rather than sending a bot. Zoom also states plainly that it does not use customer audio, video, chat or screen sharing to train its models, which is a clearer commitment than several competitors offer.

Three limits shape everything below.

Action items land in Zoom Tasks and stop there. The included tier creates tasks inside Zoom's own task surface. It does not file into Linear, Jira, GitHub or anything else.

Cross-tool action requires ZoomMate. Writing to third-party systems is a ZoomMate capability, priced at 20 dollars per user per month, metered by pooled credits, and by Zoom's own documentation it is currently United States only, English only, and unsupported for government, healthcare and education customers. Zoom's read-only connector list is much longer than its write-capable one, which is Jira, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Slack.

Each meeting leaves a static summary. Zoom generates one summary per meeting. There is no accumulating record that updates as a project moves, so a recurring meeting produces a stack of separate documents describing an evolving situation, and the useful version of the story lives in none of them.

• Best for: teams committed to Zoom who want stronger summaries at no added cost and are content for follow-through to happen wherever it happens now.
• The catch: the included tier stops at the summary, and the tier that acts is a second subscription with its own credits and its own regional limits.

What to look for in a Zoom AI Companion alternative

If you are leaving the bundled assistant, you are leaving it for one of four reasons. Rank the alternatives against whichever applies to you.

• Capture that is not tied to one platform. Your baseline should work the same on Zoom, Teams and Meet, and ideally on an ad-hoc call nobody put on a calendar.
• Output that lands in your tools. Not another task list inside a vendor's own surface. A filed issue, a drafted document, a sent follow-up.
• A record that updates. Ten weeks of a recurring meeting should leave one current record, not ten summaries.
• A human in control. The agent drafts, you approve. That is what makes it safe to leave running.

The alternatives

Otter: the strongest searchable archive

Otter is the largest tool in this category by some distance, and in 2026 it is no longer just a bot. Its desktop app for macOS and Windows, launched in late 2025, records without anything joining the call, and its mobile apps capture in-person conversations. Its Conversational Knowledge Engine, announced in April 2026, connects conversations across people and time so you can query the whole corpus rather than one meeting. It works as an MCP server, so Claude and ChatGPT can read your meeting history, and it connects outward to Notion, Jira, Salesforce, Gmail and Google Drive. Reviewers consistently praise how little it asks of you once it is set up.

• Best for: teams whose deliverable is a searchable archive of what was said, and who are happy for the follow-through to happen somewhere else.
• How far it goes: it pushes takeaways and action items out to tools like Jira, Asana, Notion and ClickUp, which is real. What it does not do is maintain a single record that changes as new meetings land. Its cross-meeting layer retrieves and synthesizes across a pile of per-meeting records; it does not update the document you already have.

Fireflies: the notetaker that files tickets

Of the classic notetakers, Fireflies pushes furthest into follow-through. It joins the call, transcribes, and creates issues natively in Jira and Linear from the meeting's action items, with configurable project, issue type and owner, plus a link back to the recording. It syncs to Salesforce and HubSpot, and in 2026 it added AI Skills and voice agents. Its free tier keeps unlimited transcription with a shared storage cap.

• Best for: teams content for the ticket to be created after the call, in one direction, and for later changes to happen in the tracker.
• How far it goes: the Jira sync is one-way and fires on meeting completion, and there is no native GitHub. It also puts a bot in the call, which is a step backwards from Zoom's bot-free My Notes if that is what you liked about the bundled option.

Fathom: the most generous free tier, as of now

Fathom's free plan includes unlimited recording and transcription with instant summaries, which is more capture than anyone else gives away, though free tiers change. It is also the only tool here offering both capture modes from one app: the traditional bot, or a bot-free mode. Teams like it because there is almost nothing to set up.

• Best for: the solo user or small team that wants clean notes with nothing to maintain.
• How far it goes: bot-free is still a beta and still Mac only by Fathom's own documentation. AI action items and advanced summaries are paid rather than free, and the deeper CRM sync sits on the Business plan. It is a notetaker by design, so the meeting still becomes work somewhere else, by you, afterwards.

Granola: the polished shared record

Granola captures without a bot on Mac, Windows and iPhone, merges your rough notes with the transcript into a clean summary, and prepares you beforehand with Briefs that pull open threads and context as you join. Its Spaces give teams shared, access-controlled collections, and it raised a large round at a 1.5 billion dollar valuation in March 2026, so it is a well-funded choice rather than a risky one.

• Best for: teams whose deliverable is a polished, shareable meeting record, and who will wire up whatever filing they need afterwards.
• How far it goes: Granola's own integrations guide names Linear, Jira, Asana, Salesforce and Monday as non-native, reachable through Zapier. Its native list is Slack, Notion, HubSpot, Affinity and Attio, and integrations require the Business plan. For the fuller comparison see Best Granola alternatives for product teams 2026.

Tana: the meeting produces the work

Tana answers the thing Zoom's included tier does not. It captures from the desktop app on macOS and Windows using your machine's own audio, so nothing joins the call and it is not tied to a platform: Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, or an ad-hoc conversation that was never on a calendar. During the call you can turn any stretch of the conversation into a typed record, an artifact or a skill run, and it appears live for everyone in the room.

What it produces is not a summary document. It is typed records: a bug with a severity and a component, a decision with its rationale, a task with an owner and a state. Those file into the tools you already run on, including Linear, Jira, GitHub, Slack and HubSpot among others, and an MCP server extends the reach to coding agents and anything else that speaks it. Every change arrives as a proposal you approve before it is written, and updates and deletions always need your say-so.

