Quick verdict
Short answer: If you only used Krisp to clean up your microphone, NVIDIA Broadcast (free, if you own an RTX graphics card) and SteelSeries Sonar (free, any Windows PC) do that job without a subscription. If you used Krisp as a meeting note-taker, Fathom and Fireflies.ai both have real free plans — Krisp no longer does.
Bottom line: Krisp now bundles noise cancellation with a bot-free AI note-taker, and charges for both from day eight. Split the two jobs apart and most people can cover one — or both — for free.
Why people look for Krisp alternatives
Krisp built its name on AI noise cancellation, then grew into a meeting assistant with transcription, recording, and AI notes. The catch is on its own pricing page: there is no ongoing free plan anymore, only a 7-day free trial with no credit card required. After that, Core costs $8 per user per month billed annually ($16 monthly) and Advanced costs $15 billed annually ($30 monthly). People who signed up years ago for a free noise filter, or who only need one half of the bundle, are the ones shopping around — and if your real need is meeting notes, our roundups of Fathom alternatives and Fireflies alternatives are worth a look too.
What Krisp’s pricing page doesn’t make obvious
Three details from Krisp’s own pricing page, verified during this run: recording storage is capped per seat, not pooled — 10 GB on Core and 60 GB on Advanced, so a small team cannot share one heavy user’s spare space. Accent conversion on Core is limited to 1 hour per day. And a BAA for HIPAA-covered work is only available for teams with 100 or more seats, which puts Krisp out of reach for small clinics and solo practitioners who need one signed. If any of those three affect you, they are a stronger reason to switch than the headline price.
The 8 best Krisp alternatives at a glance
| Tool | Best for | Free option | Paid starts | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA Broadcast | Noise removal on RTX PCs | Free | — | Best free pick if you have the GPU |
| SteelSeries Sonar | Noise removal on any Windows PC | Free | — | Best free pick without an RTX card |
| NoiseTorch | Linux and privacy-first users | Free, open source | — | Best open-source option |
| Fathom | Free meeting notes | Free plan | Paid tiers available | Best free note-taker |
| Fireflies.ai | Searchable meeting archive and CRM workflows | Free plan | Paid tiers available | Best for sales teams |
| MeetGeek | Meeting notes with automations | Free plan | Paid tiers available | Best for automation-heavy teams |
| Tactiq | Transcript-only capture, no audio stored | Free plan | From $8/mo | Best where recording audio is blocked |
| IRIS Clarity | Noise cancelling on both sides of a call | No free plan listed | From £9.50/seat/mo | Best for call centers |
1. NVIDIA Broadcast — best free noise removal for RTX owners
NVIDIA Broadcast is a free Windows app that uses an RTX graphics card (20-series or newer) to remove microphone noise and room echo, strip speaker noise, and clean up your camera feed with background removal and auto-frame. It replaces the noise-cancellation half of Krisp completely and costs nothing. The hard limit is hardware: no RTX card, no Broadcast — which is exactly why the next pick exists.
2. SteelSeries Sonar — best free noise removal without special hardware
Sonar is the free audio suite inside SteelSeries GG for Windows. It gives you an AI noise-cancelling virtual microphone that works in Zoom, Teams, Meet, and games, with no GPU requirement and no subscription. It was built for gamers and streamers, but remote workers get the same benefit: set Sonar as your mic once and every app sounds cleaner. Like Broadcast, it does notes not at all — it is purely the audio half.
3. NoiseTorch — best open-source option for Linux
NoiseTorch is a free, open-source app for Linux built on the RNNoise neural network. It creates a virtual microphone that suppresses background noise locally, with no account and nothing sent to a cloud server. If Krisp’s cloud processing or subscription is your objection — rather than its quality — NoiseTorch is the principled answer, as long as you live on Linux.
4. Fathom — best free meeting note-taker
Fathom records, transcribes, and summarizes Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams calls, and its free plan is genuinely usable rather than a trial: in our own Fathom coverage we found free users get unlimited recordings with a small monthly allowance of advanced AI summaries. A bot joins the call, unlike Krisp’s bot-free capture, but for most teams that is a fair trade for paying nothing. See how it stacks up in our Granola alternatives roundup if bot-free notes matter to you.
5. Fireflies.ai — best for searchable archives and CRM workflows
Fireflies joins your meetings, transcribes them, and builds a searchable archive with summaries, action items, and conversation analytics, with integrations into CRMs and tools like Slack and Notion. It has a free plan to start and paid tiers for teams that need the workflow features. It does not cancel noise live — pair it with Broadcast or Sonar if your room is loud.
6. MeetGeek — best for meeting automations
MeetGeek records and transcribes meetings, generates AI summaries and highlights, and pushes follow-ups into thousands of other apps through its integrations. A free plan makes it easy to test against Krisp’s note-taking side. Choose it when the value you want is what happens after the meeting — tasks, CRM updates, and shared highlights — rather than cleaner audio during it.
7. Tactiq — best where audio recording is not allowed
Tactiq captures a live text transcript in Google Meet and Zoom without recording or storing audio, which makes it a fit for government, education, and enterprise settings where recording is blocked by policy. It adds real-time action items and AI summaries on top of the transcript, has a free tier, and paid plans start at $8 per month. No noise cancellation — this replaces only Krisp’s notes, in the places Krisp’s recording cannot go.
8. IRIS Clarity — best for call centers and customer-facing teams
IRIS Clarity isolates voices on both sides of a conversation, removing the customer’s background noise as well as the agent’s — something one-sided mic filters cannot do. Pricing starts at £9.50 per seat per month. It is overkill for a home office, but for support and sales teams whose customers call from noisy places, it solves the half of the problem Krisp’s standard plans are weakest on.
Verdict: which Krisp alternative should you pick?
Split Krisp into its two jobs and the choice gets simple. For noise only: NVIDIA Broadcast if you own an RTX card, SteelSeries Sonar if you do not, NoiseTorch on Linux. For notes only: Fathom for a free start, Fireflies for team archives and CRM workflows, Tactiq where audio recording is banned. For both jobs plus two-way noise control at work, IRIS Clarity is the specialist. Stay with Krisp only if you specifically want one bot-free app doing both jobs and the per-seat storage caps and 100-seat BAA rule do not bite you.
Frequently asked questions
Is Krisp free in 2026?
No. Krisp’s pricing page offers a 7-day free trial with no credit card, then Core at $8 per user per month billed annually ($16 monthly). There is no ongoing free plan.
What is the closest free alternative to Krisp?
For noise cancellation, NVIDIA Broadcast (RTX owners) and SteelSeries Sonar (any Windows PC) are both fully free. For meeting notes, Fathom’s free plan is the closest no-cost replacement.
Does Discord still include Krisp?
Discord includes Krisp’s noise suppression technology inside its own voice settings, so Discord-only users may not need a separate Krisp subscription at all. It only cleans audio inside Discord, though.
Can one tool replace both Krisp’s noise cancelling and its notes?
Not well, for free. The alternatives split by job: audio tools do not take notes, and note-takers do not clean live audio. Combining a free audio tool with a free note-taker covers both at $0.