Krisp review

Krisp is a noise-cancellation app that strips background sound out of a live call before it reaches the other end, bundled with an AI meeting assistant in the same account. Core pricing runs $16 a month per user billed monthly, or $8 a month per user billed annually, after a 7-day trial that needs no credit card. Krisp used to give away a free-forever tier; that plan is gone as of 2026, which matters if you landed here searching for a free noise-cancelling app. Trustpilot rates it 3.0 out of 5 from 412 reviews, G2 rates it 4.7 out of 5 from roughly 1,600. Both numbers are real, and the gap between them is worth understanding before you buy (covered below).

What Krisp does on a live call

Krisp installs as a virtual microphone and virtual speaker at the operating-system level, not as a plugin inside one app. That’s the structural difference from Zoom’s and Microsoft Teams’ own noise suppression, which ships free on every plan but only cleans audio inside that single app. Turn Krisp on once and it cleans your mic input and the incoming audio from other speakers on Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, Slack Huddles, Discord, Webex, WeChat and Loom, plus any other app that reads from your system’s audio input or output. It also cuts echo and cross-talk, the voices bleeding in from someone else’s background. All of that processing happens on the device itself: Krisp’s privacy policy states voice data never leaves the machine during noise cancellation, and the company doesn’t store or access that audio.

How much does Krisp cost?

The trial unlocks everything, including noise cancellation, recording and transcription, before you pick a plan. After seven days, keeping noise cancellation running requires a paid subscription; there’s no free-forever fallback anymore.

Does Krisp clean audio you’ve already recorded?

No, and Krisp says so itself. Its own blog tells readers that if a recording already exists, they’re cleaning it after the fact, and points them to a dedicated audio cleaner instead of to Krisp. A second Krisp blog post, written specifically to explain how to clean up recorded audio, skips Krisp entirely and recommends Adobe Audition, Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, describing Krisp only as something you turn on during a live meeting. If you have a video or voice memo that’s already noisy, two tools built for that job: Adobe Podcast’s Enhance Speech is free for up to an hour a day (a 30-minute, 500 MB cap per file), with a $9.99/mo Premium tier that extends that to 4 hours a day and adds video support and speaker separation. Descript’s Studio Sound sits inside its editor: the free plan covers 60 minutes of media a month with limited Studio Sound, and paid plans start at $24/mo billed annually (Hobbyist) if you need more. Neither is a Krisp feature. Both are the right next step if your file is already recorded.

What about meeting notes and transcripts?

Beyond noise cancellation, Krisp records and transcribes meetings without a visible bot joining the call, since it works off your own device session, and turns the transcript into automated notes and action items. Core includes unlimited transcription and AI notes plus 10 GB of storage and unlimited integrations and webhooks; Advanced adds a manager view, deal grouping, trim and comment tools, Salesforce and ConnectWise integrations, and 60 GB of storage. You can also upload an existing recording for transcription, but that’s a notes feature, not a noise-cleaning one; it transcribes the file as-is rather than quieting it. One spec worth flagging before you rely on Krisp for a non-English team: no page we checked confirms exactly how many languages meeting transcription supports, so confirm directly with Krisp if that matters for your use case.

Is Krisp’s noise cancellation private?

Krisp draws a real line between its two main functions on privacy. Noise cancellation is local on every plan; your mic audio never reaches Krisp’s servers. Transcription and AI notes work differently: that audio is processed in Krisp’s cloud by default, and private on-device transcription and recording is gated to Enterprise. Krisp’s homepage advertises SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA and PCI-DSS compliance badges, but the HIPAA one needs a caveat the badge doesn’t give you: a signed Business Associate Agreement, the legal document that actually makes a vendor HIPAA-compliant for a healthcare practice, is available only at the Enterprise tier, and only once you’re buying 100 or more seats. A therapist or small clinic on Core or Advanced doesn’t get a BAA from Krisp, badge or no badge.

Why Trustpilot and G2 tell such different stories

A 3.0 out of 5 on Trustpilot next to a 4.7 on G2 looks like a data error until you read what each pool of reviewers is actually rating. Trustpilot’s 412 reviews skew toward people with a billing problem: 15% are one-star, clustered around auto-renewal. One reviewer wrote that Krisp turned on auto-renew without notifying them and then declined a refund; another described the app creating an unprompted calendar event reminding them to install the desktop client, calling it bad practice. A separate, recurring complaint on both platforms is resource use: one Trustpilot reviewer measured the app using 1.4 GB of memory just sitting on standby, and G2 reviewers report lag, choppy audio and fan spin-up on older or already-loaded machines, the real cost of running neural noise suppression in real time. G2’s 1,600-plus reviews lean toward people evaluating the feature set day to day, where the noise cancellation draws consistent praise, alongside gripes that accent conversion can distort natural tone and that the app sometimes disconnects and needs re-setup. Add the 2026 retirement of the free-forever plan, and you get three distinct sources of frustration showing up more heavily in one review pool than the other.

A few alternatives worth knowing about

If Krisp isn’t the right fit, here’s where the adjacent searches usually land. NVIDIA Broadcast is free and does real-time mic and webcam noise removal, but it needs a compatible RTX GPU and runs on Windows only, with no file-cleaning mode either. Zoom’s and Microsoft Teams’ own built-in suppression are free on any plan and genuinely effective, but each works inside that app alone, not across your whole system the way Krisp does. Otter.ai competes on the meeting-transcription side (free plan covers 300 minutes a month with a 30-minute cap per conversation, Pro runs $8.33/mo billed annually) but has no real-time noise-cancellation feature of its own. Granola is a similar meeting-notes competitor, free on its Basic plan with notes hidden after 30 days, $14 per user a month on Business, and like Otter, it doesn’t touch your mic audio.

Who should buy it, and who should skip it

Krisp fits remote workers and anyone on frequent video calls from a home office, co-working space or anywhere with unpredictable background noise, who wants cancellation that follows them across every app instead of being locked into Zoom or Teams. It also fits sales and support teams that want transcripts and action items generated automatically from calls already happening on Zoom, Teams or Meet. Skip it if you’re trying to clean a file that’s already recorded; go to Adobe Podcast’s Enhance Speech or Descript’s Studio Sound instead. Skip it too if you need a real HIPAA BAA below 100 seats, or if you came looking for the old free-forever plan; that plan is gone, and the only no-cost option today is a 7-day trial.