The part that compounds is what happens on the second meeting. When Tana extracts an outcome, it first searches the whole workspace for a record that is already the same thing, the same bug, the same customer, the same decision, and updates that record rather than creating a duplicate. Pin a project document to a recurring meeting and each call folds into that one record. Ask chat what your team decided about something and it answers from your own workspace, linking the source document and the moment in the transcript.

• Best for: teams that want the meeting to end with filed tickets, drafted documents and tracked decisions in their own tools, on any platform.
• Tana's honest catch: the value builds as your team runs its work in it. On day one it captures and files well. By week ten the connected record is the part you would not give up. If a clean summary of each call is all you want, that depth is more than you need.

Comparison table

Tool	Captures any platform	Without a bot	Files into your trackers	Record updates across meetings	Approval step
Tana	Yes (Zoom, Teams, Meet, ad-hoc)	Yes	Yes (Linear, Jira, GitHub, Slack, HubSpot)	Yes, updates and de-duplicates	Yes, proposals
Zoom AI	Yes, via My Notes	Yes	No (Zoom Tasks only; cross-tool needs ZoomMate)	No, one summary per meeting	No
Otter	Yes	Yes (desktop app)	Partial (pushes takeaways to Jira, Asana, Notion)	Retrieval across meetings, not an updating record	No
Fireflies	Yes	No (bot)	Yes (Jira, Linear; post-call, one-way, no GitHub)	Search, not an updating record	No
Fathom	Yes	Partial (Mac beta)	No (CRM and Slack; not trackers)	No	No
Granola	Yes	Yes	Via Zapier (Linear, Jira, Asana)	Folders and search	No

All product details were verified in August 2026.

How to choose

Three questions settle it.

• Is the summary the deliverable, or the starting point? If your team reads the recap and that is enough, Zoom's included tier is already paid for and there is little reason to add a vendor. If the recap is where your actual work begins, you want a tool that files it.
• Where does the work have to land? Zoom's included tier reaches Zoom Tasks. Fireflies reaches Jira and Linear after the call. Granola reaches them through Zapier. Tana files into Linear, Jira and GitHub natively, as proposals you approve.
• Does the record need to stay current? This is the question people ask last and regret most. Every tool here produces a good summary of one meeting. Only some of them leave you with a record that still makes sense at meeting forty.

The verdict

Zoom did something genuinely useful by including meeting summaries at no extra cost, and My Notes capturing Teams, Meet and in-person conversations without a bot is more than most bundled assistants offer. The reason teams still look elsewhere is the seam Zoom drew in June 2026: summarizing is included, acting is a separate 20 dollar subscription with its own credits and its own regional limits, and even then the included path files nowhere but Zoom Tasks. If you have no intention of leaving Zoom and a summary you read is what you need, stay put. If the meeting should end with the issue filed, the document drafted and the decision recorded somewhere it can still be found next quarter, that is a different product. Tana captures any meeting without a bot, files the work into the tools you already use as proposals you approve, and keeps one record current instead of stacking up summaries.

Frequently asked questions

Is Zoom AI Companion being discontinued?

The name is. Zoom retired the AI Companion brand in June 2026 and split the features into Zoom AI, the built-in meeting summaries and transcription still included on paid Zoom Workplace plans, and ZoomMate, a separate agentic product at 20 dollars per user per month that replaced Custom AI Companion on 1 June 2026. The term still appears on Zoom's own pricing page, so you will see both. Nothing you rely on has been switched off, but the agentic half now costs extra. If what you wanted was the meeting turning into filed work, Tana does that without a second subscription tier.

What is the best free Zoom AI Companion alternative?

Fathom currently gives away the most, with unlimited recording and transcription on its free plan, though its AI action items are paid and free tiers change. Zoom's own Basic tier is capped at three meeting summaries a month. Tana is free to start with five hosted meetings a month, and its paid tier is where the botless capture of external Zoom, Teams and Meet calls lives, alongside the filing into your trackers that the free notetakers do not do at all.

Does Zoom AI Companion work with Microsoft Teams or Google Meet?

Yes. Zoom's My Notes captures Teams, Google Meet and in-person meetings using your device's audio, with no bot joining. Two caveats worth knowing: it needs the Zoom Workplace desktop or mobile app running on your machine, and Zoom supports 46 languages for its own meetings against 12 for third-party and in-person capture. Tana captures the same set the same way, from the desktop app, and transcribes in your organization's language while detecting others spoken in the same call.

Can Zoom AI Companion create Jira or Linear tickets?

Not on the included tier. Action items from a meeting become tasks in Zoom Tasks, with no third-party export. Writing to outside systems is a ZoomMate capability, which is a separate subscription metered by credits, and Zoom's write-capable connector list is Jira, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Slack. Linear and GitHub are not on it. Tana files into Linear, Jira and GitHub natively as proposals you approve, with the screen-share screenshots attached to the issue.

Which Zoom alternative is best for product and engineering teams?

Fireflies if you want a ticket created in Jira or Linear after the call and are fine with it being one-way. Tana if you want the meeting itself to produce the work: issues filed into Linear, Jira and GitHub, documents drafted, decisions recorded, all as proposals you approve, and all connected so the fiftieth meeting is informed by the previous forty-nine. See Best agentic meeting platforms 2026 for that end of the category.

Do I need to replace Zoom to replace Zoom's AI?

No, and this is the part teams get wrong. The alternatives here sit alongside your meeting platform rather than replacing it. Tana captures a Zoom call from your desktop without joining it, so you keep Zoom for the meeting and change only what happens to the conversation afterwards. Nothing about your calendar, your links or your participants changes.