TL;DR
- The category has split in two. Notetakers transcribe and summarise for individuals at $15 to $35 per user. Conversation intelligence platforms analyse deal risk, coach reps, and forecast, and they carry mandatory platform fees that put them in five and six figures.
- Gong is the strongest fit for organisations with a dedicated enablement function, but the true cost is $1,200 to $1,920 per user per year plus a mandatory platform fee of $5,000 to $50,000, and 2026 added a Gong Credits usage meter for AI agents.
- Fathom is the strongest fit for small teams, at $16 to $25 per user per month on annual billing, with a genuinely usable free tier.
- Avoma is the strongest fit for teams that want conversation intelligence, scheduling, and lead routing from one vendor, from $19 to $39 per user per month.
- Chorus.ai no longer exists as a standalone product. ZoomInfo acquired it for $575 million in July 2021 and has folded it into ZoomInfo Copilot.
Contents
- Notetaker or conversation intelligence platform
- Comparison table: pricing, coaching, and CRM depth
- The 8 tools reviewed
- What Gong actually costs
- Transcription accuracy and the claims problem
- Compliance and recording consent
- Which tool fits which team
- FAQ
Notetaker or conversation intelligence platform
Buyers searching for conversation intelligence usually want one of two very different things, and vendors are happy to blur the line.
A notetaker joins your calls, transcribes them, produces a summary and action items, and pushes them to your CRM. It saves each rep an hour a day. Fathom, Grain, and Otter live here. Cost is $15 to $35 per user per month, and the value is individual productivity.
A conversation intelligence platform does that, and then analyses across every call in the organisation: which deals show risk signals, which reps deviate from the winning pattern, what competitors are mentioned and how often, and how pipeline is really progressing. Gong and Clari Copilot live here. Cost includes a platform fee because the product is an organisational asset rather than a personal one.
Buying a notetaker when you needed a platform means you get transcripts nobody analyses. Buying a platform when you needed a notetaker means paying five figures for meeting summaries. Establish which you need before evaluating features.
The useful test: if nobody in your organisation has "enablement" or "RevOps" in their job title, you almost certainly need a notetaker.
Comparison table: pricing, coaching, and CRM depth
| Tool | Type | Entry price | Platform fee | Free tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gong | Platform | ~$1,200/user/yr | $5,000 to $50,000/yr | No |
| Clari Copilot | Platform | $60 to $110/user/mo | Bundled with Clari | No |
| Avoma | Hybrid | $19 to $39/user/mo | None | Trial only |
| Fathom | Notetaker | $16 to $25/user/mo | None | Yes |
| Grain | Notetaker | $15 to $29/user/mo | None | Yes |
| Otter.ai | Notetaker | ~$8 to $20/user/mo | None | Yes |
| Salesloft Conversations | Platform module | Bundled | With Salesloft | No |
| ZoomInfo Copilot | Platform module | Bundled | With ZoomInfo | No |
| Tool | Deal risk scoring | Rep coaching | CRM field sync | Contract |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gong | Yes, strongest | Yes, strongest | Yes | Annual or multi-year only |
| Clari Copilot | Yes | Yes | Yes | Annual |
| Avoma | Yes | Yes | Yes, Business tier | Monthly or annual |
| Fathom | No | Limited | Yes, Business tier | Monthly or annual |
| Grain | No | Limited | Yes | Monthly or annual |
| Otter.ai | No | No | Limited | Monthly or annual |
| Salesloft | Yes | Yes | Yes | Annual |
| ZoomInfo Copilot | Partial | Limited | Yes | Annual |
The 8 tools reviewed
1. Gong
Best for: Organisations with 50 or more reps and a dedicated enablement function that will act on what the analysis surfaces.
Gong is the deepest product in the category and the reference point every competitor positions against. It captures calls, emails, and meetings, analyses them against deal outcomes, and surfaces risk, competitor mentions, and coaching opportunities. It holds a G2 rating of 4.7 across 6,558 reviews, serves over 5,000 companies, employs 2,633 people, and was founded in 2015.
