The Fathom alternative where the meeting never leaves the room
This page is for someone who already likes Fathom — most people who try it do — and has started to wonder what it means that every client call, every one-to-one and every hiring conversation they have ever had is sitting in a US datacentre under somebody else's account.
What you gain by switching is the location of the audio: a Deixis meeting is a folder on your own disk holding the WAV files, a readable Markdown transcript and, if you have asked for them, notes, all produced by your own processor with no account, no key and no network connection required. What you lose is real and worth naming up front: Fathom's free tier gives you unlimited recordings, unlimited transcription, instant AI summaries and search across every call you have ever had, at no price at all. Above that, transcription in seven languages on its Premium and Team plans, and a Salesforce or HubSpot sync on Business, are things Deixis has no answer to.
The rest of this page is that trade in full, with Fathom's facts taken from Fathom's own pages on the date at the bottom.
Why switch
What you gain, and what you give up
Why Deixis
- The audio never leaves the machine, and there is no bot to admit. Deixis records your microphone and, where the system allows it, the loopback of what your speakers are playing, and transcribes both on your own CPU. Nothing joins the call, because nothing is in the call. Fathom's own bot-free guide, last updated 4 September 2026, says it offers "a choice of bot or bot-free (beta) capture on Mac" — so on a Windows PC today, a Fathom recording is still a participant that joins your call and that everyone on it can see.
- No account, no key, no network. Meeting mode is in the list of things Deixis never asks you to sign in for. Recording and transcription need no Deixis account, no provider key and no internet connection. Fathom's free tier is free, but it is a sign-up: the name, the email and the calendar are the price.
- Nobody trains on your meetings, because nobody else has them. Fathom's help centre says its AI sub-processors are contractually barred from training on user data, and that Fathom itself "uses de-identified customer data to improve the accuracy of our proprietary AI models" unless you go into settings and opt out. With Deixis the question does not arise for the recording or the transcript: they are computed on your machine and written to your disk.
- It knows who is speaking, and remembers them. Deixis tells the voices in a meeting apart and gives each person their own place in the transcript rather than a channel label. Name a voice once and it is recognised in later meetings. The voiceprint is a mathematical fingerprint that stays on the machine, is never uploaded, and can be deleted per person.
- A meeting is files, not a tenancy. Each session is a folder of WAV segments, timestamped JSONL
per channel, a readable
transcript.mdand anotes.md. Uninstall Deixis and every one of them is still there and still readable in any text editor. There is no export to request, no plan to keep paying to read your own history, and no retention policy to look up. - Named from what was said, so a month reads as subjects. Each session takes its name from the opening of its own transcript, and a name you type yourself is never overwritten. When nothing can name it, it shows its date — the same thing every meeting showed before the feature existed.
- One chord for the whole day.
Ctrl+Winheld withMstarts and stops a meeting, and the same chord is dictation, screen capture and screen recording. The tool you reach for to record the call is the one you were already using to write the follow-up email. - It is free, and the paid tier is $49 a year for one person. Recording, transcription, the transcript file and speaker naming cost nothing. The subscription buys the managed cloud extras — cleanup, translate and meeting notes — and even those are free if you bring your own provider key. Fathom's equivalent AI tier starts at $20 a month.
Where Fathom still wins
- A free tier that is hard to argue with. Fathom's pricing page lists "Unlimited recordings + transcriptions", "Instant AI call summaries" and "Clips, playlists + search across calls" on the free plan, with no card and no cap published beside any of them. Its help centre is unusually candid about why — the free app "drives usage and brand awareness which generates leads for our Team Edition product". If your objection to a meeting tool is the price, Fathom has already removed it, and this page is a harder sell than most on this site.
- Every call you have ever had, searchable in one place. Recordings, transcripts, clips and playlists live in your Fathom account, and search runs across all of them. Deixis writes each meeting into its own folder on your disk; finding a sentence somebody said four months ago is your file manager's problem, not the app's.
