# Fathom vs Shadow Fathom records 5,620,385 monthly visits with +0.2% month-over-month growth and Freemium, Free Trial pricing. Shadow records 17,796 monthly visits with -4.4% growth and Freemium pricing. | Metric | [Fathom](https://openaitools.app/tool/fathom-2-0) | [Shadow](https://openaitools.app/tool/shadow) | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | Website URL | https://fathom.video | https://www.shadow.do | | Categories | AI Note Taker, AI Meeting Assistant, AI Summarizer, AI Transcriber | AI Meeting Assistant, AI Transcription, AI Note Taker, AI Summarizer | | Pricing Model | Freemium, Free Trial | Freemium | | Monthly Visits | 5,620,385 | 17,796 | | MoM Growth Rate | +0.2% | -4.4% | | Primary Market | United States | United States | | Direct Visits | 4,071,452 | 7,167 | | Review Score | 4.7 | 4.3 | | Saved Count | 9 | 1 | | Supported Platforms | Website | Website | ## Fathom Fathom records and understands your online meetings so you can stay present instead of typing notes. It works across Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, and can either join calls with a visible notetaker bot or capture them bot-free. After each call you get a searchable transcript, an instant AI summary, extracted action items and highlighted key moments delivered to your inbox. Beyond basic notes, Fathom turns conversations into a searchable knowledge base. You can ask questions across past meetings, set automated topic trackers, and push notes and follow-ups into Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, Notion and Asana. AI Scorecards add coaching metrics for sales and customer success teams, and integrations extend Fathom into ChatGPT, Claude and a public API. Fathom offers a generous free tier and paid team plans, and is SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and HIPAA compliant with SSO/SCIM support. The company has been acquired by and is now part of Superhuman, which continues to develop the product. **Pricing & Plans:** Freemium with a free-forever tier for individuals, plus paid Premium and Team plans billed per user. Enterprise options add SSO, SCIM and admin controls. - **Bot-free and bot recording:** Capture meetings with a visible notetaker or completely bot-free, so you can record your way and keep participants comfortable. - **Instant AI summaries and action items:** Get accurate transcripts, concise summaries and extracted to-dos delivered right after each call. - **Ask Fathom across meetings:** Search and ask questions across your entire meeting history to surface decisions, commitments and patterns. - **CRM and workflow sync:** Notes, insights and follow-ups flow automatically into Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, Notion, Asana and other tools. - **AI Scorecards and topic trackers:** Monitor key topics automatically and use AI Scorecards to coach sales and customer success teams with follow-up metrics. **Strengths:** Generous free plan covers most individual needs; Bot-free recording option and workflow syncs with major tools; Strong accuracy and reliable summaries with SOC 2, GDPR and HIPAA compliance **Limitations:** Best value features push teams toward paid per-user plans; Deep CRM and Scorecard features are aimed at larger sales organizations [Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/fathom-2-0.md) ## Shadow Shadow starts from a complaint many knowledge workers share about meeting assistants: the bot that joins your call, the note-taker that locks your history behind a subscription, and the data that leaves your machine for someone else's servers. Shadow's answer is a native Mac app that operates entirely in the background. It has no bot that joins the meeting, auto-detects when a call begins, records and transcribes it locally, and stops on its own when the call ends. Speaker identification is done in real time, so transcripts arrive labelled with who said what. The output is deliberately portable. Every meeting is written to your Mac as Markdown — transcripts, notes, and Skill results — with every call and every person linked into a knowledge base. You can open the folder as an Obsidian vault, sync it with iCloud Drive or Google Drive, search it with Spotlight, or point any AI agent at it. Shadow emphasises that there is a built-in advantage: because agents read the raw files rather than a connector's filtered view, tools like Claude, Codex, or OpenClaw get the complete context. Between calls, Shadow is more than a note-taker. Press a keyboard shortcut on any screen and it can see what you're looking at, hear what you say, or read selected text, then run an Action Skill to produce an email, a set of notes, or code. Skills are just prompts you can edit or write from scratch, and a webhook can forward results to Zapier, n8n, or Make. The privacy stance is equally concrete: transcription is local, audio does not leave the device, meeting content is never used for model training, and you choose which Skills are allowed to call AI at all. **Pricing & Plans:** Shadow is free to start, and the developer's stated policy is that every meeting is saved to your Mac as Markdown with no history limit on any plan — you keep the files even if you