Pricing: Quote-only, annual or multi-year contracts, with no monthly billing. Per-user licences run $1,200 to $1,920 per year, roughly $100 to $160 per month, with RevOps leaders citing $1,600 per user per year as a standard mid-market figure and enterprise deals reaching $2,400. A mandatory platform fee applies on top: $5,000 to $10,000 for under 50 users, $15,000 to $30,000 for 50 to 250 users, and $30,000 to $50,000 or more above 250 users, with some 2025 contracts standardising at a flat $50,000. Onboarding starts at $7,500. New for 2026, Gong Credits meter AI agent usage. Modules are Foundation, Engage, and Forecast, bundling at roughly $250 per user per month. A hundred-user deployment lands between $170,000 and $330,000 per year.
Spendhound data puts Gong's average annual spend at $73,673 for SMB and $308,533 for enterprise.
Where it falls short: Cost, contract rigidity, and renewal terms. Auto-renewal increases run 5% to 15% annually. Early termination penalties are 50% to 100% of remaining contract value. There is no monthly option and no free tier. The platform fee means small teams pay a disproportionate share for the same product.
Verdict: The strongest analytical product available, priced for organisations that have someone whose job is to use it. Below 50 reps the platform fee makes the economics hard to defend.
2. Clari Copilot
Best for: Teams already running Clari for forecasting that want conversation data in the same pipeline model.
Clari Copilot, formerly Wingman, brings call analysis into Clari's revenue platform. Following the completed Clari and Salesloft merger in December 2025, it now sits alongside Salesloft's engagement layer under one vendor with Steve Cox as CEO.
Pricing: $60 to $110 per user per month as part of the Clari stack, with some sources citing $120 to $160 standalone. Clari Forecast is $100 to $120 per user per month, and the full stack including Salesloft engagement reaches $200 to $310 or more per user per month. Implementation is $15,000 to $25,000 for standard deployments and $50,000 to $75,000 for complex ones. Vendr's median across 287 Clari purchases is $75,488 per year, ranging from $18,931 to $408,424.
Where it falls short: It is difficult to buy in isolation and makes most sense as part of a Clari commitment. The merger integration is recent, and packaging is still settling.
Verdict: The right choice inside a Clari deployment. Rarely the right standalone purchase.
3. Avoma
Best for: Mid-market teams that want conversation intelligence, meeting scheduling, and lead routing from one vendor at a fraction of Gong's cost.
Avoma is modular: an AI Meeting Assistant, a Scheduler and Lead Router, Conversation Intelligence, and Revenue Intelligence, each purchasable separately. That structure lets you buy the notetaker now and add deal analysis later without changing vendors.
Pricing: G2 lists Startup at $19, Organization at $29, and Enterprise at $39 per user per month. Other analyses cite a Business plan at $79 per user and an enterprise tier above $100, so the tiering varies by source and by module mix. The Lead Router add-on is $19 per seat per month billed annually, or $25 monthly.
Where it falls short: Analytical depth does not match Gong. Published pricing is inconsistent across sources, which makes budgeting harder than it should be. The breadth of modules means some are stronger than others.
Verdict: The best value in the middle of this market, and unusually good if you also need scheduling and routing. Verify current tiering directly given the source conflicts.
4. Fathom
Best for: Small teams and individual reps who need reliable transcription, summaries, and CRM sync without a platform commitment.
Fathom is the strongest notetaker for the money. It records, transcribes across 28 languages, generates summaries and action items, and syncs to CRM on higher tiers.
Pricing: Free plan with unlimited recordings, transcripts, and storage, but only 5 AI summaries per month. Premium at $20 per month, or $16 billed annually, for unlimited summaries. Team at $19 per user per month, or $15 annually, with a two-user minimum. Business at $34 per user per month, or $25 annually, adding CRM field sync, keyword tracking, and admin controls. Sources conflict on the Team and Business figures, with some citing $29 and $39 respectively. A 90-day money-back guarantee applies.
Where it falls short: No deal risk scoring and no cross-call analysis, so it is not a substitute for a platform. Servers are US-based, which is a genuine consideration for European teams with GDPR obligations. The free tier's five-summary cap makes it an evaluation tool rather than a permanent option.
Verdict: The strongest fit for teams under about fifteen people. It does the notetaker job as well as anything and costs a tenth of a platform.
5. Grain
Best for: Teams that want fast, shareable call highlight clips for internal enablement.
Grain's differentiator is clipping. Pulling a 45-second moment from a call and dropping it into Slack is faster here than anywhere else, which makes it useful for informal coaching.
