Short answer
Two different products share the phrase. If nobody is capturing meetings, buy an AI notetaker: Otter, Fireflies, or Teams' own recap. If the team cannot find what it decided, buy a shared knowledge base: Notion, OneNote, ClickUp Docs, or Baalda for markdown files you own with live co-editing. Most teams need the second.
Search for a note taking app for your team and you get one list containing two completely different products. Otter sits next to Notion. Read.ai sits next to OneNote. One of those halves records what was said in a meeting and hands you a transcript nobody will open again. The other holds the thing your team currently believes and gets rewritten every week. Buying the wrong half is the most common way a team ends up with four hundred meeting summaries and still no written answer to "how do we deploy".
So this post sorts the category before it ranks anything. I work on Baalda, which is in the second half and is covered below along with where it is the wrong purchase. Every price here is the list price on the vendor's own page on 12 October 2026, in US dollars.
Which of the two jobs does your team actually need?
Ask which sentence your team says more often.
- "Nobody wrote down what we agreed in that call." You need a recorder. The output is one artifact per meeting: a transcript, a summary, a list of action items. It is written once and never revised, because a record of a conversation that happened is not supposed to change.
- "We agreed this months ago and now nobody can find it." You need a shared knowledge base. The output is one document per topic, and its whole job is to be current. It gets edited this week, and next week, and by three different people.
Those are opposite requirements. A recorder is append-only by design and that is a feature. A knowledge base that is append-only is just a worse recorder, which is exactly what happens to teams who bought a notetaker and expected a wiki.
Most teams of five to fifty eventually want both, and that is fine. They are two purchases. The mistake is thinking one of them covers the other.
| Recorders | Shared knowledge bases | |
|---|---|---|
| What it produces | One record per meeting | One document per topic |
| Written | Once, automatically | Continuously, by people |
| Who writes | A bot in the call | The team |
| Goes stale | Never, it is a record | Constantly, which is the work |
| Examples | Otter, Fireflies, Teams recap | Notion, OneNote, ClickUp Docs, Obsidian, Baalda |
What do the AI meeting notetakers actually give a team?
They are good at the job they do, and the job is narrower than the listicles imply.
Microsoft Teams already has one, which matters because a lot of people searching this phrase mean Microsoft Teams rather than teams of people. Microsoft's own recap page says that in a recap "you can find the event recording, transcript, shared files, notes, custom summary, agenda, and follow-up tasks". The AI part is licensed separately: "Intelligent recap experiences are available as part of Teams Premium, an add-on license", and it "is also available as part of the Microsoft Copilot license". On mobile, "AI notes are available for events that lasted longer than five minutes and were transcribed in English". If you already pay for Copilot or Teams Premium, check what you have before buying a third-party notetaker.
Otter is the best known of the standalone ones. Its free Basic plan gives 300 monthly transcription minutes. Pro is $8.33 per user a month billed annually or $16.99 monthly, with 1,200 in-app recording minutes and up to 90 minutes a meeting. Business is $19.99 annually or $30 monthly, with unlimited meetings and up to four hours a meeting.
Fireflies does the same category of work across Zoom, Google Meet and Teams. Its pricing page lists Free, Pro, Business and Enterprise tiers but does not publish per-seat prices, so you have to ask.
What none of them do is hold your team's current answer to anything. A transcript of the call where you picked Postgres is not your database decision. It is evidence that the decision happened. Six months later the person who needs it searches your notes, not your meeting archive, and the honest version of this category's marketing is that it gives you excellent raw material for a knowledge base you still have to write.
Which shared knowledge bases hold up for a team?
Here is the half most people searching this phrase actually need, ranked by whether the notes stay yours and whether several people can work in the same document.
| App | Best for | Notes as files you own | Live co-editing | AI writes into the notes | Price, 12 Oct 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baalda | A team that wants owned markdown and multiplayer | Yes · .md on each member's disk | Yes · CRDT | Yes · over MCP | Free for 2 people · Team $10 / seat / mo |
| Notion | An all-in-one team workspace | No · server-side | Yes | Yes · Notion AI, full on Business | Free · Plus $10 · Business $20 / member / mo |
| OneNote | A team already inside Microsoft 365 | No · OneDrive notebook | Yes · in OneNote for the web | Copilot needs a Microsoft 365 subscription | Free app |
| ClickUp Docs | Teams whose notes and tasks are the same thing | No · cloud | Yes | Yes · in paid plans | Free Forever · Core $8 / user / mo yearly |
| Obsidian | Strong solo vaults, shared read-write | Yes · .md on disk | No | Only local agents on your own disk | Free · Sync Standard $4 / user / mo yearly |
| Guru | Enterprise support and sales knowledge | No · cloud | Yes | Yes | Not published · sales quote |
A few notes on that table, because the columns are where the listicles get vague.
