Circleback AI Review: Meeting Notes, Mobile App and Cost

Priya manages product at a 40-person software company in Denver. Her day is six Zoom and Google Meet calls, and she wants notes and action items to land in Notion without anyone typing. Tom sells roofing supplies across Ohio. His meetings happen in contractor offices and on job sites, and the only device he has with him is his iPhone. (Both are composites, not real people.)

Both searched for Circleback AI this week, and both want the same three answers: what the notes look like, whether there's a real phone app, and what it costs. Most of the reviews ranking today skip the phone part or quote prices from 2024.

This Circleback AI review is built from Circleback's own pricing page, help docs and App Store and Google Play listings as they read on November 13, 2026, plus public user reviews. We did not test it hands-on. You'll get a table of every way Circleback captures a meeting, what the iPhone and Android apps do, the full price list with yearly totals, and who it suits.

A disclosure first: ParrotNotes publishes this blog, and ParrotNotes is our app. It appears near the end, for readers like Tom who record face-to-face conversations on a phone. If that's you, you can try ParrotNotes free and come back for the Circleback facts.

Circleback AI review in short

Circleback suits you if most of your meetings are online calls, you want notes, action items and searchable history across your whole team, and you'd like the results pushed into tools like Notion, HubSpot or Salesforce. It has a bot that joins calls, a bot-free desktop app for Mac and Windows, and phone and Apple Watch apps for meetings in a room. Its Free plan has unlimited meetings.

Look elsewhere if you need more than 30 days of history without paying, your phone is your only work device and key features need to be there, or you mix two languages in one conversation and want both kept in the transcript.

What Circleback AI is (and what it isn't)

Circleback is an AI meeting notetaker from Circleback AI, Inc., a San Francisco startup that went through Y Combinator. Its homepage sums it up as "AI-powered notes, action items, automations, and search." After each meeting you get written notes, a speaker-labeled transcript, a list of action items and the option to ask questions across everything you've recorded.

One naming trap: searches for "circleback" also bring up CircleBack, an older contact-management app at circleback.com, and a lender called Circleback Lending. Neither is related. This review covers only the meeting notes app at circleback.ai.

How Circleback captures a meeting

This is where Circleback differs from most note takers. It gives you five ways to capture a conversation, and its help article on getting started with recording explains when each one fits. Here they are side by side, as of November 2026:

The bot is the easy option: connect Google or Outlook Calendar, pick which meetings it should join, and it shows up. If you'd rather not have an extra participant, Circleback's desktop app page says it captures meetings "without a bot joining the call." It also keeps meeting video by default, so slides and dashboards shown on screen make it into the notes. You can turn video off and keep only audio.

For Priya, the bot or the desktop app covers nearly every meeting. Tom needs the next section.

The Circleback mobile app on iPhone and Android

Yes, Circleback has a real mobile app. The Circleback for mobile page links to the App Store and Google Play, and both apps are free to download. Here's what Circleback's help article on recording with the mobile app says it does, checked November 13, 2026:

• It records in-person meetings through your phone's microphone, audio only. Tap the new meeting button and recording starts right away.
• It keeps recording in the background when you lock the phone or switch apps. A Live Activity on iPhone, or a live notification on Android, lets you pause, resume or finish.
• It links to your calendar. Pick the matching calendar event and the notes get the right title and participant names.
• An incoming phone call may pause the recording, the help article warns.
• iPhone extras: start a recording with a long press of the Action button, or with a Lock Screen or Home Screen widget.
• Ask Circleback works on the phone. The app's Ask tab lets you type questions like "What did we decide in this morning's standup?", according to the mobile Assistant article.

The iPhone app needs iOS 16.4 or later and also runs on iPad and Apple Vision Pro, per its App Store listing.

Apple Watch recording

Circleback also has an Apple Watch app, which is rare for a meeting notetaker. Its Apple Watch help article says it records "from your wrist, without your phone," then uploads the audio when you finish. You can add a complication to your watch face for one-tap recording, or use the Action button on an Apple Watch Ultra running watchOS 26 or later.

Phone calls: import, don't record

The Circleback app doesn't record phone calls itself. Its phone call article tells you to use your phone's built-in call recording, then share the file to Circleback. On iPhone that means iOS 18.1 or later; on Android it depends on your phone, country and carrier.

In both cases, everyone on the call hears an announcement that it's being recorded. Our guides on recording calls on iPhone and on Android walk through those built-in options.

Whatever you record, get consent first. Rules differ by state and country; our post on one-party consent states covers the US basics. It's general information, not legal advice.

So Tom has a working phone app. The question for him is whether it's the right one, and we come back to that below.

Meeting notes, Ask Circleback and automations

The notes are the core product. After each meeting, Circleback writes a summary, lists decisions and action items, assigns tasks to people and tags the meeting. You can edit notes, add your own, leave comments, clip moments and share a meeting with teammates.

Three features stand out on Circleback's site:

1. Ask Circleback. You question your whole meeting history in plain language and get answers with cited sources, per its store listings.
2. Automations. Notes and action items can go to Slack, Notion, Linear, HubSpot, Salesforce, Attio, Zoho, Zapier and others. The Free plan lists only "limited automations"; Pro unlocks all integrations.
3. API, MCP and CLI on every plan. Developers and AI tools that support MCP can read your meetings, even on Free.

It also imports history from other note takers. The homepage says you can bring meetings over from Fathom, Fireflies, Granola and Read AI.

Want a summary and action items from a conversation at a customer's site, from an app on the phone you already carry? Download ParrotNotes free and record your next visit.

