Fathom vs tl;dv

Both give away a lot and both put a bot in the call, so the free tiers look similar at a glance. They are not similar at all once you ask what happens to the recordings.

The summary limit and the deletion date

Fathom gives unlimited recordings, storage and transcription at no cost. The limit is on the clever part: advanced summaries stop after five calls a month on the free plan. So you keep everything and get basic notes for most of it.

tl;dv gives unlimited transcription and then deletes free-plan recordings after three months. Search across the whole archive is held back to a paid tier, which is the limit people actually notice — an archive you cannot search is a filing cabinet you cannot open.

Fathom scores 5 for value against tl;dv's 4, and 5 for ease against 4.

Which one you can put in front of a European client

tl;dv lets you choose EU or US hosting for the AI processing and uses no customer data to train its models. tl;dv scores 5 for privacy against Fathom's 3, and the hosting choice is most of that.

Fathom excludes customer data from training too, so this is not a question of one company being careless. It is that Fathom does not publish a regional processing choice, and for some contracts that is the whole conversation.

Fathom answers on capture. It offers both bot and bot-free recording rather than imposing one model, with the bot-free half still marked as being in beta, while tl;dv is bot-only. If some of your meetings will not tolerate a recorder in the participant list, that flexibility is worth more than a rating.

On reach Fathom is ahead: Fathom scores 4 for coverage against tl;dv's 3, with thirty-eight transcription languages and Mandarin missing. tl;dv advertises thirty-plus but publishes no enumerated list, which is why it does not appear in this directory's language filters.

Which should you choose?

Choose Fathom if you want the most product for nothing, you need the option to record without a bot, or you need a language list you can actually check.

Choose tl;dv if European processing is a requirement, and you will pay for the tier that lets you search what you recorded.