Fireflies.ai vs Otter.ai
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentOtter.ai compared with Fireflies.ai
Both are bot-based archive platforms at a similar price. Fireflies supports far more languages, has a deeper integration catalogue, and pushes conversation intelligence harder. Otter has the better live transcript, the stronger raw export story, and a longer track record. Pick Fireflies for multilingual teams and automation breadth; pick Otter if English-language transcription quality and a searchable archive are the actual job.
Choose Fireflies.ai if
Multilingual teams and startups that want one vendor covering transcription, conversation intelligence, task routing, and automation across sales, recruiting, and support, and who are willing to model minute and credit consumption rather than buying on the headline price.
Choose Otter.ai if
Individuals and teams who want a mature, accurate transcript of every call in a searchable archive, who are comfortable with a visible bot, and who either fit inside the free 300 minutes or are ready to pay for the unlimited Business tier at roughly $20 per seat annually.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Fireflies.ai | Otter.ai |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Meeting Notes | Meeting Notes |
| Starting price | $0 (Free), then $10 per user per month billed annually (Pro; $18 monthly) (free plan available) | $0 (Basic), then $8.33 per user per month (Pro, billed annually) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Per-seat subscription across four tiers, metered on two axes: storage minutes and monthly AI credits. Annual billing is roughly 35 to 45 percent cheaper than monthly. | Freemium per-seat subscription with a transcription-minute meter on the lower tiers. Free and Pro are metered in minutes per user per month; Business removes the meter and switches to a flat per-seat price. |
| Free plan | Free forever with unlimited transcription and unlimited AI summaries, 400 minutes of storage per team, 20 AI credits, Zoom, Meet, and Teams support, 100-plus language transcription, real-time notes, search, AskFred, and audio or video upload. | Basic gives 300 transcription minutes per month, a 30-minute cap per meeting, 1 concurrent meeting, and 3 lifetime file imports, plus live transcription, speaker ID, and AI Chat. |
| Free trial | No fixed trial period published; the free-forever tier is the evaluation path | No separate paid trial; the free Basic tier is the evaluation path |
| Best for | Multilingual teams and startups that want one vendor covering transcription, conversation intelligence, task routing, and automation across sales, recruiting, and support, and who are willing to model minute and credit consumption rather than buying on the headline price. | Individuals and teams who want a mature, accurate transcript of every call in a searchable archive, who are comfortable with a visible bot, and who either fit inside the free 300 minutes or are ready to pay for the unlimited Business tier at roughly $20 per seat annually. |
| Setup time | Fifteen minutes for basic capture: connect a calendar, confirm which meetings the bot should join, and install the Chrome extension if you use Google Meet. Configuring CRM field mapping, AI Skills, and topic trackers adds a few hours. | Under fifteen minutes. Sign up, connect Google or Microsoft calendar, choose whether OtterPilot auto-joins all meetings or only ones you approve, and the next call is captured. Training speaker voices takes a few meetings before names attach reliably. |
| Learning curve | Moderate, and higher than any other product in this set purely because of surface area. The transcription and summary layer is immediately obvious; AI Skills, conversation intelligence, the rules engine, and voice agents each need their own learning session. | Low. The interface has accumulated a decade of features and the agent menu is busier than it needs to be, but the core loop of join, transcribe, summarise, search needs no explanation. |
| Platforms | Web app, Desktop application, iOS and Android apps, Chrome extension for Google Meet, Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, Aircall and RingCentral dialers, MCP server | Web, macOS desktop app (12.3 or later), Windows desktop app (10 or later), iOS, Android, Chrome extension |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA (Enterprise tier), Zero data retention for AI training | SOC 2 Type II attestation, GDPR with a DPA, HIPAA compliance with a BAA available as an Enterprise add-on |
| Founded | 2016 | 2016 |
| Headquarters | Miami, Florida, United States (previously Pleasanton, California), with a distributed team across 20 countries and 47 cities | Mountain View, California, United States |
| Ownership | Venture-backed | Venture-backed (operating company AISense, Inc.) |
Strengths and limitations
Fireflies.ai
Strengths
- The broadest capture coverage in the category: bots for the major platforms, email invitation, Chrome extension, mobile and desktop apps, dialer integrations, and file upload.
- More than 100 transcription languages with auto-detection, plus a multi-language mode for calls that switch mid-conversation, which no competitor here matches.
- Pro at $10 per seat annually is remarkable capability per dollar, including video recording, AI Skills, voice agents, and unlimited integrations.
- AskFred and unlimited AI summaries are available on the free tier, so the assistant is not held hostage to an upgrade.
Limitations
- Dual metering on storage minutes and AI credits makes real cost hard to forecast, and the free tier's 400-minute pool is shared across the entire team rather than per user.
- Bot-based capture only; there is no silent local-capture mode, so client-facing teams who object to a visible participant have no option here.