Obsidian is the strongest solo tool here and the weakest team tool, and its own help page is refreshingly direct about why. "Obsidian does not yet support collaborative live editing on the same file. You will not see the other user's cursor, and their edits will only appear once the changes are synced." On a shared vault, "the maximum number of collaborators on a shared vault is 20 users", and "all collaborators receive the same permissions as the vault owner, with one exception: only the vault owner can invite collaborators". Sync Standard is $4 per user a month billed annually, $5 monthly, and every collaborator needs their own. That means no viewer role and no folder scope, which is a real problem the moment one folder should not be readable by everyone. We went through what Sync and Publish do and do not add up to in whether Obsidian can be a team knowledge base.
OneNote is free and genuinely collaborative, which is more than its reputation suggests. Microsoft's own collaboration page says "you can collaborate with real-time co-authoring in Word for the web, Excel for the web, PowerPoint for the web, and OneNote Online on OneDrive". Copilot in OneNote requires a Microsoft 365 subscription. The trade is the format: a OneNote notebook is not a folder of files you can grep, diff or hand to a local agent.
Notion is the default for a reason and the reason is databases. If your team runs on Notion databases, most of this table is a downgrade. Its AI is also plan-dependent: Plus gets a trial of Notion AI, the full Notion Agent arrives on Business at $20 per member a month, and Custom Agents run on credits at $10 per 1,000 on top. If you are weighing a move, the reasons teams leave Notion are more useful than a feature grid.
Guru does not publish prices. Its pricing page says your "investment is tailored to your organization's scale, knowledge complexity, and AI maturity", which is a sales motion, not a price. Fine for a hundred-person support org, heavy for eight people.
Why does a note that holds current state get harder once an AI writes to it?
This is the part the round-ups skip, and it is the thing that separates the two halves for good.
A recorder never has this problem. Nothing writes to a transcript after the call. But the moment your notes hold current state, every write is a write over somebody else's version, and that was already true with three humans. Now add an assistant that reads a note, thinks for twenty seconds, and writes back a revised version. In those twenty seconds a teammate edited the same paragraph. The assistant's write is based on text that no longer exists.
Most tools handle this by not handling it. The write is last-one-wins, or it lands on disk and the open editor notices later and offers you a conflict copy. We wrote up the Obsidian version of that failure, and the connector version, where an assistant simply gets everything you can open, in connecting Claude to Notion.
Baalda handles it with a content hash. read_note returns a revision alongside the note: a sha256 of the note's current text. Every write tool accepts it back:
update_note
docId: the note
content: the new full markdown
expectedRevision: the `revision` read_note returnedIf the note no longer matches that hash, the write is refused with a conflict and the assistant has to read again and retry. The reason it is a hash rather than a version number is worth saying plainly, because it is the honest consequence of building on a CRDT: there is no single version counter to increment, so the hash of the content is the only truthful identity for "the text I read".
The second half is where the write lands. When somebody has the note open, the write mutates the live document and broadcasts to every connected editor, the same path a human keystroke takes, so the assistant's revision appears in your editor as it happens rather than arriving on disk behind your back. When nobody has it open, the change is applied to the stored state and the next person to open the note gets it. Either way it is still a plain .md file on your own disk, which is the part that makes a local agent like Claude Code able to work the same notes with no server at all. Baalda is Apache-2.0, free to run locally or self-host, free on the managed backend for 2 people and 1 synced vault, and $10 per seat a month or $110 per seat a year above that with a minimum of 3 seats.
Where is each one the wrong choice?
Worth being blunt, because every app here is wrong for somebody.
- Baalda does not record meetings. No bot, no transcription, no speaker labels. If the problem is that nobody takes notes in the standup, buy a notetaker and do not look at this list. Baalda is also the wrong pick if you want the biggest plugin ecosystem, which is Obsidian, or relational databases, which is Notion. And a refused write tells you the note moved, not whose version was right. A person still decides that.
- Otter, Fireflies and Teams recap are wrong if what you need is one page that is current. They will give you a growing archive and the feeling of being organised.
- Obsidian is wrong for any team with an internal boundary, because the unit of sharing is the whole vault and everyone gets the owner's access.
- OneNote is wrong if you want notes as files you can version, diff or hand to a local agent.
- Notion is wrong if the notes must survive the vendor, and right if your team's work is databases.
- ClickUp Docs is wrong as a standalone knowledge base and right if your notes and your tickets genuinely are the same object.
- Guru is wrong below about fifty people, mostly on price and process weight.
If you only take one thing: decide which of the two jobs you are buying before you open a comparison table. Almost every bad purchase in this category is a recorder bought to solve a knowledge base problem.