Compare talat and Fathom
Fathom is easy to start with, mostly because of price: the free tier covers recording, transcription, and storage. If you meet on Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams and you’re fine with a notetaker bot joining the call and your audio going to the cloud, it’s a reasonable place to start.
talat works differently. There’s no bot and no cloud. It captures audio locally from your microphone and your own speakers, transcribes it on your Mac or PC, and keeps everything on the machine it was recorded on. The trade you’re weighing isn’t really talat versus Fathom on features; it’s whether your meeting audio should leave your machine at all.
Feature comparison.
| talat | Fathom | |
|---|---|---|
| Audio processing | On-device | Cloud |
| Audio leaves your device | Never | Yes |
| Meeting bot | No | Yes (bot-free in beta) |
| Models trained on your data | No; nothing leaves your device | Yes, unless you opt out |
| Works offline | Yes | No |
| Account required | No | Yes |
| Pricing | From $9/mo, or $189 once | Free tier, then from $20/mo |
| AI summaries | On-device LLM or your own cloud API key | Cloud |
| Platforms | macOS, Windows | Zoom, Google Meet, Teams |
| Integrations | Webhooks, MCP, folder export | Lots (CRM) |
| Import existing recordings | Yes (audio & video, on-device) | No |
| Dictate into any app | Yes | No |
| Data residency | Your machine only | Cloud servers |
| Cross-device sync | Planned | Yes |
| Search across meetings | Yes (full-text search, all local) | Yes (cloud search) |
| Chat with your meetings | Planned | Yes |
We’ve done our best to make this comparison accurate and thorough, but we can’t exhaustively test every aspect of every product we compare against. If you spot anything that’s wrong, outdated, or missing, please let us know.
Missing something you love from Fathom?
If there’s a feature you really like and wish talat had, tell us about it. We can’t promise we’ll build everything, but we take every request seriously.
The price that isn't money.
Fathom’s free tier is free in dollars, and that’s the draw. But “free” here means your meeting audio is streamed to Fathom’s servers, where it’s transcribed, summarised, and stored. That’s how the whole thing works, and it’s how the price stays at zero. Free of charge isn’t the same as free of cost.
Fathom holds SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance, but by default it trains its own models on de-identified customer data unless you opt out. The certifications describe how carefully your data is handled once it reaches their cloud, which is still a place your audio has to go. talat doesn’t need any of it, because your audio never gets there in the first place.
A visible participant, and only three platforms.
Fathom joins your call as a bot everyone can see. It has recently added a bot-free capture mode, in beta on Mac, though the default is still a visible bot. talat is bot-free by architecture rather than as an optional mode: it listens to the audio your own speakers are already playing, so nobody else on the call knows it’s running unless you tell them, which is itself a responsibility to weigh.
Fathom also only supports Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. talat records any meeting your computer can play, because it captures system audio directly: a Slack huddle, a webinar, a browser call on a platform nobody has built a bot for.
talat is a full app, not just a recorder.
Privacy is the headline, but it isn’t the whole story. talat does the things you actually reach for day to day, all on your own machine.
Full audio playback
Play the original recording back in sync with the transcript, kept locally on your machine.
Dictation in any app
System-wide voice-to-text, straight into whatever you're typing in.
Import past recordings
Bring in existing audio and video files and transcribe them on-device.
In-meeting screenshots
Grab slides and shared screens while you record, saved with the meeting.
Search every meeting
Full-text search across your whole local history, no cloud index.
Yours to keep
A one-time purchase that works fully offline, with no account.
Which one's right for you?
Choose Fathom if...
- You want free meeting notes and the cloud tradeoff doesn’t bother you
- Your calls all happen on Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams
- Cloud processing and a visible bot aren’t concerns for you
Choose talat if...
- You’d prefer no bot joining your calls
- Your meetings involve things you’d hesitate to send to a third-party server
- You meet on platforms beyond the big three
- You’d like the option of a one-time licence, not just a subscription
10 hours free, no account.
Download talat and use every feature with 10 hours of free recording time; no account or payment needed.