stop paying. For current paid tiers, check the pricing page inside the app. - **Bot-free auto recording:** Shadow detects when a call starts, records automatically, and stops at the end — no bot in the meeting, nothing to remember to press. - **On-device transcription:** Transcription runs on your Mac, with real-time speaker identification so you always know who said what. - **Markdown you own:** Every call is saved as a clean .md file locally, openable as an Obsidian vault, backed up with iCloud or Drive, or searchable by Spotlight. - **Meeting and Action Skills:** Run prompts on a completed call (notes, BANT, follow-ups, summaries) plus shortcut-driven actions on your screen between meetings. - **Webhooks and automation:** A webhook pushes transcripts and Skill results into Zapier, n8n, or Make so meetings feed your existing workflows. **Strengths:** No bot joins your call, so meetings stay natural; Local, on-device transcription with no history limits; Meetings stored as portable Markdown that works with Obsidian and AI agents; Flexible Skills you can edit or write from scratch **Limitations:** Mac-only — there is no Windows or web app; Local-first storage means you manage your own folder, sync, and backups; By design it records without a bot, so you are responsible for getting consent from other participants; Skill output quality still depends on prompt craft, though Skills ship with sensible defaults [Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/shadow.md) ## Frequently Asked Questions ### How do Fathom and Shadow compare in monthly traffic? Fathom has 5,620,385 monthly visits, while Shadow has 17,796. Traffic estimates describe audience size, not product quality. ### How do their growth rates compare? Fathom has a month-over-month growth rate of +0.2%; Shadow has -4.4%. ### How does pricing compare? Fathom: Freemium, Free Trial. Freemium with a free-forever tier for individuals, plus paid Premium and Team plans billed per user. Enterprise options add SSO, SCIM and admin controls. Shadow: Freemium. Shadow is free to start, and the developer's stated policy is that every meeting is saved to your Mac as Markdown with no history limit on any plan — you keep the files even if you stop paying. For current paid tiers, check the pricing page inside the app. ## Alternatives | # | Tool Name | Monthly Visits | MoM Growth Rate | Pricing Model | Summary | Profile (Markdown) | | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | | 1 | [Otter AI](https://openaitools.app/tool/otter-ai) | 7,360,981 | +9.6% | Freemium | AI meeting agent that transcribes, summarises, and turns every conversation into searchable knowledge | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/otter-ai.md) | | 2 | [Tactiq](https://openaitools.app/tool/tactiq) | 6,521,542 | +4.1% | Freemium | Transcribes meetings live via a browser extension without joining bots, but requires active browser participation. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/tactiq.md) | | 3 | [Fireflies.ai](https://openaitools.app/tool/fireflies-ai) | 4,411,502 | +3% | Freemium | AI teammate that records, transcribes and summarizes every meeting | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/fireflies-ai.md) | | 4 | [Notta](https://openaitools.app/tool/notta) | 2,585,354 | +2% | Freemium, Paid, Contact for Pricing | AI note taker that transcribes, summarizes and visualizes meetings | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/notta.md) | | 5 | [tl;dv](https://openaitools.app/tool/tldv-io) | 1,396,729 | +1.9% | Freemium | Excels at capturing and clipping video calls across platforms, but has a less polished action item workflow. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/tldv-io.md) | | 6 | [Noota](https://openaitools.app/tool/noota) | 283,526 | +3.3% | Freemium, Paid, Contact for Pricing | Bot-free AI meeting assistant hosted in Europe | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/noota.md) | | 7 | [Circleback](https://openaitools.app/tool/circleback) | 272,906 | +12.5% | Free Trial | AI notetaker and company brain that turns every meeting into searchable knowledge | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/circleback.md) | | 8 | [Avoma](https://openaitools.app/tool/avoma-ai-meeting-assistant) | 193,867 | +7.5% | Freemium, Free Trial, Paid | All-in-one AI meeting assistant for revenue teams | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/avoma-ai-meeting-assistant.md) | | 9 | [Fellow](https://openaitools.app/tool/fellow) | 188,722 | -5% | Contact for Pricing | The secure AI meeting notetaker built for teams that cannot get privacy wrong | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/fellow.md) | | 10 | [MeetGeek](https://openaitools.app/tool/meetgeek) | 188,118 | -7.5% | Freemium, Free Trial | Delivers deep meeting analytics and automated insights routing, but has a steeper learning curve for configuration. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/meetgeek.md) | --- Source: https://openaitools.app/compare/fathom-2-0-vs-shadow More Markdown: [Categories](https://openaitools.app/categories.md) · [Traffic rankings](https://openaitools.app/rankings.md) · [llms.txt](https://openaitools.app/llms.txt)