Narada vs Fathom — a local Mac recorder against a hosted notetaker
Fathom gives away a lot and asks you to upload your calls. Narada keeps the calls on your Mac and asks you to install a Mac app. That is the whole trade, and it decides the answer for most people in about a minute.
- Fathom’s free plan includes unlimited recordings and storage, but advanced summaries are throttled — its help centre says “Advanced summaries for your first 5 calls each month.”
- Fathom is a hosted service. Its own security article states “All Fathom data is stored in the United States,” and its privacy policy says de-identified customer data trains Fathom’s in-house models unless you opt out in account settings.
- Narada is a Mac app. Recording and transcription happen on the machine using Parakeet TDT v3 through Core ML, and the audio file never leaves it. Minimum macOS is 15.6.
- Fathom’s bot-free capture is beta and Mac-scoped by its own footnote on the pricing page: “Choice of bot-free* and bot capture-types (*Beta feature for Mac).”
- Narada has no team workspace, no CRM sync and no mobile app. Fathom syncs to HubSpot, Salesforce and Close on the free plan, “for up to 3 users per email domain.”
If you want meeting notes with no setup and you do not mind your calls living on someone else’s servers in the United States, use Fathom. It is free for real, the free tier is more generous than most paid tiers, and there is nothing to configure. If you want the recording and the transcript to stay on your own Mac, in files you can open in Finder, use Narada. Everything below is detail on that one sentence.
Who each one is for
Fathom is built for people who sell, or who work in a team that wants a shared record of calls. It joins your Zoom, Meet and Teams meetings — as a bot, or bot-free through its desktop app — processes the call on its infrastructure, and pushes results into HubSpot, Salesforce or Close. Its own security article explains why the free tier is so generous: “We provide the Fathom app free of charge because it drives usage and brand awareness which generates leads for our Team Edition product.”
Narada is built for one person on a Mac who would rather not upload their meetings at all. It taps your microphone and your Mac’s audio output as two separate streams, transcribes both on-device, and writes plain files into a folder you choose. No account is needed to record. There is no team workspace, no CRM connector and no phone app; it is a single-user tool and does not pretend otherwise.
The difference that actually matters
Everything else follows from this: Fathom is a service and Narada is a program.
With Fathom, the meeting audio goes to Fathom. That buys processing power the Mac does not have, live summaries while the call is still running, a web app your colleagues can open, and integrations. It also puts your recordings under someone else’s retention policy, jurisdiction and training settings. Fathom’s privacy policy: “Our Services are hosted in the United States and intended for visitors located within the United States.”
With Narada, the audio stays on the disk. Transcription runs through Core ML on the machine, so it works on a plane and there is nothing to delete from a server. The cost is real: your Mac does the work, transcript quality depends on the language you speak, there is no shared workspace, and AI-written summaries mean either a local model (Apple Silicon, a 3 GB or 7 GB one-time download) or a cloud mode that sends the transcript text — never the audio — to OpenAI after you explicitly consent.
Side by side
| Narada | Fathom | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the recording is processed | On your Mac | Fathom’s cloud — “All Fathom data is stored in the United States” |
| Bot in the participant list | Never; nothing joins the call | Your choice: bot for Meet/Zoom/Teams, or bot-free capture marked "*Beta feature for Mac” |
| Transcription | Parakeet TDT v3 on-device, 25 European languages | “We currently support transcripts in 38 languages! 🌎" |
| Speaker labels | Speaker 1, Speaker 2 on the call’s audio; your own lines named because your mic is a separate track | Speaker attribution on calls. In person: “All audio will be attributed to the Fathom user’s name” |
| Media files you keep | .m4a plus .txt transcript and .md summary, in a folder you pick | Recordings held in Fathom; free plan gets “Unlimited recordings & storage” |
| Free tier | Complete recorder: calendar-aware capture, on-device transcription with diarization, and on-device AI notes on Apple Silicon | Unlimited recordings; “Advanced summaries for your first 5 calls each month” |
| Paid tier | $6.99/month or $69.99/year for cloud AI notes, 3-day trial | Premium $20/user/month ($16 annual); Team $19 with a 2-user minimum; Business $34 ($25 annual) |
| Live notes during the call | No — transcription runs after the recording stops | Yes — “Live summaries during your meeting” in the desktop app |
| CRM sync | None | HubSpot, Salesforce, Close — “for up to 3 users per email domain”, including free |
| In-person meetings | Mic-only recording works, but there is no in-person mode and no speaker separation on that track | Not yet — “coming soon as part of Fathom for iOS!” |
| Training on your data | None. In cloud AI modes the transcript text goes to OpenAI after consent | “Fathom uses de-identified customer data to improve the accuracy of our proprietary AI models” — opt-out in settings |
| Deleting your data | Delete the folder | Request account deletion; “within 30 days, although we cannot guarantee” |
| Compliance claims | None. Sandboxed Mac App Store app; files are deliberately unencrypted so other tools can read them | “Fathom is HIPAA, SOC2 Type II, and GDPR-compliant”; volunteers “We don’t have ISO27001” |
| Requirements | macOS 15.6 or later; on-device AI needs Apple Silicon | Desktop app for macOS and Windows; bot works without any install |
Checked 4 August 2026. Fathom’s rows come from its pricing page, privacy policy and help centre on that date; prices and beta scoping change.
