Be clear: NOT a real-time Zoom meeting bot

Tools like Otter, Fireflies, Fathom, and tl;dv auto-join your Zoom calendar meetings as a bot, transcribe in real time, and push notes to your CRM/Notion/Slack automatically. mdisbetter does NONE of that. We are a manual post-meeting upload tool — you record the Zoom yourself (Cloud Recording is built into Zoom on paid tiers; Local Recording on all tiers), download the recording, upload to mdisbetter for transcription. No real-time presence in your meetings, no calendar integration, no auto-pushing notes anywhere.

Getting the recording from Zoom

Zoom Cloud Recording: enable Cloud Recording in your Zoom settings (paid Pro/Business/Enterprise tier), record the meeting via the Record button, after the meeting Zoom emails a link to download the recording from your Zoom account. Zoom Local Recording: enable Local Recording in settings (free tier supports this), record the meeting, the recording saves directly to your computer in ~/Documents/Zoom/ (or equivalent on your OS). Both produce MP4 files you can upload to mdisbetter.

Zoom's native transcript vs mdisbetter

Zoom's paid tiers include a built-in audio transcription feature for Cloud Recordings. For teams already paying for Zoom Business or above with the audio transcription add-on, the native transcript is the natural workflow — it's embedded in the Zoom recording UI. mdisbetter is the alternative when: (1) you're on Zoom's free tier without the transcription add-on, (2) you want transcripts outside the Zoom UI for archiving in your docs/Notion/wiki, (3) you need transcripts of Local Recordings (Zoom's native transcript only works on Cloud Recordings), (4) you want better accuracy than Zoom's native transcription on technical content (Whisper-class models often outperform Zoom's built-in transcription).

When the manual workflow makes sense

Solo founders or small teams who don't want a recording bot in every Zoom (some clients/prospects find them off-putting). Internal meetings where a permanent record is needed but a real-time bot is overkill. Recorded Zooms you join later (you couldn't attend, watch the recording, want a transcript for reference). One-off interviews or sensitive Zooms where you don't want a third-party bot capturing audio. Local-recorded Zooms where the cloud-only transcription tools don't apply.

For full meeting-intelligence workflows, use a real-time bot

If you need automated meeting capture, real-time transcription, action-item extraction, CRM sync, and team-wide meeting libraries, the right tools are Otter Business, Fireflies, Fathom, or tl;dv. Their per-user pricing reflects the integration depth ($10-25 per user per month typically). mdisbetter is the cheap manual alternative when those features aren't needed.