- Seven languages, natively transcribed. Fathom's overview page lists English, Spanish, Dutch, French, Italian, German and Portuguese, on its Premium and Team plans. The Deixis speech model is English-only, and no setting, tier or download changes that. If your meetings are not in English, stop reading here: the honest answer is Fathom.
- It shows up to the meeting for you. Fathom connects to your calendar and can capture all meetings, external meetings only, internal meetings only, or none, and it prompts you when it detects a call. Deixis records when you press the chord and not before; a meeting nobody started recording is a meeting with no transcript.
- CRM sync, and a workflow around it. Salesforce and HubSpot field sync, Deal View, coaching metrics and AI scorecards are on Fathom's Business tier at $34 a user a month. Deixis has webhooks to your own URLs and nothing that knows what an opportunity is.
- It runs on hardware Deixis will not. Deixis records meetings on a 64-bit Windows PC from roughly 2013 or later, because the speech engine requires AVX2, and on Android from the phone's own microphone — not yet on a Mac or an iPhone. A PC below that floor runs Fathom's desktop app and cannot run Deixis at all.
- Summaries that do not depend on anything you set up. Fathom's instant summaries are on the
free tier and arrive in your inbox. Deixis writes
notes.mdonly when a cleanup endpoint is configured; without one you still get the recording and the transcript, but the notes step is the one thing on this page that can come back empty.
What you get
More than dictation. One key, and everything behind it.
Hold the key and press a letter: free mode, a grab, a meeting, a recording, a translation, your own buttons. All of it on your own device, all of it free, none of it behind an account.
Dictation, where your cursor is
Hold a key, speak, release. Clean, punctuated text lands in whatever has focus, on your PC, your Mac and your phone, with your clipboard handed back.
Free mode: talk and point
Narrate for as long as you like while you grab a region, pick a button on screen or take a selection. One note, what you said interleaved with what you pointed at, pasted where you finish and saved as Markdown.
Screen grabs, annotated
Freeze every screen at the keypress, drag a region, add arrows, boxes, text and numbered steps, and pixelate what is private. Saved as a PNG that stays editable.
Screen recording, shared as a link
Record the screen with your narration. The recording writes itself up with a title, chapters and a summary, and from your Deixis account it shares as a link anyone can open without one. The Loom you can stop paying for.
Meetings, no bot, names included
Your microphone and the other side, transcribed on your machine while the call runs. Deixis tells the voices apart and remembers the ones you name, and never uploads a voice.
Your own buttons and workflows
Add a button to the palette: it gets the note on stdin and types back whatever it prints. Send finished notes to any URL you own. Chain steps: read the text off a screenshot, translate it, summarise it, post it.
Side by side
Fathom and Deixis, side by side
| Row | Deixis | Fathom |
|---|---|---|
| Runs on | Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit, on a CPU with AVX2: 2013 and later), Mac (Apple Silicon) and Android (a dictation bubble in any app, plus meetings), with an iPhone keyboard in beta on TestFlight and not yet in the App Store. One engine on all of them, and dictation audio never leaves the device. | Desktop app for macOS and Windows, Captures meetings on Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Slack Huddles, Bot-free capture is in beta and on Mac only |
| Speech recognition happens | On your own device, inside the app, on every platform. Your audio never leaves it. | In the cloud |
| AI cleanup happens | On your device, with no provider at all. Or, if you want more, Deixis's cloud, your own Ollama, or your own key. Your choice, in one setting. | In the cloud |
| Leaves your machine | Text only, and only once you switch a cloud feature on — plus, if you press the Claude usage key, the Claude Code sign-in already stored on your machine. Never audio, never screenshots, never window titles. | Audio, video, text |
| Account needed | None, ever, for anything that runs on your device. The cloud extras have a seven-day trial you start with an email code. No card. | Required |
