Spinach AI Review: Unlimited Free Notes and One Big Catch

Spinach AI is a meeting assistant that joins your calls and writes the notes. It then pushes the follow-up work, like tickets and CRM updates, into the tools your team already uses. The free Starter plan gives you unlimited recording and transcription, which no big rival matches. Whether you should pay for it depends on how many meetings your team sits through each week.

What is Spinach AI?

Spinach AI is an AI meeting assistant that records your video calls and turns them into notes your team can act on. Action items land where your team works, whether that is a Slack channel, a Jira ticket, or a Salesforce record.

The company started out as a Scrum helper for software teams under the spinach.io name. That version focused on standups and sprint planning. The product has since grown into a general meeting tool for sales, HR, and operations teams, and it now lives at spinach.ai. Companies like Netflix, Zendesk, and GoDaddy appear on its customer list.

Spinach supports transcription in up to 100 languages. That matters if your team runs calls in more than one language, because many rivals handle far fewer.

Are the notes any good?

Mostly, yes. Spinach holds a 4.6 out of 5 rating across 25 reviews on G2. Reviewers praise how it takes an unstructured call and returns structured meeting minutes, and they like getting the summary by email with one-click ticket creation. The complaints are worth knowing too: some users report that summaries can slip in accuracy over time and that the AI struggles with people’s names. Skim your first few summaries before you trust them with clients.

How does Spinach AI work?

You connect your Google or Microsoft calendar. Spinach then joins the meetings you choose. Here is the flow for a typical call:

1. Connect your calendar. Sign up at spinach.ai and link Google Calendar or Microsoft Calendar.
2. Pick your meetings. Tell Spinach which calls it should join. You can set it to skip 1-on-1s or personal events.
3. Let it listen. Spinach joins as a participant on Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, or Webex and records the call.
4. Get your notes. A few minutes after the call ends, you get a summary, the full transcript, and a list of action items.
5. Send the work onward. Spinach can post the recap to Slack or email, draft follow-ups, create tickets, and update your CRM.

Prefer to see it in motion? This short demo comes from Spinach AI’s own channel:

What can Spinach AI do?

The core job is notes. Spinach records the call and delivers a transcript plus a summary you can share. Around that core, it handles the boring work that follows a meeting:

• It drafts recap emails and sends them for you.
• It creates and updates tickets in Jira, Linear, Trello, ClickUp, Asana, and Monday.com.
• It updates records in Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, and Attio after sales calls.
• It posts summaries to Slack and syncs docs to Notion and Confluence.
• It answers questions about past meetings with AI search across your transcripts.

There is also a Transcript and AI Summary API. It comes with the Enterprise plan and costs extra as an add-on on some other plans. Most teams will not need it, but it is there if you want meeting data inside your own apps.

Is Spinach AI free? Pricing explained

Yes. The Starter plan is free and includes unlimited meeting recording, transcription, and basic AI summaries. You do not hit a monthly minutes wall like you do on most free notetakers.

The Pro plan’s pay-as-you-go model is unusual. You pay from $2.90 for each hour of meetings Spinach processes, and you can add your whole team without per-seat fees. That is cheap for a team with few meetings. It gets expensive for a team that lives on calls.

What the free plan leaves out

Starter covers the capture side of the job, and the word doing the work in Spinach’s own plan description is basic. The deeper features sit on paid plans: advanced summary formats, the workflow automations that file tickets and update your CRM, and onboarding help on Business. Spinach also sells its transcript API separately on some plans.

If you want a record of what was said and a short summary, the free plan is enough, and you will never pay a cent. If you want Spinach to do the follow-up work for you, that is exactly the part it charges for.

What Spinach AI costs for three real team sizes

Prices per meeting hour are hard to picture, so here is the math for three common setups. The numbers use the published base rates and a four-week month: $2.90 per meeting hour on Pro, and $19 to $29 per user per month on Business depending on whether you pay annually or monthly.

Pay-as-you-go wins when meetings are rare, and seats win when they are daily. If your team debates which side it falls on, run a month on Starter first and count the hours Spinach actually joins.

Which apps does it connect to?

Spinach works with the four big meeting platforms: Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Webex. Beyond that, it offers about two dozen native integrations, and Zapier opens the door to thousands more. These are the ones most teams will care about:

Is Spinach AI safe to use at work?

Spinach holds SOC 2 Type 2 certification and states that it complies with GDPR and HIPAA. The company says customer data is never used to train AI models, and it backs its security claims with third-party audits and standard controls like encryption. Enterprise customers can sign a Business Associate Agreement, which health teams need.

One thing to plan for: Spinach joins your call as a visible participant. Clients and interview candidates will see it. Tell people they are being recorded. In some places the law requires consent from everyone on the call.

How to keep Spinach out of a meeting

You stay in control of where the bot goes. When you connect your calendar, you pick which meetings Spinach joins, and you can exclude 1-on-1s and personal events from the start. During a live call, the host can remove the Spinach participant the same way you remove any attendee.

Anything already captured can be cleaned up afterward. Spinach’s account settings let you remove meetings and delete your account data, and its help center has a whole section on data, account, and meeting removal. If your company handles patient or financial data, look at the Enterprise plan, where the custom data retention rules and the BAA live.

Spinach AI vs Otter vs Granola

Spinach’s closest rivals take different paths. Otter is the veteran with a capped free plan. Granola skips the bot and works like a smart notepad on your device.

Pick Spinach when the notes need to end up somewhere else, like a ticket or a CRM record. Otter suits people who mostly want a live transcript while they talk. Granola fits anyone whose guests would balk at a bot on the call.

Who should use it, and who should skip it

Use it if your team runs lots of meetings on Zoom, Meet, Teams, or Webex and the follow-up work keeps slipping. The free plan alone beats most rivals for pure transcription. Sales and support teams get real value from the CRM updates.

Skip it if you rarely meet, you record mostly in-person conversations on your phone, or your clients would object to a bot on the call. Solo users who just want transcripts can start with the free plan but may find lighter tools simpler.

Verdict: worth it for meeting-heavy teams

Spinach AI earns 4.2 out of 5. The free Starter plan is the most generous in this category, and the integrations turn notes into finished work instead of another document nobody reads. The main caution is cost planning: pay-as-you-go looks cheap until you count your real meeting hours. Start free, run it for two weeks, then decide if the Business plan pays for itself.

Best guides to read next

• Trint review: AI transcription for journalists and teams
• XNote review: the AI smart notebook that digitizes handwriting
• Podnotes review: turn audio into show notes

Which meeting notetaker does your team trust? Tell us in the comments. We read every one.