Where Fathom is the better choice
Take Fathom if you are on Windows, or if you switch machines, or if anyone other than you needs to read the notes. Narada has no answer to any of those.
Take Fathom if the notes are for a sales process. The advanced summaries are built around that — Fathom describes them as “over 15 expert meeting templates, including frameworks such as BANT, Sandler, and more” — and CRM sync is on the free plan for up to three users per email domain. Narada writes a summary, decisions, open questions and an action-item list, then stops. There is nowhere for it to send them.
Take Fathom if you want the summary while the call is still happening. Its desktop app does live summaries; Narada’s transcription is a batch job that starts when the recording ends.
And take Fathom if the free tier’s shape suits you. Unlimited recording and unlimited storage at $0 is a good offer, and if five advanced summaries a month covers the calls you care about you may never pay.
Where Narada is the better choice
Narada is the better choice when uploading the meeting is the problem — and that covers more people than it sounds like. A contractor whose client agreements restrict where recordings may be stored. Someone in the EU who would rather not export every call to US infrastructure; both vendors will sign a DPA, but the data still lands there. Anyone at a company whose IT blocks notetaker bots, which is common enough that Fathom built a bot-free mode for it. Or anyone who wants to point at a folder and say: that is all of it, and deleting it deletes it.
It is also better when you want the audio itself. Narada keeps the .m4a next to the transcript, in your folder, forever by default. And it tells you when a recording went wrong instead of quietly serving you a short file: it compares the frames it submitted against the frames actually in the finished file and marks the meeting Incomplete with a reason. It cannot recover the missing audio. It can stop you trusting a truncated recording.
One more case: you use Claude Desktop. Narada ships a read-only connector — six tools over MCP — so you can ask Claude about your archive without the archive leaving the Mac. Its search is keyword matching, not semantic, and the tool description says so: "'API' finds 'API' but not 'интерфейс'.” Fathom also reaches Claude and ChatGPT on every plan, but from its servers rather than your disk.
Privacy and where your audio goes
Read both vendors' own words rather than either one’s marketing.
Fathom, on hosting and training, from its help-centre security article:
“All Fathom data is stored in the United States. For users located in the EU/UK, we are GDPR compliant and are happy to sign a DPA.”
“None of our AI sub-processors (Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google) are contractually permitted to use our users' data to train their AI models. Fathom uses de-identified customer data to improve the accuracy of our proprietary AI models in order to improve our service for all users. You can opt out of this anytime in your My Settings.”
Both halves matter. Third parties are contractually blocked from training on your meetings; Fathom itself trains on de-identified data unless you turn it off. It also states it does not sell data: “We do not and will never sell your data to third parties.”
On deletion, Fathom’s two documents give different numbers, so use the contractual one — the privacy policy:
“If we receive an account deletion request, we will use commercially reasonable efforts to delete your recordings and personal information within 30 days of your account deletion request, although we cannot guarantee that deletion will always occur within this timeframe.”
Narada’s position, in the app’s own wording:
- Recorder-only mode: “This Mac only. No AI requests are sent.”
- On-device AI mode: no account, no key, nothing leaves after the one-time model download — and the app says the quality is “lighter quality than the cloud.”
- Pro AI and bring-your-own-key modes: the transcript text and your chat questions go to OpenAI, via Narada’s proxy or directly, after you tick an explicit consent sheet. Pro AI also sends a per-install device id for billing. The raw audio never leaves the Mac in any mode, because transcription is entirely local.
Files on disk are unencrypted on purpose, so you can drop a transcript into any other tool. If that is wrong for your threat model, FileVault is the answer and Narada adds nothing on top of it. Narada also claims no compliance certification — no SOC 2, no HIPAA. If you need one, that is a reason to pick Fathom.
Neither app makes recording lawful. Tell people you are recording; in some places consent from everyone is required, and the responsibility is yours either way.