| Price | Free forever for everything local, meetings included. Pro is $49 a year for the cloud extras with nothing to set up. | Free tier: Free: "Unlimited recordings + transcriptions", "Choice of bot-free (in beta) or bot capture", "Instant AI call summaries", "Clips, playlists + search across calls"; $20 a month; $192 a year; Premium is $20 a month, or $16 a month paid annually ($192 a year), and is where advanced call summaries, AI-generated action items, the conversational meeting assistant and a custom meeting bot live. Team plans need two users: Team is $19 a user a month ($15 annually) and adds global search, playlists and collaboration; Business is $34 a user a month ($25 annually) and is the tier that carries CRM field sync, Deal View, coaching metrics and AI scorecards. Enterprise is priced on request and adds single sign-on, SCIM provisioning and custom data retention. The free tier is unusually generous and is the row worth reading twice: unlimited recordings, unlimited transcription and instant summaries, at no price and with no card. |
| Your transcripts live | In plain files, in one folder you own and can back up. Uninstall Deixis and every note is still readable. | In the cloud |
| Make it yours | Add your own buttons that run a script, send finished notes to any URL you own, and switch on vocabulary packs for your field. | Salesforce and HubSpot (CRM field sync is the $34 a user a month Business tier), Slack, Asana, Notion, Gmail, Zapier, ChatGPT and Claude, plus a public API and MCP support. Calendar-driven auto-capture can be set to all meetings, external meetings only, internal meetings only or none. |
Fathom facts from fathom.ai, overview, botfree, desktop, security and its privacy policy, read on 14 September 2026. “Not documented” means those pages did not say.
Fathom is a hosted AI notetaker: it captures the call, and the recording, the transcript and the summary live in your Fathom account. Its own pages say all Fathom data is stored in the United States. Two things about it are genuinely strong and are said plainly on the comparison page. The first is the free tier — unlimited recordings and transcriptions, instant AI summaries, clips, playlists and search across calls, for nothing, and the help centre explains why: the free app "drives usage and brand awareness which generates leads for our Team Edition product". The second is bot-free capture, which Fathom's own guide describes as capturing at the device level so that "nothing joins the meeting and nothing needs to be admitted" — except that the same guide, last updated 4 September 2026, says Fathom offers "a choice of bot or bot-free (beta) capture on Mac". On Windows, today, a Fathom meeting is recorded by a bot that joins the call and that everyone on it can see. On training: the help centre says none of its AI sub-processors (Anthropic, OpenAI or Google) may train on user data, and that Fathom itself "uses de-identified customer data to improve the accuracy of our proprietary AI models", which you can opt out of in settings. Transcription is native in seven languages, which is seven more than the Deixis speech model. Note that fathom.video now redirects to fathom.ai; the help centre and the download links still sit on fathom.video.
What leaves your machine, and what leaves theirs
Deixis publishes every byte it sends, as a table, because there is so little of it. Here is that table beside what Fathom's own pages say.
| What | Deixis | Fathom |
|---|---|---|
| Audio | Never. Recognition happens inside the app on your device; the recording, the model and the transcript stay there. | The meeting audio. In bot mode a virtual participant joins the call and records it; in bot-free mode the desktop app captures at the device level, and the capture mode can be set to transcript only, audio only, or audio plus videoFathom, in the United States · every captured meeting — automatically for whichever meetings auto-capture is set to, or when you press Capture Now |
| The dictated text | The sentence you just dictated, your vocabulary, and your previous sentence in that fieldthe endpoint you chose · only with a cloud endpoint set, and by default only when the local rules are not enough | The transcript, the AI call summary and, on the paid tiers, action items and whatever the conversational assistant is asked. Transcription is native in seven languages: English, Spanish, Dutch, French, Italian, German and PortugueseFathom, and its AI sub-processors Anthropic, OpenAI and Google · every captured meeting; the summary arrives in your inbox |
| Context around the text | The names of the app and the field the text is going into. Never the window title, never a screenshot.the same endpoint · with that request | Calendar information, so that scheduled meetings can be detected and captured automatically. The privacy policy also lists voiceprints, if you opt into them. A bot capture records the video of the call, which is whatever was on screen while it ranFathom, in the United States · calendar access is continuous once connected; auto-capture can be set to all meetings, external only, internal only or none |
