Fireflies vs Otter
If you're comparing Fireflies and Otter, you've already made the important decision: a person shouldn't be typing notes during a call. What's left is picking which of the two biggest names in AI meeting notes gets a seat at your meetings.
The short answer: Otter is a transcription product first, built for individuals who want live words on a screen. Fireflies is a meeting-automation product built for teams whose notes need to land somewhere, like a CRM, a task list, or a Slack channel. Both transcribe well enough that accuracy shouldn't be the deciding factor. The choice comes down to languages, the free plan, and what each company does with your recordings.
What each one actually is
Otter grew up as a live transcription app. Its bot, OtterPilot, joins Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams from your calendar and streams the transcript in real time, so you can watch the words scroll while someone is still talking. That live view is the whole appeal. Summaries and action items arrive after the call.
Fireflies treats the transcript as raw material. Its bot, named Fred, joins the same platforms plus a few more, records the call, and then the interesting part happens afterward: summaries with action items, plus a layer of AI apps and integrations that push notes into Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Notion, and the rest. Fireflies is aimed at teams, and increasingly at sales teams specifically.
The difference matters more than it sounds. If your meetings are mostly you taking notes for yourself, Otter's live transcript is genuinely nicer. If your notes need to become CRM fields and follow-ups without you retyping anything, Fireflies does more of that work.
What a call feels like
With Otter, the bot shows live captions to everyone on the call. That's useful if people want to follow along, and it also makes it obvious a third party is recording. Some hosts mute or remove the bot when they notice it.
With Fireflies, Fred sits quietly and delivers after the meeting, so it's less visible in the moment. Fireflies also sells a Chrome extension and a desktop app that record the meeting tab without sending a bot into the call at all.
Neither approach is wrong. They're for different comfort levels with a visible recording bot.
Pricing, side by side
At the time of writing, list prices look like this. Both companies change these pages regularly, so treat this as a snapshot rather than a contract.
| Plan | Fireflies | Otter |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Limited transcripts, roughly 400 min storage per team, about 20 AI credits a month | 300 min a month, 30-min cap per meeting, 3 lifetime imports |
| Entry paid, annual | Pro, $10 per seat | Pro, $8.33 per user |
| Entry paid, monthly | $18 per seat | $16.99 per user |
| Team, annual | Business, $19 per seat | Business, $19.99 per user |
| Team, monthly | $29 per seat | $30 per user |
| Enterprise | $39 per seat, annual only | Custom quote |
The entry tiers are close enough that price shouldn't decide it. For most people, the free plan does.
The free-plan trap nobody mentions
Otter's free plan gives you 300 minutes a month, but with a 30-minute cap per conversation. An hour-long client call stops transcribing at the 30-minute mark, and most people discover that during a real meeting, not while comparing plans. Fireflies meters differently: transcription is effectively unlimited on free, but storage and AI summaries are capped, so the free plan runs out in a different place.
If you're choosing on the free tier, know what each one is actually counting. Otter counts minutes. Fireflies counts storage and credits.
Languages
If your calls are in English, skip this section. If you have clients or teammates who speak anything else, it's the fastest way to rule one of these out.
Fireflies advertises transcription in 100+ languages, though its own pricing FAQ notes most of them are in beta and English is the primary supported language. Otter supports six: English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese Simplified in beta. For a US team running English-only calls, both are fine. For a team with calls in Polish, Hindi, or Portuguese, Fireflies is the only real option of the two.
Privacy: where they actually differ
This is the difference that never shows up in a feature table.
Otter's default is to use de-identified user recordings and transcripts to train its models. It's opt-out, not opt-in. A class-action lawsuit filed in 2025, Brewer v. Otter.ai, challenges that practice and how the bot handles consent. The case is still working through the courts, so treat it as an open question rather than a settled fact.
Fireflies states the opposite: it does not train AI on customer data, and its model vendors keep meeting content for zero days.
If you're in healthcare, legal, or finance, or if your calls include the words "we haven't announced this yet," that policy difference matters more than the price of a seat.
Who should pick which
Pick Otter if you mostly want a live transcript to read during the call, you meet in English on Zoom or Meet, and your notes are for you rather than a pipeline.
Pick Fireflies if your notes need to reach a CRM or task list without a human copying them, you work in more than a couple of languages, or you want conversation analytics like talk-time and questions asked without an enterprise contract.
There's a third case worth naming: teams that want the summary and action items but don't want a bot in the call at all. That's the niche Meetbook occupies. Meetbook records the meeting tab with no bot joining, and every point in its summary links back to the quote, speaker, and timestamp that produced it.
If the bot-in-the-call question is what's actually holding you back, read Meetbook vs Fireflies, Meetbook vs Otter, or the wider field in Fireflies alternatives and Otter alternatives.