Donna vs Fathom
Donna or Fathom? Pick Fathom if you want a zero-setup free tier that covers Zoom, Meet, and Teams. Pick Donna if the meeting record must stay on your own infrastructure and you want analysis beyond summaries — verbatim receipts, tensions, position shifts, and the room read, all from a bot on your own server.
Fathom won its audience honestly: a genuinely useful free tier and summaries that appear almost before you’ve left the call. For an individual who wants quick recaps on the vendor’s cloud, it is an easy pick. Donna is for the team that reads the fine print — the one that noticed where those free recordings actually live.
Side by side, structurally
| Axis | Fathom | Donna |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Fathom’s cloud (SaaS) | Your own server (privately hosted) |
| Where your recordings live | Stored and processed on Fathom’s servers | Your server’s disk and your own database — nothing on a vendor cloud |
| How it attends meetings | Bot joins Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams calls | Joins Google Meet as a visible participant — on demand, or auto-joined from your calendar’s iCal feed |
| Meeting video capture | Yes — call recording with highlight clips | Yes — screen video + audio, compressed server-side after the call |
| Transcription engine | Vendor-managed | Flocci Speech Recognition, with your key |
| Who owns the AI keys | Fathom | You — your Flocci Speech Recognition and Flocci Intelligence keys |
| What you get after the call | Fast summaries, action items, highlight clips, CRM sync on team plans | Meeting intelligence through one of six lenses: decisions with tradeoffs, exact-quote receipts, tensions, what nobody said, position shifts, the room read, and orders |
| Pricing model | Generous free tier for individuals; per-seat team plans | No per-seat fee — credit-metered usage on the hosted service, or only your own infrastructure and API usage when deployed privately |
Where Fathom genuinely wins
- The best free tier among cloud notetakers — unlimited recordings for individual users.
- Summaries arrive within moments of the call ending.
- Covers Zoom and Microsoft Teams as well as Google Meet — Donna is Google Meet only today.
Where Donna wins
- “Free” is still paid in data: your calls are processed and retained on Fathom’s cloud. Donna’s costs are transparent — your server, your metered API calls — and your recordings are yours alone.
- Fathom optimizes for speed of recap; Donna optimizes for depth of read. Highlight clips won’t tell you who dodged a commitment or which decision skipped its tradeoff discussion.
- Team features at Fathom sit behind per-seat plans; Donna’s dashboard, upload pipeline, and full reports come with the server, whoever is in the meeting.
The data question, since nobody else leads with it
Fathom: Stored and processed on Fathom’s servers. Donna: your server’s disk and your own database — nothing on a vendor cloud. For boards, client work, hiring, negotiations, and one-on-ones, that line is usually the whole decision.
What each one charges
| Fathom | Donna | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Unlimited recordings and transcriptions on the free plan | One-time credit grant plus a monthly free allowance |
| Paid | Premium $20/month or $16 annual; Team $19 or $15 annual; Business $34 or $25 annual | Credit-metered usage — meetings attended, minutes transcribed, reports delivered. No seat licence. |
Fathom’s figures were read from their own pricing page on 29 July 2026; check it before you buy, because plans change without notice. Donna’s current credit costs live on your billing page at account.flocci.in.
Questions, answered straight
Is Donna free like Fathom?
Donna has no subscription at all — you run it on your own server and pay your own metered Flocci Speech Recognition and Flocci Intelligence usage. Fathom’s individual tier is free on Fathom’s cloud; Donna trades that for full ownership: your server, your keys, your data.
Does Donna support Zoom and Teams like Fathom?
Not yet. Donna attends Google Meet calls today, and can also ingest uploaded recordings from any source for transcription and analysis. If your organization lives in Zoom or Teams, Fathom covers those natively.
Why choose Donna over a free cloud notetaker?
Because the meeting record is often the most sensitive document a team produces. Donna keeps it on infrastructure you control and returns a deeper artifact: decisions with tradeoffs, receipts with timestamps, tensions, and the room read — not just a fast summary.
Put Donna in your next meeting
Access is open — sign in with your Google account and she’s in your dashboard in minutes. Rolling out to a whole team, or want a hand with the server setup? We’re glad to help.