| Telemetry and analytics | None. No account, no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reports. | The privacy policy lists device information and usage data alongside registration and meeting contentFathom · while you use the service |
| Update check | Nothing but the request; the version check happens on your PCapi.deixis-voice.com · every launch, and when you ask in Settings | not documented |
| Model download | Nothing but the requesthuggingface.co · once, when you press Download on first run | Fathom's help centre says its AI sub-processors (Anthropic, OpenAI and Google) are not contractually permitted to train on user data, and that Fathom "uses de-identified customer data to improve the accuracy of our proprietary AI models". You can opt out of that in My Settings, and a Team Edition organisation can opt out everyoneFathom, and its AI sub-processors · unless you opt out |
| Account and sign-in | An email address, only if you choose to start the trial, plus the partner tag from a partner download link and the first partner website that connected to Deixis on this computer, if there are anythe Deixis endpoint · when you start the trial | Registration information — name and email. There is no way to use Fathom without an account: the free tier is a sign-upFathom · before anything is captured |
| Integrations | The finished note, and for a screenshot its file name, never the imagea URL you added yourself · on finish, only for destinations you added | The meeting, its transcript or the fields drawn from it, to whatever you connect: Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Asana, Notion, Gmail, Zapier, ChatGPT and Claude, or your own code through the public API and MCPthe service you connect · only once you connect one; CRM field sync is the Business tier |
Before you switch
Before you switch
Who should not switch
Stay on Fathom if your meetings are not in English, if your team's pipeline lives in Salesforce or HubSpot and the call notes are expected to land there by themselves, or if the thing you actually need is that somebody else's software remembers to record when you forget. Stay too if you want every call from the last two years searchable from one box, because Deixis gives you folders and a transcript rather than a hosted library, and if your PC predates AVX2 or your Mac is Intel, Deixis will not run at all. And if the free tier is the whole reason you use Fathom, be clear-eyed: this page is not arguing that Deixis is cheaper. It is arguing that a meeting recorded on your own machine is a different kind of thing from a meeting recorded on somebody else's, and that the difference is worth something to some people and nothing to others.
Making the switch
Where the session files land
A meeting lands in %USERPROFILE%\.deixis\sessions\<timestamp>\. Inside it: meta.json with the
devices, sample rates, model, segment length and the start and end times; audio\mic-0001.wav and
the rest, your microphone at 16 kHz mono, one file per minute; audio\sys-0001.wav and the rest,
the system output, when loopback is available; transcript.mic.jsonl and transcript.sys.jsonl
with timestamped lines as they were transcribed; transcript.md, the merged readable version; and
notes.md, the summary with decisions, action items and open questions.
That folder is the backup unit. Copy .deixis\sessions\ somewhere and you have copied every meeting
you have ever recorded, in formats that need no application to open. If a crash interrupts a
recording you lose at most a minute, because the WAVs are finalised per segment, and
deixis-core --transcribe <session-dir> rebuilds the transcript from what is on disk.
The keys
Hold Ctrl+Win and press M to start; press again to stop. The tray item and the record button on
the Meetings tab do the same thing. While a meeting runs the app says so from wherever you are:
the tray icon carries a red dot and its menu counts the elapsed time, the Meetings item in the side
rail shows a recording dot and a clock, and the floating bar shows it too unless you have set it to
Hidden. Dictation still wins — transcription of the meeting yields to any dictation you start, so
push-to-talk stays quick while an hour-long recording runs behind it.
Loopback and headphones
Deixis records the microphone and, when the system allows it, the loopback of what your speakers are playing, which is how both halves of a call end up in the transcript. Wear headphones if you can: loopback captures what the speakers play, but your microphone hears the room too, so on open speakers the far side bleeds into your own channel. Echo cancellation is out of scope, and no setting fixes it.
