Comparison
Heliotype vs Fathom
Fathom's free tier is genuinely generous, and its bot is genuinely a bot. That trade — free but visible and cloud-hosted, versus paid once but local and invisible to the platform — is the whole comparison.
What Fathom is good at
Fathom gives away more than most: unlimited transcripts on the free plan, with AI summaries limited rather than the recording itself. It is aimed squarely at sales teams — CRM integrations, call libraries, shared highlights — and if that is your job, those integrations do work you would otherwise do by hand.
If the deciding factor is "I want this to cost nothing today", Fathom wins that and we should say so.
Where Heliotype is different
Fathom's assistant joins the call as a participant. Your prospect sees it, your client sees it, and — increasingly — your IT department's policy sees it: Teams' bot detection reached general availability in June 2026 and holds third-party recording bots in the lobby. The details are here.
Heliotype records the audio your Mac plays and hears, so nothing joins and nothing can be blocked. And the free tier question cuts both ways: free means the recording lives in the vendor's cloud on the vendor's terms. Heliotype's $29 buys the opposite arrangement — the recording and the transcript are files on your disk, and the transcription runs on your own AssemblyAI key at roughly $0.17–0.23 an audio-hour, which for most people is a few dollars a month.
| Fathom | Heliotype | |
|---|---|---|
| Bot in the call | Yes — joins as a participant | No — records your Mac |
| If IT blocks bots | Affected | Unaffected |
| Entry cost | Free tier available | $29 once, after a 14-day full trial |
| Ongoing cost | Subscription for the paid tiers | Only your own transcription usage |
| Where recordings live | Fathom's cloud | A folder on your Mac |
| Summaries & action items | Yes — a core feature | No, deliberately — you use your own AI |
| CRM integrations | Yes | None — files on disk, integrate them yourself |
| Team library & sharing | Yes | None — single user |
| Platforms | Cross-platform | macOS, Apple Silicon only |
| Transcribe files you already have | Not its job | Yes — right-click any audio or video in Finder |
Pick Fathom if…
- You want a capable free tier and are fine with a bot in the call.
- You're in sales and want calls pushed into a CRM automatically.
- Your team needs a shared library of recordings and highlights.
- You need meetings recorded that you don't attend yourself.
Pick Heliotype if…
- A visible bot would change the conversation — or is blocked outright.
- The recording and transcript should be yours, on your disk, not in a vendor's account.
- You'd rather pay once and know the per-hour cost than depend on a free tier's future terms.
- You want to feed clean transcripts to your own AI rather than read generated summaries.
Competitor details checked 28 July 2026 and stated from public information; plans change — verify before deciding. What Heliotype can't do is published in full.