Circlebackvs
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Circleback
AI meeting notes that join calls from your calendar and push action items into other tools
As of 30 August 2026, Circleback has a free plan and paid plans start at $20.83/month. Automatic transcripts, notes and action items from online and in-person meetings, with an unusually generous free plan that keeps only 30 days of history. Softwr lists it under Productivity.
Overview
What Circleback does
Circleback is an AI meeting notes service. It connects to a Google or Outlook calendar, joins scheduled calls, and also records in-person conversations, then produces a speaker-labelled transcript, structured notes and a set of action items. Those outputs are pushed into the tools where work actually happens, including Slack, Notion, Linear, HubSpot, Salesforce, Attio and Asana, and reached programmatically through an API, a CLI, webhooks and an MCP interface. It supports over a hundred languages and carries SOC 2, GDPR and EU-US Data Privacy Framework attestations, with HIPAA available at the top tier. The company is Y Combinator backed. What distinguishes it is not the transcription, which is now close to a commodity, but what happens afterwards and how the free tier is drawn. Free accounts get unlimited meetings rather than a monthly minutes allowance, which is unusual and removes the anxiety that makes people ration a note taker. The constraint is instead placed on time: history is kept for 30 days. That is a well-chosen boundary, because it is invisible during evaluation and unavoidable the first time somebody needs to look back at a conversation from last quarter. It is adopted by sales teams, recruiters, consultancies and founders, almost always by individuals first and by the organisation afterwards. The trade-off is that it manufactures a durable, searchable, attributed record of everything said in your meetings, which is an asset until it is a liability. Retention controls and admin roles sit on the Business tier and single sign-on and HIPAA on Enterprise, so the governance an organisation eventually needs is priced at the top, discovered after adoption, and negotiated from a position where the client conversations are already inside the product.
What people use it for
- Sales or recruiting calls where the follow-up has to land in the CRM or applicant system without anybody retyping it.
- Consultancies that need an accurate record of what a client asked for and when they asked for it.
- Distributed teams where people who missed a call need the substance rather than an hour of recording to sit through.
- Managers and founders running many short calls where the action items are the only output that matters.
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Circleback.
- The free plan keeps 30 days of history, so it serves immediate follow-up and fails as a record, and the tier that made it look free has to be paid for the first time anyone needs a conversation from last quarter.
- Custom retention and admin roles are on the Business tier and single sign-on and HIPAA on Enterprise, which is the familiar pattern of an organisation discovering the real price only after individuals have adopted the tool and filled it with client conversations.
- Pricing is per user and a note taker spreads to everyone who attends meetings rather than staying with one team, so the seat count tracks headcount, and free viewer accounts only arrive at the Business tier.
- Transcription errors persist on accents, crosstalk and domain jargon, and because the output becomes the official record people stop checking it against what was actually said, so a mistranscribed commitment can outlive everyone's memory of the meeting.
- Recording consent rules differ by jurisdiction and some require every participant's agreement, and the obligation rests with you rather than the vendor, so a bot joining calls automatically from a calendar can create a compliance problem nobody consciously chose.
Cross-shopped
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Pricing
What Circleback costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Individual
$20.83 /mo
- AI notes
- Auto-assigned action items
- Transcription
- 1,000+ app integrations
Team
$25 /mo
- All Individual features
- Shared meetings
- Free viewer seats
- AI search
- Team automations
- Centralized billing
Enterprise
On request
- All Team features
- Invoice/PO billing
- Priority support
- Advanced security
- HIPAA compliance
Capabilities
Features
Calendar-driven recording
Joins meetings automatically from a connected Google or Outlook calendar
Speaker-labelled transcripts
Attributed transcripts with support for over a hundred languages
Action item extraction
Pulls out commitments and owners rather than only summarising
Search across meetings
Ask questions of the whole history rather than opening individual notes
In-person meetings
Records conversations that are not on a video platform
Integrations
Slack, Notion, Linear, HubSpot, Salesforce, Attio, Asana and others, with the wider set on paid tiers
Programmatic access
API, CLI, webhooks and an MCP interface
Unlimited meetings on free
The free plan meters history at 30 days rather than metering meetings
Governance controls
Custom retention and admin roles on Business; single sign-on and HIPAA on Enterprise
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
What does the free plan include?
Unlimited meetings, notes and action items, speaker-labelled transcripts, in-person recording, and Slack and Linear integrations, with history limited to 30 days. Longer history and the wider integrations are the paid line.
How accurate are the notes?
Good on clear audio and worse with heavy accents, crosstalk and specialist jargon. Because the notes become the record, spot-check anything consequential rather than assuming somebody else will.
Do we need everyone's consent to record?
It depends on jurisdiction, and some require all-party consent. The obligation sits with the meeting organiser, not with the vendor, so set a policy before enabling automatic joining.
Can we control how long recordings are kept?
Custom retention is a Business-tier feature. On the lower tiers you accept the defaults, which is worth knowing before client conversations start accumulating.
Keep looking
Where to go from Circleback
- Circleback alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Circleback pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Circleback badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Productivity softwareThe full category
- Best Productivity softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Productivity software for
Compare Circleback with
- Todoist
- Things 3
- OmniFocus 3
- Brain.fm
- Granola
- Supernormal
- Bluedot
- MeetGeek
- Milanote
- Alfred
- Mimestream
- AnyList
- Lazy
- LibreOffice
- Memberstack
- Memtime
- Microsoft OneNote
- MeetGeek
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Circleback, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
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Circleback badge
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