Choose Otter if the meeting itself is where you need help: live captions, real-time text, participants who benefit from reading along. Choose Fireflies if the archive is the point: many meetings, several people needing to search them later, summaries that route somewhere automatically. For a solo freelancer taking a few client calls a week, Otter's free plan is the more honest starting point. For a team accumulating meetings it will need to search, Fireflies is built for the job, but check its storage limit before assuming the free plan covers you.
Both tools join your calls, transcribe them and produce a summary. On that description they are interchangeable, and choosing between them on accuracy percentages published by their own marketing is a waste of an afternoon.
The useful distinction is when the value arrives. Otter is strongest during the meeting; Fireflies is strongest weeks later, when someone needs to find what was agreed. Those are different products wearing the same label, and the free plans make the difference concrete in a way the feature lists do not.
The picks that stand out
Otter.ai
Real-time transcription and captions during the call, which is an accessibility feature as much as a note-taking one.
Fireflies.ai
Built around what happens after the call: querying past meetings, routing summaries, keeping a record the team can search.
At a glance
| Criterion | Otter.ai | Fireflies.ai |
|---|---|---|
| Used mainly for | Meeting transcription, action items | Meeting transcription, AI meeting summaries |
| Entry price | $16.99/mo · Pro | $18.00/mo · Pro |
| Free plan | ✓Yes | ✓Yes |
| Free trial | ✕No | ✕No |
| Works on | Web, iOS, Android | Web, Chrome, iOS, Android |
| Documented integrations | Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce | Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce |
| Setup | Easy: minutes | Easy: minutes |
| Main limitation | Accuracy drops in noisy audio | Free plan stores only 400 minutes per team, so the archive fills fast |
| Our evidence level | Vendor documented | Vendor documented |
| Try it | Try Otter.ai ↗ | Try Fireflies.ai ↗ |
Every cell comes from the tool's record, built from its official documentation and pricing page. The integrations listed are the ones the vendor documents, not tested by us.
Both free plans run out, in opposite places
Otter's free plan caps how much you transcribe: a monthly allowance of transcription minutes, after which you wait for the month to turn over. Fireflies takes the opposite approach: transcription and AI summaries are unlimited on the free plan, but only a few hundred minutes are stored per team, so the archive fills and older material stops being available. Read that difference carefully, because it maps directly onto the two use cases. If you record a lot and revisit little, Fireflies' free plan is more generous. If you record occasionally but need everything you recorded to still be there, Otter's is.
Fireflies' annual discount is unusually steep
Most software offers something like two months free for paying yearly. The gap between Fireflies' monthly and annual rates is materially larger than that, which is a fact worth naming rather than glossing over: choosing monthly flexibility costs a great deal more per seat than it does with most tools, and the headline price you see quoted in comparison articles is almost always the annual one. Decide deliberately whether you are committing for a year. Otter also discounts annual billing, on more conventional terms.
Otter owns the live call; Fireflies owns what comes after
Otter's real-time transcription appears during the meeting, which makes it useful to participants while they are still talking: for anyone who processes text more easily than speech, that is an accessibility feature, not a convenience. Fireflies invests instead in the layer above the transcript: querying across your whole meeting history, summary formats that differ by meeting type, and pushing output into the other tools your team uses. Neither is imitating the other badly; they have made different bets about where a meeting tool earns its subscription.
What neither of them fixes
Transcription accuracy degrades in poor audio, and no amount of AI summarisation repairs a transcript that misheard the meeting. Both vendors' accuracy claims assume clean conditions; a bad speakerphone in a room with three people talking over each other will defeat either one. Fireflies also meters its AI credits separately from transcription, so the summarising capability and the recording capability run out independently: a detail that surprises people who assumed one allowance covered both. Test on your worst recurring call, not your best.
Pricing side by side
Otter.ai Pro · in dollars
Fireflies.ai Pro · in dollars
Each tool's paid entry plan multiplied by the number of seats, free plan and tax excluded. One currency for all: the bars share a scale and compare directly. Prices read on the official pages (25.10.2026).
| Tool | Verified price | Billing condition | Free | Checked | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Otter.ai | $16.99/mo · Pro | $8.33/user/mo billed annually; $16.99/user/mo billed monthly | Yes | 25.10.2026 | Visit ↗ |
| Fireflies.ai | $18.00/mo · Pro | $18 per user/month billed monthly; $10 per user/month billed annually (Fireflies advertises up to 44% off) | Yes | 25.10.2026 | Visit ↗ |
Frequently asked questions
How does Fathom compare to these two?
Fathom is the third serious option in this category and competes most directly with Otter on the free plan. We compare Otter and Fathom head to head on a separate page, and the meeting assistants roundup covers the full field including Fireflies and Krisp.
Do I need permission to record participants?
Usually yes, and in some jurisdictions always. Both tools announce themselves when joining a call, which helps, but consent rules for recording conversations vary by country and sometimes by region within a country. Treat this as a legal question about where your participants are, not a product question: neither vendor's default settings constitute compliance advice.
Will either work with our video platform?
Both cover the mainstream platforms. Because integration coverage changes faster than anything else in this category, check the vendor's current list against the platform you actually use rather than trusting any comparison article, including this one, on that specific point.
Is a meeting assistant worth it for a solo freelancer?
Often yes, for one reason that has nothing to do with note-taking: it lets you stop splitting attention between listening to a client and writing down what they said. If you take more than a couple of substantive client calls a week, start on a free plan and see whether you go back to the transcripts. If you never open them, you did not need the paid tier.