Kalima vs Zoom AI Companion

Why people compare these two

Zoom AI Companion is included with paid Zoom Workplace plans, which start at $15.99 per user per month, and it is not available on the free Basic plan. If your company already pays for Zoom, AI Companion costs nothing extra. That is a hard offer to compete with on price, and this page will not pretend otherwise.

The comparison is about what happens to everything that is not a Zoom meeting.

One platform against all audio

AI Companion is a Zoom feature. It summarises Zoom meetings, chapters Zoom recordings, answers questions about the Zoom call you are in, and drafts follow- ups from it. Within Zoom it is well integrated, it respects the account's administration model, and Zoom states plainly that customer audio, video, chat and screen sharing are not used to train its AI models.

Outside Zoom it does not exist. A Microsoft Teams call, a Google Meet, a Webex meeting, a Slack huddle, a lecture, an interview in a room, a podcast recording, a webinar you are watching, a phone call on speaker: none of these are Zoom meetings, and AI Companion is not there for any of them.

Kalima records the audio the device can hear. Zoom is one of the things it hears.

Plans and limits, side by side

Figures checked on 8 September 2026.

The last row is the one that decides it for many individuals. AI Companion is enabled or disabled by whoever administers the Zoom account. In a company that has turned it off, or on an account you do not control, the feature is simply not available to you, and no amount of wanting it changes that.

Where Kalima is the better fit

Companies that use more than one meeting platform. Almost all of them do. Teams for internal calls, Zoom with one client, Google Meet with another, Webex with a public-sector customer. One tool that covers all four is worth more than four features that each cover one.

Recording outside meetings entirely. Roughly half of what people transcribe is not a scheduled video call.

Languages. 60 against 30+, with live translation in the session rather than as a separate entitlement.

Meetings you join as a guest. On someone else's Zoom account, their administrator decides what AI Companion does. Kalima records from your side and asks nobody.

European hosting. Built and run in Germany.

Where Zoom AI Companion is still the better choice

All-Zoom organisations. If every meeting is a Zoom meeting on your own account, AI Companion is included, integrated and free of an extra purchase decision.

Administered environments. The permissions, retention and availability controls live where IT already manages Zoom.

No new vendor. No procurement, no data-processing agreement, no additional supplier. For a large organisation this is often the deciding argument.

In-meeting Q&A. Asking the assistant what was decided before you joined is a genuinely good feature, tightly bound to the Zoom client.

How Kalima captures the audio

Kalima records on the device that is already in the meeting. The desktop app takes the microphone and the system audio, mixes them, and streams that to the transcription engine. Nothing dials into the call, so the participant list shows the people who were invited and nobody else.

That has three consequences worth knowing before you compare feature lists.

The first is access. A tool that joins as a guest needs permission to join. In an external meeting that permission belongs to the host, and in a company that blocks unknown participants it may never be granted. Capturing locally moves the decision to the person doing the recording.

The second is coverage. A meeting bot only works where its integration exists, which in practice means Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. Local capture has no such list. Kalima records a Webex call, a Slack huddle, a Discord call, a webinar you are watching, a lecture in a room, or a video playing in a browser tab, because to the desktop app all of these are simply audio.

The third is timing. There is no bot to admit and no recording to process afterwards, so the transcript exists while the conversation is still running. Desktop audio capture and meeting detection are enabled on every Kalima plan, including the free one.

Questions people ask

Can I use Kalima for Zoom meetings? Yes. It records the audio Zoom is playing, so it works on a call you host, a call you are invited to, and a call on an account that has AI Companion switched off.

Does Kalima replace AI Companion? For transcription, translation and summaries, it covers the same ground and reaches further. For Zoom-specific administration and the in-client experience, it does not try to.

What if my organisation has disabled AI Companion? That is one of the more common reasons people arrive at this page. Kalima runs on your device and depends on no Zoom setting.

Is AI Companion available on the free Zoom plan? No. It comes with paid Zoom Workplace plans.