Pricing, plainly
| Free | Individual paid | Team | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Narada | Full recorder, on-device transcription, on-device AI notes on Apple Silicon | Pro AI $6.99/month or $69.99/year, 3-day trial | Not offered |
| Fathom | “Free forever”: unlimited recordings, 5 advanced summaries/month | Premium $20/month, $16 billed annually | Team $19/user/month (2-user minimum), Business $34 ($25 annual); Enterprise price not published |
Checked 4 August 2026. Fathom’s cards carry a “90 day guarantee” and a “Monthly / Annually (save 25%+)" toggle. Note the oddity that Team at $19 is cheaper per seat than individual Premium at $20. Fathom also lists free routes for nonprofits (10 seats) and startups affiliated with select VCs.
The honest read: Fathom’s free tier is the better free product if you want AI summaries of a handful of calls a month. Narada’s is the better free recorder — no summary quota at all, because on Apple Silicon the summaries are generated locally.
How to try both
Run them on the same meeting. Nothing stops you.
- Install Fathom’s desktop app, let it capture one call bot-free, and look at what comes back — including whether the summary template matches how you work.
- Install Narada from the Mac App Store, grant Microphone and System Audio Recording (it does not ask for Screen Recording — it records audio, not pixels), point it at a folder, and record the same kind of call.
- Compare the transcripts in the language you actually speak. People skip this step and regret it. Narada’s speech model publishes per-language error rates that range from about 4% word error on Italian to about 37% on Greek, so “25 languages” is not a promise of even quality. Fathom claims 38 languages and publishes no per-language accuracy at all.
- Then decide the thing that does not change: recording on your disk, or on a server.
If you land on Narada and get stuck, support is here. The Fireflies comparison covers a service with a visible bot by design; Granola is the closer read if you want notes without keeping a recording. There is also a guide to recording a Zoom call on a Mac, including why QuickTime only captures your own voice.
Sources
- Fathom, Pricing — https://www.fathom.ai/pricing. Prices, seat minimums, feature matrix, the "*Beta feature for Mac” footnote, summary templates.
- Fathom, What's New — https://www.fathom.ai/whats-new. Four capture modes, “Now live on Mac”, live summaries.
- Fathom, Privacy Policy — https://www.fathom.ai/privacy. In-house training on de-identified data, third-party prohibition, 30-day deletion, US hosting.
- Fathom Help Centre, Is Fathom secure? — https://help.fathom.video/en/articles/296512. US storage, compliance, training answer, no data sale, no ISO 27001.
- Fathom Help Centre, Free vs. Premium for Individuals — https://help.fathom.video/en/articles/5290881. The 5-summary limit, unlimited storage, CRM sync limits.
- Fathom Help Centre, Supported languages — https://help.fathom.video/en/articles/296192. The 38-language claim.
- Fathom Help Centre, In-person meetings — https://help.fathom.video/en/articles/5500225. iOS “coming soon”, single-speaker attribution.
- Fathom, Integrations — https://www.fathom.ai/integrations. Named integrations; Claude and ChatGPT on every plan. Fathom publishes no integration count, so none is given above.
All Fathom pages were fetched on 4 August 2026. Narada’s figures come from the shipping build (1.2, minimum macOS 15.6) and its own in-app text.
Questions people ask about this
Is Fathom really free?
The plan is free and Fathom says so plainly — “Free forever” on the pricing card, with unlimited recordings and storage. The throttle is on the AI: the help centre limits free accounts to advanced summaries for the first 5 calls each month, and free accounts have no AI action items, follow-up emails or custom summary templates.
Does Fathom put a bot in my meeting?
Only if you choose that mode. Fathom offers a bot for Google Meet, Zoom and Microsoft Teams, and a bot-free desktop capture that its pricing page marks “NEW! Choice of bot-free* and bot capture-types (*Beta feature for Mac)". Narada has no bot at all — it records your Mac’s audio output, so nothing appears in the participant list.
Where do my recordings live with each one?
Fathom stores them; its help centre says all Fathom data is stored in the United States. Narada writes one folder per meeting in a location you pick, containing an .m4a, a plain-text transcript and a Markdown summary. You can delete a Narada meeting by dragging the folder to the Trash.
Does either one train AI on my meetings?
Fathom’s help centre says its AI sub-processors are not permitted to train on user data, but that “Fathom uses de-identified customer data to improve the accuracy of our proprietary AI models,” with an opt-out in settings. Narada does not train anything; in its cloud AI modes the transcript text is sent to OpenAI after explicit consent, and the audio never is.
Try it on your next call
Narada records your Mac's audio and your microphone, transcribes on-device, and hands you the decisions and follow-ups. Free to use, no account, no bot in the meeting.