Circleback

What it is

Circleback records a meeting, writes speaker-labeled notes and action items, then runs automations that push that output into the apps where the work continues — Linear issues, Notion pages, HubSpot contact and deal updates, Slack messages, raw webhooks. Ali Haghani and Kevin Jacyna founded it in 2023. It went through Y Combinator, raised $2.5M in 2024, and TechCrunch reported on 2026-08-31 that it has been profitable since, at more than $1M of ARR per employee across a team of eight — roughly $8M ARR. Both figures are company-disclosed and unaudited.

There are two capture modes, and the second is why it lands against Granola rather than only against the bot-based tools. The Circleback notetaker joins a call as a visible participant, the way Fireflies.ai and Otter.ai do. Or the macOS and Windows desktop app captures your microphone and your computer’s audio directly on Zoom, Meet, Teams or anything else that makes sound, with nothing in the participant list. Switch joining preferences off under Settings → Calendar and the bot never appears again. Mobile and Apple Watch apps cover conversations held in a room. Transcription covers 100+ languages — a vendor claim with no independent evaluation published.

The platform build-out is recent and precisely dated. App integrations and MCP shipped 2026-07-28. The API — notes, action items, transcripts, recordings, people, companies — landed 2026-08-20, with meeting import added 2026-09-09. Migration from competing notetakers shipped 2026-08-28, the four-tier plan lineup on 2026-08-31, and SSO with SAML, OIDC and SCIM provisioning on 2026-09-16.

The automation layer, specifically

This is the part worth evaluating, because notes and transcripts are now commodity across the whole category. An automation in Circleback is a trigger, an optional condition limiting which meetings fire it, and a chain of actions. The published actions: generate insights with AI, share the meeting, send a webhook, post notes to Slack, update Notion, create Linear issues, update HubSpot, update Salesforce, update Attio, update Zoho contacts, create monday.com items, or hand off to Zapier. Linear issues assign themselves to the named owner when that person is in the workspace. HubSpot updates match meeting invitees’ email addresses against contacts or deals. Automations run on their own by default, can be fired by hand, can be replayed against past meetings, and can be published for the whole workspace rather than one user.

The scoped case Circleback wins outright: a recurring meeting whose real output is a list of owned tasks — sprint planning, client check-ins, candidate debriefs through Ashby — where someone currently retypes action items into a tracker afterwards. Attach a condition for that meeting type, chain “create Linear issues,” and the retyping stops. That is a workflow purchase, not a notes purchase.

What the automation layer is not: CRM field sync. Fathom Business maps extracted insights into named CRM fields. Circleback updates the contact or deal record matched on email. If the ask from RevOps is “populate our custom next_step and competitor fields,” this is the wrong tool and Avoma or Fathom Business is the right one.

Pricing

Per user per month, monthly / annual, checked 2026-09-20 at circleback.ai/pricing.

• Free — $0. AI notes and action items, Ask Circleback, email drafting, online and in-person meetings, speaker-labeled transcripts, automatic tagging and sharing, API, MCP and CLI access, 2 teams. Automations are limited, and meeting and recording history stops at 30 days.
• Pro — $15 / $11. Unlimited meeting history, one year of recording storage, automations with every integration including Notion, HubSpot, Salesforce, Attio and webhooks, custom AI insights, a personalized notetaker participant, 5 teams.
• Business — $25 / $22. Admin and member roles, unlimited free viewers, custom data retention, enforceable default settings, two years of recording storage, usage dashboard, unlimited teams.
• Enterprise — $35 / $33. SSO with SAML or OIDC plus SCIM provisioning, invoice and PO billing, unlimited recording storage, priority support, HIPAA.

Pro annual at $11 is the cheapest fully-integrated seat in the segment: Granola Business runs $14, Fathom Team $15 annual on a two-seat minimum, Fireflies Business $19, Otter Business $19.99. Twelve seats cost $1,584 a year on Pro annual against $2,016 on Granola Business. The 21-27% gap is real, but it is under $500 a year at that headcount — cheaper seats alone do not justify a migration, and you should treat the automation write-path as the thing you are buying.

