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Recall.ai vs MeetingBaaS in 2026 — prices, what each actually does, and the third option

By Jack Jay · 17 September 2026 · 6 min read

Somebody typed "is MeetingBaaS worse than Recall.ai?" into Google, and Google offered them this site — which had no page for it. Now it does. The short answer: they are the same machine with different meters on it, and which is "worse" depends entirely on how many hours you record and whether you want a monthly plan. The long answer, with every number taken from the two pricing pages on 17 September 2026, follows — and a disclosure first: TeamMeet's own notetaker runs on Recall.ai. We picked it for reasons in this post, and we have tried to be fair to the other side anyway.

What they both are

A meeting bot API is a fleet of browsers in containers, with a REST call in front. You POST a Zoom, Google Meet or Teams link; a participant with a name you chose appears in the call; webhooks tell you when it joined, when it started recording, when the call ended; afterwards you download a mixed video, a mixed audio track and a transcript with the platform's participant names attached where the platform reported them. We took the whole architecture apart in Why a meeting bot needs a whole browser to take notes; both vendors run some version of it, and both inherit its one structural limit: the bot hears one mixed stream, so who spoke is reconstructed from the platform's active-speaker signal and from diarisation, and it is a guess whenever two people overlap or a shared microphone is in the room.

That is the thing to hold onto when comparing them. Neither has better ears. They differ in price, platforms, transcription options, and how much of the stack they let you see.

Prices, side by side

Recall.aiMeetingBaaS
UnitPer hour of recording, prorated to the secondTokens — 1 token per hour of recording
Price per hour$0.50 on Pay As You Go$0.35–$0.50, by token pack: Boost $50 / 100 tokens ($0.50), Growth $100 / 220 ($0.45), Power $625 / 1,550 ($0.40), Infinity $1,500 / 4,250 ($0.35)
Transcription+$0.15/h built-in+0.25 tokens/h with Gladia; +0.05 tokens/h bring-your-own-key (Gladia, Deepgram, AssemblyAI, Speechmatics, Soniox)
StreamingReal-time transcript / audio / video endpoints+0.10 tokens/h per input or output stream
Free tierFirst 5 hours free; 7 days of storage free per recording8 hours free on Pay as You Go
Monthly plansPay As You Go; Launch and Enterprise at custom pricingPay as You Go (free), Pro $99/mo, Scale $199/mo, Enterprise $299/mo — plus tokens
Storage$0.05 per recorded hour kept for 30 days after the free weekNot itemised on the pricing page
Startups$0.25/h introductory rate for the first 10,000 hours, by application—
Tokens expire?n/a"Tokens never expire"

Worked out for a recording with a transcript:

  • Recall: $0.50 + $0.15 = $0.65 per hour, any volume, no plan. 100 hours a month is $65.
  • MeetingBaaS: 1.25 tokens per hour. At the smallest pack that is $0.625/h; at the largest, $0.4375/h. 100 hours a month is $62.50 on Boost tokens, or $43.75 if you pre-buy $1,500 of Infinity tokens — plus whatever monthly plan you are on.

So at small volume they cost about the same; at large volume MeetingBaaS's pre-paid tokens are cheaper per hour, and Recall's startup rate ($0.25/h + $0.15 transcription = $0.40/h) beats both if you qualify. Recall's per-second proration matters for short calls: a twelve-minute standup is 0.2 hours on Recall and, depending on how MeetingBaaS rounds, potentially more.

Platforms and integrations

  • Recall.ai lists Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex and Slack Huddles, plus a Desktop Recording SDK for calls that have no link at all, billed at the same rate. Four API regions (US East, US West pay-as-you-go, EU Central, Japan).
  • MeetingBaaS lists Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. It publishes its bots, SDKs and MCP servers as open source, and offers deployment inside your own perimeter "when the data cannot leave it" — the one thing Recall does not sell.

Both have calendar integrations (connect a user's Google or Microsoft calendar; bots are scheduled into meetings automatically), both have webhooks for bot status and artifacts, both give you the mixed MP4 and a word-level transcript.

Transcription

Recall's built-in transcription is its own; you can also pass a third-party provider's key. MeetingBaaS is built around Gladia by default and lets you bring your own key to Gladia, Deepgram, AssemblyAI, Speechmatics or Soniox at a lower token rate — which is the better deal if you already have a transcription contract. Diarisation quality is a property of the provider and of the mixed stream, not of the bot vendor; do not expect either to name the second person who talks over the first.

So, is MeetingBaaS worse?

No. It is newer, narrower (three platforms, not five), and more open (public bots, self-hosting). It is cheaper if you pre-pay, and its monthly plans are a cost Recall does not have. Recall is the more established fleet, with more platforms, per-second billing, a startup rate, and a desktop SDK for the meetings that never had a link.

Pick Recall.ai if you need Webex or Slack Huddles, if you are a startup that can get the introductory rate, if your calls are short and many, or if you want the broader platform list. Pick MeetingBaaS if you need the bot code to be inspectable, if the recordings must stay inside your perimeter, if you already pay a transcription provider, or if you record enough hours that the token discount matters.

We picked Recall for the TeamMeet notetaker because of platform coverage (Webex included) and per-second billing, and because the notetaker is not our product — the room is.

The third option, which is the reason this site exists

Both vendors exist because Zoom, Meet and Teams have no door for programs, so a program has to arrive as a browser. When the room itself has an API, the fleet, the tokens and the guessing all go away. On TeamMeet a bot is one WebSocket and one key, it is listed to everyone in the room as an agent, and every transcript line arrives with the speaker attached — not because the diarisation is better, but because there is no mixed stream: each participant's browser transcribes its own microphone. The whole bot is thirty lines, verified against the live server, in How to build a meeting bot, and the agent API is free.

That only helps if the meeting happens here. For the meetings that still happen on Zoom, use a bot API — ours, if you would rather not integrate one: paste the link on the notetaker page, and the transcript and recording land in the same dashboard, with an honest count of the lines the bot could not put a name on.

Sources

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