Pricing: A free plan is available, with paid tiers reported between $15 and $29 per user per month on G2.
Where it falls short: The bot joins calls visibly, which some prospects react badly to, and there is no mobile recording. Analytical depth is limited. As with Fathom, this is a notetaker rather than a platform.
Verdict: A good notetaker with a specific strength in clip sharing. Choose it over Fathom if internal clip distribution is a real workflow for you.
6. Otter.ai
Best for: General meeting transcription across a whole company rather than sales-specific analysis.
Otter is the broadest transcription tool here and the cheapest per seat, but it was built for meetings generally rather than for revenue teams.
Where it falls short: CRM integration is limited, there is no deal analysis, and none of the sales-specific vocabulary handling that the revenue-focused tools invest in. Sales teams consistently outgrow it.
Verdict: Fine as a company-wide transcription utility. Not a sales tool.
7. Salesloft Conversations
Best for: Teams already committed to Salesloft that want conversation intelligence inside the engagement platform.
Following the Salesloft and Clari merger completed in December 2025, Conversations sits within a combined revenue platform, with Groove now folded into Salesloft branding.
Pricing: Bundled into Salesloft, which lists at $125 to $165 per user per month, negotiated down to $100 to $130 for mid-market. Note that Salesloft discounts of 35% to 45% are commonly available at fiscal quarter ends in April, July, October, and January.
Where it falls short: Not available standalone. Analytical depth trails Gong. Post-merger packaging is still consolidating.
Verdict: Reasonable if you already run Salesloft. Not a reason to adopt Salesloft.
8. ZoomInfo Copilot, formerly Chorus
Best for: Existing ZoomInfo customers who want call analysis connected to ZoomInfo's contact and intent data.
This entry needs a correction that most comparison articles have not made. Chorus.ai has not existed as an independent product since ZoomInfo acquired it for $575 million in cash in July 2021. Its capabilities now sit inside ZoomInfo Copilot. If you are reading a 2026 roundup that lists Chorus as a standalone option with its own pricing, that article has not been updated.
Pricing: Bundled into ZoomInfo, which runs from roughly $3,000 per year for Basic to $39,995 or more for Elite, with per-seat add-ons of $1,500 to $2,500 per user per year.
Where it falls short: Not purchasable without ZoomInfo. Development focus has shifted to the Copilot platform, so the conversation intelligence layer is no longer the product's centre of gravity.
Verdict: Worth using if you already pay for ZoomInfo. Not a reason to buy ZoomInfo.
What Gong actually costs
Gong quotes per user, which makes the platform fee easy to miss during evaluation. Here is the full picture at three team sizes.
| Team size | Licences at $1,600/user/yr | Platform fee | Onboarding | Year one total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25 reps | $40,000 | $5,000 to $10,000 | $7,500+ | ~$52,500 to $57,500 |
| 100 reps | $160,000 | $15,000 to $30,000 | $7,500+ | ~$182,500 to $197,500 |
| 300 reps | $480,000 | $30,000 to $50,000+ | $7,500+ | ~$517,500 to $537,500+ |
Three contract terms deserve attention before signing.
Auto-renewal uplift. Increases of 5% to 15% annually are standard and compound. Over a three-year relationship that is a material sum, and it is negotiable at initial signature in a way it is not at renewal.
Early termination. Penalties of 50% to 100% of remaining contract value mean a three-year commitment is effectively irreversible. Price the optionality of a one-year term accordingly.
Gong Credits. The 2026 introduction of a usage meter for AI agents adds a variable cost line that did not exist in previous contracts. Model expected agent usage before assuming your budget holds.
The honest summary is that Gong is not expensive for what it does. It is expensive relative to how many organisations actually operationalise it. If nobody is scheduled to review call analytics weekly, the platform fee is buying a very good notetaker.
Transcription accuracy and the claims problem
Every vendor in this category claims high accuracy, and almost none publish a reproducible methodology.
The number that matters is not overall word accuracy on clean audio, where everything performs well. It is accuracy on the parts of a sales call that carry meaning: product names, competitor names, pricing figures, and speaker attribution when two people talk over each other. A transcript that renders your competitor's name wrong is not analysable, and a summary that attributes the buyer's objection to your rep is worse than no summary.
