Productivity · Head-to-head

Fathom vs Shortwave

Fathom (freemium, AI Score 8.5/10) vs Shortwave (freemium, AI Score 7.8/10). Side-by-side pricing, features, pros and cons, and which to pick.

The verdict

Pick Fathom if…

→overall capability matters more than price (AI Score 8.5 vs 7.8)
→you want our editor's pick for this category
→your primary use case is founders, consultants and small sales teams living in zoom or google meet who want unlimited call recording and crm-synced summaries without a visible bot joining client calls.

Try Fathom →

Pick Shortwave if…

→your primary use case is google workspace power users — founders, recruiters, sales leads — who live in a 200-thread-a-day inbox and want retrieval across years of mail plus a keyboard-fast client, not just reply suggestions.

Try Shortwave →

Spec	Fathom	Shortwave
Category	Productivity	Productivity
Pricing model	freemium	freemium
Headline pricing	Freemium — generous free tier; paid Premium and Team plans priced per seat (check website for current rates)	Free tier + paid plans — check website for current pricing
Free tier	Unlimited recording, transcription and AI summaries for individual users; advanced summary templates, CRM sync and team analytics require a paid plan	Yes — a free tier exists with capped AI usage; confirm the current cap and feature split on shortwave.com/pricing
AI Score	8.5/10	7.8/10
Best for	Founders, consultants and small sales teams living in Zoom or Google Meet who want unlimited call recording and CRM-synced summaries without a visible bot joining client calls.	Google Workspace power users — founders, recruiters, sales leads — who live in a 200-thread-a-day inbox and want retrieval across years of mail plus a keyboard-fast client, not just reply suggestions.
Editor's pick	✓ Yes	—
Use cases	productivity agents	productivity agents
Date added	2026-04-30	2025-09-15

Productivity · freemium

✓Free tier still includes unlimited recording and transcription — Otter meters minutes and Fireflies meters credits
✓Records without a visible bot participant by default, with the bot available only when you need it
✓Ask Fathom searches the entire meeting archive rather than one transcript at a time
✓Auto-syncs summaries and action items into HubSpot and Salesforce, so reps never retype call notes
✓Multilingual transcription and summaries removed the old English-only ceiling

×Zoom AI Companion, Gemini in Google Meet and Teams Copilot recap now ship free inside platforms teams already pay for — Fathom has to beat 'good enough and already included'
×Priced per seat, so cost scales linearly with headcount while bundled platform notetakers do not
×Does not publish which foundation models generate its summaries, a gap enterprise procurement increasingly asks about
×The 'unlimited free' headline understates the gating — advanced summary templates, CRM sync and team analytics are all paid

Productivity · freemium

✓Semantic retrieval over a long mail archive is the standout — it answers questions Gmail search structurally cannot
✓The assistant reasons across threads and calendar rather than only the open message
✓Genuinely fast keyboard-driven client underneath the AI, so it survives as a daily driver
✓Drafts are conditioned on your own past replies rather than a generic corporate voice
✓Real native apps across desktop, web and mobile rather than a browser extension

×Google-centric — the deep features assume Gmail/Google Workspace, and other mailboxes are a lesser experience
×You pay a per-seat subscription on top of a mailbox you already pay for, while Google and Microsoft bundle comparable basics into the default clients
×The free tier caps AI usage enough that the assistant is effectively a paid feature
×A small independent team competing against AI shipped by default inside Gmail and Outlook

Updated 2026-08-10. Spec data sourced from official product pages and tracked in our public directory at /tools.