Loopback can also be unavailable — exclusive-mode devices and some virtual audio cards will not give
it up. When that happens Deixis falls back to microphone-only, tells you, and records the fact in
meta.json rather than failing the meeting. Worth testing on a call that does not matter before you
rely on it for one that does.
The meetings already in Fathom
There is no import path, and there is no honest way to build one: your Fathom recordings are in your Fathom account. Download the ones you would mind losing before you cancel anything, and remember that Fathom's help centre says deleting your account removes the recording data and metadata, with backups cleared seven days later — so the download has to come first. Fathom's own pages document no automatic retention window on the lower tiers, which cuts both ways: nothing is quietly deleted, and nothing is quietly deleted.
Before you ask
Questions people search for
Can I record a meeting without a bot joining the call?
Yes — that is what Deixis does on Windows, and on Android from the phone's own microphone, because it records the microphone and the system audio on your own machine rather than joining the meeting as a participant. Fathom offers bot-free capture too, but its own guide describes that as a beta and on Mac; on Windows a Fathom capture is a bot that joins the call and shows up in the attendee list.
Is Fathom really free?
The free plan is real and generous: unlimited recordings and transcriptions, instant AI summaries, clips, playlists and search across calls, checked on the date at the foot of this page. It needs an account, the recordings live on Fathom's servers in the United States, and the help centre explains the business reason — the free app generates leads for the Team Edition product.
Where does Fathom store my recordings, and does it train on them?
Fathom's help centre says all Fathom data is stored in the United States. On training it says none of its AI sub-processors are contractually permitted to train on user data, and that Fathom itself uses de-identified customer data to improve its own models, which you can opt out of in My Settings.
Does Deixis work with Zoom, Teams and Google Meet?
It does not care which of them you are on. Deixis records the microphone and the system output of your own PC, so whatever is making sound — a browser tab, a desktop client, a phone on speaker — is what gets recorded. There is nothing to connect, authorise or admit.
Do I need an account or an internet connection?
No. Recording a meeting, transcribing it and writing transcript.md happen on your machine with no
account, no key and no network. Two optional steps leave, both to the cleanup endpoint you
configure: notes.md, and — only when you have not named the session yourself — the opening of the
transcript, about 1,500 characters, that Deixis asks a model to turn into a title. Without an
endpoint the meeting still records and the transcript is still written, the session shows its date,
and the Regenerate notes button retries later.
What does the paid tier buy?
$49 a year, or $10 a month, for the managed cloud extras: cleanup escalation, translating a selection, and meeting notes, with Deixis running the inference so there is nothing to set up. Point Deixis at your own provider key instead and those same features cost nothing. Everything that runs on your machine — the recording, the transcript, the speaker names — is free at every tier.
Keep reading
Related pages
A free meeting recorder that sends nothing
Record both sides of a call and transcribe it on your own machine, free and with no account. Nothing joins the meeting and nothing uploads the audio.
Here is every byte that leaves your machine, for each tool
Every byte Deixis sends off your machine in one table, and the same table filled in for other dictation tools from their own documentation, dated.
The meeting recorder that never sends the meeting anywhere
tl;dv records your calls to its European cloud and transcribes in 30+ languages. Deixis records mic and system audio to your own disk, on your own CPU.
The same no-bot idea, with the transcript left on your disk
Krisp transcribes English on your device, then stores the transcript, recording and notes in its cloud. Deixis leaves the whole session in your folder.
The Granola alternative that keeps the audio on your machine
Granola streams your meeting audio to a cloud transcriber. Deixis records the same call and transcribes it on your own machine, with no account.
The Fireflies alternative that keeps the call off the cloud
Fireflies sends a bot into your call and keeps the recording in its cloud. Deixis records the call on your own PC and transcribes it there.
Hold a key. Speak. Keep working.
Deixis is free, needs no account, and runs on your own device. Everything on this page is in the current release.
v1.2.2 · 64‑bit Windows 10/11 · macOS 13 on Apple silicon · 51 MB · nothing else to install · also for Windows