- Product sprawl is real: voice agents, an email assistant, a task manager, 200-plus AI Skills, and conversation intelligence in one subscription means an unavoidable navigation cost and inconsistent polish across surfaces.
- Customer-count claims are inconsistent across the vendor's own pages, more than 1 million companies on the homepage against more than 500,000 on the about page, which is not a great signal for a data-driven buyer.
Otter.ai
Strengths
- The most mature transcription engine in the category, built in-house since 2016 rather than wrapped around a third-party model, with the best live streaming transcript view for following a call in real time.
- Business removes the minute meter entirely for roughly $20 a seat annually, which is competitive with everything else at that price.
- Unusually serious data export: Amazon S3, Dropbox, Egnyte, and Airtable destinations mean your transcripts do not become hostage to the vendor.
- Salesforce and HubSpot sync arrive at the Pro tier rather than being reserved for the top plan, which is earlier than most competitors.
Limitations
- Six transcription languages is a short list. If a meaningful share of your calls are in Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Hindi, or Korean, Otter is the wrong tool and Fireflies or Circleback are the obvious alternatives.
- The free and Pro minute meters are tight enough to be misleading: Pro reads like the sensible plan and covers under half of a busy calendar.
- Model training on de-identified customer data is the default, and the opt-out is not presented as prominently as Granola's is.
- A proposed class action filed in August 2025 alleges Otter recorded people who were not Otter users without adequate consent. It is unresolved, but it is a real reason to tighten your own consent practice.
Pricing compared
Fireflies.ai
Per-seat subscription across four tiers, metered on two axes: storage minutes and monthly AI credits. Annual billing is roughly 35 to 45 percent cheaper than monthly.
- Free$0
- Pro$18
- Business$29
- Enterprise$39
On sticker price Fireflies is the cheapest capable product here: $10 per seat annually for video recording, an email assistant, voice agents, AI Skills, a task manager, and unlimited integrations undercuts everything except Granola's Business tier, and it does considerably more. The complication is the metering. Storage minutes and AI credits are two forecasting problems most buyers will not do properly, the 400-minute free pool is team-wide rather than per seat, and unlimited storage costs $19 a seat. Model your actual meeting hours before comparing this to a flat-fee rival; if your usage is modest and multilingual, Fireflies is outstanding value, and if it is heavy, price Business rather than Pro.
Otter.ai
Freemium per-seat subscription with a transcription-minute meter on the lower tiers. Free and Pro are metered in minutes per user per month; Business removes the meter and switches to a flat per-seat price.
- Basic$0
- Pro$8.33
- Business$19.99
- EnterpriseCustom
Model this in minutes before anything else. Someone in 20 meetings a week averaging 45 minutes generates about 3,900 transcription minutes a month. Basic covers 300 of them and Pro covers 1,200, so that person is on Business whether they like it or not: roughly $240 a year per seat on annual billing, or $360 month to month. At $20 a seat for unlimited transcription, mature speech recognition, CRM sync, and AI Chat over the archive, that is fair, and it is the same neighbourhood as Fireflies Business and Fathom's paid tiers. What Otter does not do is give you a workable cheap tier: the $8.33 Pro plan looks like the value option and is not, because 1,200 minutes is under half a real calendar. Budget for Business or use the free tier honestly as a trial.
Editorial verdict on each
Fireflies.ai
Category LeaderFireflies is the most capable product in this category and the hardest to price. Nothing else here captures from as many sources, transcribes as many languages, or ships as much adjacent machinery, and Pro at $10 a seat annually is genuinely startling value if your usage fits inside 8,000 minutes. But the twin meters on storage and AI credits, the team-wide 400-minute free pool, and the concentration of the analytics story on Business mean the headline price is not the price. Buy it for multilingual coverage, capture breadth, and one-vendor consolidation across sales, recruiting, and support, and do the usage arithmetic before you sign. Teams who want a small, elegant, unmetered tool will be happier with Granola, and teams who object to bots in customer calls should not shortlist Fireflies at all.
Read the full Fireflies.ai profileOtter.ai
Otter is the safe, boring, mature choice in a category full of two-year-old startups, and it is priced accordingly once you understand the meter. Ignore the free and Pro tiers as anything more than an evaluation: a real calendar produces four times the minutes Pro allows, so the honest price is Business at about $20 a seat annually, where the meter disappears and you get unlimited transcription, CRM sync, AI Chat over the archive, and the best raw export story anyone offers. Buy it if you want an accurate, durable, searchable record of everything said, in English or one of five other languages, and a visible bot in the room is acceptable. Do not buy it if your calls are multilingual, if a vendor-named participant would embarrass you in front of a client, or if you need a contractual guarantee that your recordings never touch a training pipeline; Granola and Circleback answer those objections directly and Otter does not.
Read the full Otter.ai profileFireflies.ai profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Otter.ai last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.