Circleback AI cost: plans and pricing

Circleback charges per user, per month. The pricing page shows annual prices by default, with a Monthly toggle that raises Pro and Business. Every plan, including Free, has "unlimited meetings," according to the page's FAQ. Prices below are as of November 13, 2026:

Paid plans start with a free trial, but the page doesn't say how long it lasts. Circleback also lists a 50% student discount and a 30% non-profit discount, and says you can cancel "anytime with a single click."

What it costs in a year

Most reviews quote one number. Here's what a year of Circleback costs for three team sizes, from the prices above:

Annual billing saves about 17% on Pro and 14% on Business. Circleback's own example for a 50-person company is $9,000 a year on Pro, $15,000 on Business and $21,000 on Enterprise.

The Free plan's real limit

Unlimited meetings is generous. The catch is the 30-day meeting and recording history. On Free, a meeting from six weeks ago is gone from your account, so Ask Circleback can't search it either. If you want a running record of a customer or project, budget for Pro.

Take a five-person startup that runs on Free for a quarter. In month three, the founder asks Ask Circleback what a key customer said at kickoff. That meeting is past the 30-day window and no longer there. Moving the team to Pro on annual billing costs $900 a year, and from then on history is unlimited. (An illustration, not a real company.)

Languages, privacy and what users report

Languages. Circleback's store listings say it transcribes and writes notes in "over 100 languages." Its meeting languages article adds a detail that matters for bilingual teams: it detects the "predominantly-spoken language" and transcribes the entire meeting in that language. You can set notes to come out in a different language from the one spoken.

Privacy and security. Circleback's store listings say it is SOC 2 Type II and EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework certified, HIPAA and GDPR compliant, encrypts data at rest and in transit, and "does not use customer data to train models." On the pricing page, HIPAA compliance is listed on the Enterprise plan.

What users report. As of November 13, 2026, the iPhone app has a 4.8 rating from 282 ratings on the App Store, and the Android app a 4.9 from 124 reviews on Google Play, with 5,000+ downloads. The Android app was updated on November 12, 2026. Two Google Play reviews are worth reading before you commit:

• An Android user in March 2026 rated it highly but said some key functions are only available on desktop, which frustrated someone who works on a phone and tablet.
• A user in May 2025 said one of four in-person recordings was lost, which support put down to a software bug.

Two reviews aren't a trend. They're a reason to try the phone app on a low-stakes meeting first.

Where Circleback is strong

A fair review says what a product does well, and Circleback does a lot well:

• Every capture route in one account. Bot, bot-free desktop app, phone, watch and import all feed the same notes and search.
• A Free plan with unlimited meetings. Few notetakers give you speaker-labeled transcripts, the desktop app and the phone app at $0.
• No bot if you don't want one. The desktop app records Zoom, Meet, Teams and others from your computer. Our explainer on AI meeting notes without a bot covers how this works.
• Team tools. Shared teams, free viewers on Business, and automations into CRMs and project tools.
• Apple Watch recording. Useful if you'd rather not put a phone on the table.

Where it falls short

• 30 days of history on Free. Fine for trying it, not for a long customer relationship.
• Per-seat pricing. A 10-person team on Business pays $3,000 a year on annual billing.
• One language per transcript. A conversation that switches between English and Spanish is transcribed in whichever language dominates.
• Phone calls need a workaround. You record with the phone's own tool and import the file.
• Mobile isn't the full product, according to at least one Android user.

If you record in person on your phone: ParrotNotes

Tom doesn't need a bot. He needs to know what the contractor ordered, who signs off and when to follow up, without typing while he talks. That's the job ParrotNotes is built for.

ParrotNotes is a native app for iPhone and Android, plus macOS. You put the phone on the table, tap record and keep your eyes on the customer. It records with the screen locked, and recording works offline; transcription and AI run once you're connected. Transcription runs on Deepgram and the summaries on OpenAI.

Here's an honest side-by-side:

To be clear about where Circleback wins: if most of your meetings are online calls, or your team needs shared notes and CRM automations, Circleback does things ParrotNotes doesn't. ParrotNotes doesn't send a bot into calls, and Circleback's Free plan isn't capped by minutes.

ParrotNotes fits when the meeting happens in a room and the phone is the tool. Marisol, a food-service rep in Phoenix, meets restaurant owners in person, sometimes in English and sometimes in Spanish, all in one conversation. (Marisol is a composite.) On ParrotNotes Pro, both languages stay in the transcript, and she gets a summary, action items and a follow-up email draft before she leaves the parking lot.

Pro includes 3,000 minutes a month, recordings up to 3 hours, all AI features on every recording, speaker identification, AI chat across your notes and docx or PDF export. Details are on the pricing page. Already have a recording? Our free audio to text tool turns an audio file into text for free.

Comparing other notetakers too? See our Fireflies AI review, Granola AI review, Notta AI review and our roundup of the best AI note takers for in-person meetings.

The verdict of this Circleback AI review

Circleback AI is one of the most complete meeting notetakers on the market in November 2026. It covers online calls with a bot or a bot-free desktop app, in-person meetings with iPhone, Android and Apple Watch apps, and recorded phone calls by import. Its Free plan has unlimited meetings, and Pro costs $15 to $18 per user a month.

Its limits are the 30-day history on Free, per-seat pricing for larger teams, and one main language per transcript. For Priya and her online-first team, it's a strong pick.

For Tom and Marisol, who meet customers face to face and live on their phones, ParrotNotes is built for that job: one tap to record, mixed-language transcripts on Pro and sales frameworks on every AI-powered recording. Download ParrotNotes free, record your next customer meeting, and read the summary before you drive to the next stop.