Earmark vs Fathom: AI Meeting Notes vs “Meeting → Shippable Work”

If you’re comparing Earmark vs Fathom, you’re probably searching for the best AI meeting assistant to handle meeting transcription, AI meeting notes, meeting summaries, and action items—without adding yet another layer of post-meeting work. Fathom is a popular AI meeting notetaker that records, transcribes, and summarizes meetings across Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, so you can stay present in the conversation instead of typing notes. Earmark is built with a sharper goal: it’s designed to turn live meetings into execution-ready deliverables—tickets, decision logs, follow-ups, and stakeholder updates—so the work starts moving the moment alignment happens.

Fathom is strongest when the job is meeting documentation at scale. It promises “word-perfect transcriptions,” AI summaries, and a searchable place to revisit meetings later, which is exactly what many teams need when their calendar is stacked and details get lost. Fathom also leans into a simple onboarding story, including a free plan marketed as “free forever” for individuals with unlimited recordings and transcription, which helps it spread quickly inside organizations. If your primary pain is “we need reliable notes and a record of calls,” Fathom is a very solid solution.

Fathom also performs well in sales workflows, where teams care about fast summaries and clean CRM hygiene. It highlights native syncing of meeting summaries, action items, and deal insights into HubSpot, and it supports integrations that convert recaps into tasks in tools like Asana. Fathom’s own help docs also describe CRM functionality that links call insights to HubSpot or Salesforce deal records and automatically logs notes, summaries, and action items into the CRM. If your goal is to make meeting knowledge easy to share and attach to customer records, Fathom is built for that.

But here’s where the comparison gets real, and where Earmark intentionally takes a different stance. Most teams don’t actually fail at capturing meetings anymore. They fail at converting meetings into execution. The expensive part of meetings isn’t the transcript—it’s the translation tax that comes after the call: someone still has to interpret what was decided, identify the owners, draft the tickets, write the follow-ups, and post the stakeholder update. In other words, the meeting itself is rarely the problem. The problem is the second shift of work meetings create.

That’s why Earmark is built around meeting outcomes, not meeting archives. Instead of optimizing for “best summary,” Earmark optimizes for “best next step.” The goal is to end the meeting with work already structured into the formats teams actually ship: a decision log that reads like a decision log, action items that have owners and deadlines, tickets drafted with context and acceptance criteria, and a status update that’s ready to paste without rewriting. In practice, this is the difference between “we have notes” and “the work is already moving.”

Even if both products show up for the same SEO keywords—AI meeting transcription, AI meeting summary, AI meeting notes, action items, “best AI note taker”—they answer different jobs. Fathom is a great tool for remembering what happened and keeping the organization informed. Earmark is built for getting the organization unstuck by turning the conversation into shippable outputs immediately. And if your team is execution-heavy—product, engineering, operations, leadership—that difference compounds quickly, because every meeting you “ship” saves hours of cleanup and eliminates ambiguity before it spreads into Slack threads and follow-up calls.

Pricing reinforces this split. Fathom’s pricing page emphasizes a free plan and a paid Team plan (listed at $14 per user/month on the pricing page), which makes it a high-leverage tool for teams that want broad adoption for meeting notes and summaries. But when you measure ROI by execution time recovered—not just notes generated—the winning tool is the one that removes the post-meeting conversion work entirely.

So if you’re deciding between Fathom vs Earmark, here’s the simplest test: do you want meetings that are easier to review, or meetings that are easier to execute? Fathom is excellent at capturing, summarizing, and syncing meeting knowledge. But if what you really want is to end meetings with tickets drafted, decisions locked in, follow-ups owned, and momentum already created, Earmark is the better bet—because notes are table stakes now, and turning meetings into shippable work is the advantage.