Best for

A 5-50 seat RevOps, recruiting or customer-success team whose post-meeting work is task creation and record hygiene rather than deal scoring, and who wants meeting history readable by Claude or ChatGPT over MCP on an $11 seat instead of inside a revenue-intelligence contract. The strongest single case is a mixed call load — some external calls where the counterparty declines a recording bot, some internal calls nobody wants a bot in, some conversations held in a room, and some calls you are not on at all. Circleback covers all four with one subscription, which neither a bot-only nor a device-only tool does.

Not for

Revenue teams whose question is which deals are at risk. Call scoring, deal intelligence and forecasting live in Gong, Avoma and Sybill, and Circleback does not compete there. Not for a team whose requirement is notes at zero cost permanently — Fathom’s free tier has no recording cap and no history wall, and Circleback’s free tier deletes at 30 days. And not yet for a 500-seat regulated rollout: SSO shipped four days before this entry was written, HIPAA and unlimited retention sit on the $33 Enterprise seat, and the vendor is eight people.

Versus the alternatives

• Granola — the fastest-growing entrant, and the closest comparison because both avoid the participant-list bot. Granola captures on your device only, so a meeting you skip has no notes at all. Pick Granola when the note you write yourself is the deliverable and you attend every call that matters. Pick Circleback when you also need coverage of calls you do not attend, and a write-path into a tracker that Granola’s integration list does not run.
• Fathom — pick it when the free tier has to carry real production usage, or when CRM field mapping is the requirement. Fathom added bot-free capture and an MCP server in 2026, which narrows the capture difference to near zero; the remaining trade is Fathom’s deeper CRM sync against Circleback’s broader non-CRM action list and cheaper full-integration seat. Watch Fathom’s cap of three CRM-sync users per domain on Team and Business.
• Fireflies.ai — the scale incumbent to benchmark on connector breadth and on unlimited storage from $19 a seat, with Deal Intelligence included at that tier. Its trade is the AI credits meter: the agentic features draw from a credit balance no seat tier caps. Circleback meters nothing.
• Otter.ai — the largest installed base in the category and the tool your counterparties already recognize in a participant list. Pick it when standardization and procurement familiarity outrank the automation layer.

If none fit — one language, no tracker to write into, notes read once and never again — stay on the free tier of whatever your calendar already connects to and spend nothing. The meeting recorder roundup and Granola vs Fathom cover that decision.

Watch-outs

• The free tier deletes meetings and recordings at 30 days. It is an evaluation tier wearing a free-plan label, and the drop-off it was built to fix was users hitting the old trial wall. Guard: run the evaluation on a real meeting type for two weeks, then decide — and if you are staying free past a month, export through the API before day 30 rather than discovering the wall when someone asks for a call from last quarter.
• Nothing announces the recording in desktop mode. No bot in the participant list means consent is entirely your obligation, and the two-party-consent jurisdictions — California, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Washington, Florida, and the EU under GDPR — require notice. Guard: put verbal notice in the call template and written notice in the calendar invite before rollout. Circleback has no org-wide “we are recording” banner to fall back on, so the process control is the only control.
• The vendor is eight people on $2.5M raised. Profitability at roughly $8M ARR is a genuine argument against the usual shutdown risk, but it is also a support organization of eight during an incident. Guard: the 2026-08-20 API and the 2026-08-28 importer both cut both ways — test a full export of notes, action items and transcripts during the trial and keep the script, so switching back out is a scheduled job rather than a rebuild.
• Governance features are stacked on the top two tiers and most of them are weeks old. Custom data retention and enforceable default settings start at $22, SSO and SCIM at $33 and shipped 2026-09-16, HIPAA at $33. Guard: if security review owns this purchase, price Enterprise from the start rather than modelling Pro, and ask for the SOC 2 report plus a named customer already running SSO in production — four days of general availability is not a reference.