When evaluating, run the same three recorded calls through each shortlisted tool and check four things specifically. Are product and company names spelled correctly. Is speaker separation correct through the interruptions. Are numbers, particularly prices and dates, accurate. And does the summary capture the actual objection rather than a generic paraphrase.
This takes an afternoon and tells you more than any published benchmark, because the variable that determines accuracy is your vocabulary and your audio conditions, not the vendor's test set.
We have not run first-party accuracy testing across these tools, and any figures in this article are vendor-reported or drawn from third-party reviews rather than our own measurement.
Compliance and recording consent
Call recording carries legal obligations that vary by jurisdiction, and this is the part of the evaluation that RevOps teams most often defer until after purchase.
Two-party consent jurisdictions require every participant to agree to recording, not just the person who started it. That is the rule in several US states and across much of Europe. In practice this means your tool needs to announce recording, capture consent, and stop recording for participants who decline, and your reps need a script for handling a decline gracefully.
Data residency is the second issue. Fathom's US-based servers are a documented concern for European teams with GDPR obligations, and the same question applies to every vendor here. Ask where recordings are stored, where they are processed, how long they are retained, and whether you can configure deletion.
The third issue is scope. A conversation intelligence platform that ingests calls and emails holds a very large amount of customer data. Confirm SOC 2 status, review the sub-processor list, and check whether recordings are used to train vendor models by default.
None of this is a reason to avoid the category. It is a reason to involve whoever owns compliance before signing rather than after.
Which tool fits which team
| Situation | Strongest fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 50+ reps with an enablement function | Gong | Deepest analysis, and someone to act on it |
| Already running Clari | Clari Copilot | Same pipeline model, no second vendor |
| Want CI plus scheduling and routing | Avoma | Modular, one vendor, $19 to $39 per user |
| Under 15 people | Fathom | $16 to $25 per user, strong free tier |
| Internal clip sharing for coaching | Grain | Fastest clipping workflow |
| Company-wide transcription | Otter.ai | Cheapest per seat, general purpose |
| Already running Salesloft | Salesloft Conversations | Bundled, no extra vendor |
| Already running ZoomInfo | ZoomInfo Copilot | Bundled, connects to contact and intent data |
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FAQ: Conversation Intelligence Tools
How much does Gong cost per user?
Gong licences run $1,200 to $1,920 per user per year, roughly $100 to $160 per month, with $1,600 per user per year commonly cited for mid-market. A mandatory platform fee of $5,000 to $50,000 per year applies on top, scaled by user count, plus onboarding from $7,500. A hundred-user deployment typically lands between $170,000 and $330,000 per year.
What happened to Chorus.ai?
ZoomInfo acquired Chorus.ai for $575 million in cash in July 2021. It is no longer a standalone product and its capabilities now sit inside ZoomInfo Copilot. Comparison articles that still list Chorus with independent pricing have not been updated.
What is the best free conversation intelligence tool?
Fathom's free plan offers unlimited recordings, transcripts, and storage, though only 5 AI summaries per month. Grain and Otter.ai also offer free tiers. No platform-grade tool with deal risk scoring has a free tier.
What is the difference between a notetaker and conversation intelligence?
A notetaker transcribes and summarises individual calls, saving each rep time, and costs $15 to $35 per user. A conversation intelligence platform analyses patterns across every call in the organisation to surface deal risk and coaching opportunities, and carries platform fees that put it in five or six figures.
Is Gong worth it for a small sales team?
Below roughly 50 reps the platform fee of $5,000 to $10,000 spreads across too few licences, and the analysis requires someone whose job includes acting on it. Teams without a dedicated enablement or RevOps function usually get better value from Avoma or Fathom.
Do I need consent to record sales calls?
It depends on jurisdiction. Two-party consent rules in several US states and across much of Europe require every participant to agree, not just the organiser. Your tool needs to announce recording and handle declines, and your reps need a script for it. Confirm data residency and retention policies before rollout.
Yananai A. Chiwuta
Author
Yananai Chiwuta is a Go-To-Market Architect and founder of Forma Nôrden. He builds Go-To-Market growth systems for B2B companies selling into enterprise and mid-market accounts.
Celine Sky
Reviewer
Celine ensures technical accuracy and strategic alignment across all Forma Nôrden playbooks and resources.
