Fathom has built a loyal following among sales and customer success teams, and for good reason: it is free to start, it links every note back to the call, and it keeps adding features fast. A lot of Indian teams reach for it next, right after Otter or Fireflies, and run into the same two questions a few weeks in: what happens when a stand-up slides between Hindi and English in the same breath, and what happens when the "meeting" is three people around a desk with no call to join. If you are looking for a Fathom alternative for Indian teams, this guide checks Fathom's own help pages and recent product announcements against those two situations, states plainly what Fathom does well, and gives you a checklist to run on any alternative, Zrec included.
What Fathom actually does well
Based on Fathom's own help center and its recent product updates, a few things stand out and deserve credit before any comparison starts.
- A real choice between bot and no bot. Fathom now lets you pick per meeting how it captures: a bot with full video and audio, or a bot-free mode that records video, audio with a transcript, or a transcript only, with no bot visible to anyone else on the call.
- A long list of transcription languages. Fathom's help center lists 38 supported languages, and Hindi is one of them, which puts it ahead of several notetakers that only transcribe English.
- Action items linked to the moment they were said. Clicking an "Action Item" button during a call, or letting Fathom generate items from the transcript afterward, creates a link back to roughly ten seconds before and after that point in the recording.
- Customizable AI summaries. Instead of one fixed layout, Fathom builds summaries from templates, sales call templates among them, with a base prompt you can add your own instructions to.
None of this is unique to Fathom among AI notetakers, but it is genuine, and it is a big part of why teams that meet mostly in English, mostly online, find it hard to fault.
Where Indian teams hit limits with Fathom
Three gaps show up once an Indian team leans on Fathom for a few months, based on what Fathom's own pages say right now.
Hindi is listed, Hinglish is not. Hindi being on the supported language list is a genuine point in Fathom's favour over notetakers that skip it entirely. But nothing in Fathom's help center describes handling Hinglish, the Hindi and English code switching that most Indian sales calls and client reviews actually run in, where a speaker can move between the two languages inside one sentence. A notetaker built to transcribe one language at a time, even a language it lists as supported, tends to fragment exactly where the switch happens. For a tool that lists Hindi, that is a narrower gap than most, but it is still a gap worth testing before you rely on it.
Bot-free recording and in-person capture are not yet everywhere. Fathom's bot-free capture, the feature that matters most to teams who do not want a visible participant in every call, is live on Mac, with Windows listed as "coming soon" on its own product pages. In-person conversations are handled through Fathom's iOS app, built for hallway chats and client lunches captured on a phone, rather than a laptop sitting on a conference table recording a structured client or board meeting the same way it would an online call.
Summaries, not a fixed minutes of meeting. Fathom's AI summaries come from customizable templates rather than one minutes of meeting format with a standing decisions section. That flexibility suits a sales team that wants a SPICED or MEDDPICC summary. It is more setup for a team that just wants the same MOM format, summary, decisions, action items with owners and due dates, out of every meeting without building a template first.
None of this makes Fathom a weak product. It makes it a product whose newest, most India-relevant features are still rolling out platform by platform.
A checklist for any Fathom alternative, Zrec included
Run this list on every tool on your shortlist, not only the one you end up choosing. Check each claim against the vendor's own pages, the way this guide checked Fathom's.
Fathom alternative checklist
Recording
- Is bot-free recording available on the operating system your team actually uses, today, not on a roadmap?
- Can it record an in-person meeting from a laptop on the table, not only from a phone?
Language
- Does it list Hindi as supported, and does it say anything about Hinglish or mixed-language speech specifically?
- Does accuracy hold up when a speaker switches languages mid-sentence, not just between separate sentences?
Output
- Does it write minutes of meeting in one consistent format by default, or do you need to build a template first?
- Can every decision and action item be traced back to the exact moment it was said, without a manual click during the call?
Privacy and consent
- Does it offer a recording consent notice you can paste into the meeting chat?
- Can you set how long audio is kept, and delete a guest's recording on request?
For the background on the consent question specifically, see our guide on whether it is legal to record meetings in India.
Fathom vs an alternative built for Indian meetings
Here is the same checklist filled in with what each one can verifiably do today, based on public product pages.
| What to check | Fathom | What to look for in an alternative |
|---|---|---|
| Bot-free recording | Live on Mac; Windows listed as coming soon | Records from the computer by default on Windows and Mac, with no bot option to manage |
| In-person meetings | Through the iOS app, built for phone capture | Can record a meeting around a table from the laptop already in the room |
| Hindi and Hinglish | Hindi is a listed language; Hinglish code switching is not described | Understands Hindi, English and Hinglish in the same conversation |
| Minutes, not just a summary | Customizable AI summary templates; MOM format is something you build | Writes minutes automatically in one consistent format: decisions, action items, owners and due dates |
| Decision traceability | Action items link to the moment, mainly when flagged during the call or generated after | Every decision links straight to the moment it was said, automatically, every time |
| Consent and retention | A general privacy and security policy; no dedicated consent notice tool found on its product pages | A copyable consent notice and a retention window you set yourself |
Switching from Fathom without losing your call history
If Fathom has been your notetaker for a while, do not just stop using it. A clean switch takes about half an hour and protects months of call history and CRM notes.
Switching checklist
- Export your Fathom summaries and any calls synced into your CRM before you stop using the account, so the history stays searchable.
- Tell your team the switch date clearly, so nobody runs two notetakers out of habit for a few weeks.
- Set your retention window on the new tool from day one instead of leaving it at a default you never checked.
- Run one week on both tools in parallel for meetings that matter, the way Priya's client services team did before trusting a new tool with quarterly business reviews, then drop the old one once the minutes line up.
How to run this comparison on your own meetings
A feature table only takes you so far. Take one real Hinglish sales call and one in-person client review from the last fortnight, run both through Fathom and through the alternative you are considering, and compare the two sets of notes side by side. Pay attention to names, numbers, and any sentence where the speaker switches between Hindi and English. That single test will tell you more than any comparison, including this one.
Doing this with Zrec
Zrec was built around the two gaps this guide covers. It records meetings from the user's own computer on Windows or Mac, with no bot joining the call, and the same approach covers Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Slack huddles and in-person meetings around a table, not just calls made from a phone. It understands English, Hindi and Hinglish, transcribing Hinglish in Roman script while keeping the minutes themselves in clean English. Every meeting gets minutes automatically, in one consistent format: summary, decisions and action items with owners and due dates, each one linked to the exact moment it was said, with no button to click during the call. A one-click consent notice and a retention window you control are part of the setup from day one. If Hinglish meetings and in-person reviews are a regular part of your week, it is worth testing Zrec against Fathom on one real meeting using the checklist above.
For more on choosing between the wider set of AI notetakers available to Indian teams, see our guide to the best AI notetakers for Indian teams, and for more on the language side specifically, see how to record Hinglish meetings and get notes in English. You can also start from the Zrec home page to see how the recording and minutes actually look.
Otter is the other tool teams often compare Fathom against, so we ran the same checklist in our Otter alternative guide. Teams that want no visible bot on any platform should read how to record a meeting without a bot, and teams deciding between a transcript and a proper MOM should read MOM vs meeting notes.
Before you commit to any Fathom alternative, run one real Hinglish or in-person meeting through it first. A product page tells you what a tool is building toward, one meeting tells you what it does for your team today.