Krisp 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
Both sides assessedKrisp compared with Otter.ai
Otter is the mature bot-based archive with better English recognition, a live transcript view, and deep export, at about $20 a seat annually on Business. Krisp is bot-free, half the price, has no minute meter, and includes MCP. Pick Otter if you want the best transcript and a searchable long-term archive with CRM sync; pick Krisp if a visible bot is a problem and you want the audio layer as well.
Otter.ai compared with Krisp
Krisp captures bot-free from the local audio path, keeps recordings, adds noise cancellation, and charges $8 a seat annually with no minute meter, but caps storage at 10 GB and writes weaker notes. Otter charges about $20 for unlimited transcription with better recognition, a live transcript, and deep export, at the cost of a visible bot. Choose Krisp if a recorder in the participant list is unacceptable or the audio quality matters; choose Otter if the transcript itself is the deliverable.
Choose Krisp if
Distributed teams, support and services organisations, and anyone working from a noisy environment who wants noise cancellation and bot-free meeting notes from one $8 per seat subscription, especially teams whose accents are a friction point with customers.
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 | Krisp | Otter.ai |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Meeting Notes | Meeting Notes |
| Starting price | $8 per user per month billed annually (Core), $16 month to month (7 days trial) | $0 (Basic), then $8.33 per user per month (Pro, billed annually) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Per-user-per-month subscription with unlimited transcription and recording. The meter is cloud storage per tier rather than minutes or meetings. Accent conversion is separately rate-limited by hours per day. | 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 | No | 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 | 7 days, all premium features, no credit card required | No separate paid trial; the free Basic tier is the evaluation path |
| Best for | Distributed teams, support and services organisations, and anyone working from a noisy environment who wants noise cancellation and bot-free meeting notes from one $8 per seat subscription, especially teams whose accents are a friction point with customers. | 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 | Under ten minutes. Install the desktop app, select Krisp as your microphone and speaker in your conferencing tool, and every call from then on is covered. There is no calendar integration to authorise and no bot behaviour to configure. | 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 | Very low for noise cancellation, which is a toggle. The notetaker and accent conversion settings take a session to work through, and teams need a policy on when accent conversion is appropriate to use at all. | 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 | macOS desktop app, Windows desktop app, iOS, Android, Web workspace, Krisp SDK for embedding | Web, macOS desktop app (12.3 or later), Windows desktop app (10 or later), iOS, Android, Chrome extension |
| Compliance | SOC 2 (report access on Enterprise), HIPAA with BAA signing on Enterprise for teams of 100 or more seats, GDPR | SOC 2 Type II attestation, GDPR with a DPA, HIPAA compliance with a BAA available as an Enterprise add-on |
| Founded | 2017 | 2016 |
| Headquarters | Berkeley, California, United States, with a large research operation in Yerevan, Armenia | Mountain View, California, United States |
| Ownership | Venture-backed, and described by its co-founder as profitable | Venture-backed (operating company AISense, Inc.) |
Strengths and limitations
Krisp
Strengths
- Bot-free capture with the recording retained, which is a combination Granola deliberately does not offer and most bot-based tools cannot offer at all.
- Best-in-class noise cancellation and echo removal that works with every meeting platform because it is an OS-level audio device, not an integration.
- Real-time accent conversion is unique in this category and is a genuine business outcome for support, services, and outsourced teams.
- No minute or meeting meter on any tier, so the bill is predictable regardless of how full your calendar gets.
Limitations
- No free plan for Meeting AI; the evaluation window is seven days and then it is a paid product, which is stingy next to Fathom, Read AI, or MeetGeek.
- Storage is the hidden meter and there is no published overage rate, so heavy video recorders on Core will hit a wall they did not plan for.
- Note quality is good rather than exceptional; this is an audio company writing notes, and Granola, Circleback, and Bluedot all produce better prose.
- No language count is published for transcription, so multilingual buyers cannot compare it against Notta's 58 or Fireflies' 100-plus without testing.
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
Krisp
Per-user-per-month subscription with unlimited transcription and recording. The meter is cloud storage per tier rather than minutes or meetings. Accent conversion is separately rate-limited by hours per day.
- Free Trial$0
- Core$8
- Advanced$15
- EnterpriseCustom
Krisp is the cheapest way to get bot-free capture with a retained recording, and the value case is unusually easy to model because there is no minute meter. Someone in 20 meetings a week at 45 minutes generates about 65 hours a month of audio; on Core that is $8 a seat billed annually, $96 a year, and the transcription is unlimited, so the bill does not move. The thing to watch is storage, because 10 GB fills up fast if you record video rather than audio, and 65 hours a month will get you there inside a year. Against Granola at $14 a seat you get recordings and noise cancellation that Granola does not offer, and against Otter Business at $20 you get bot-free capture and an included MCP connector for less than half the price. What you do not get is Granola's writing quality, a free tier, or any coaching layer. If noise cancellation has any value to you at all, Krisp is the best price per unit of capability here.
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
Krisp
Krisp is the best-value bot-free notetaker in this category, and it gets there by selling you something else first. Because it already lives in your audio path as a noise cancellation engine, it can record and transcribe without a participant in the room, keep the media so you can replay a call, and charge $8 a seat annually with no minute meter and an MCP connector thrown in. For distributed teams, consultancies working from noisy places, and support or MSP organisations, that combination is very hard to beat, and the Enterprise on-device transcription option is the strongest privacy answer anyone in this category offers. The reasons not to buy it are equally clear: there is no free plan, storage rather than minutes is the meter and no overage rate is published, the integration list is two CRMs long, and the notes themselves are competent rather than beautiful. If you want prose, buy Granola. If you want the call to sound right and the notes to be free, buy Krisp.
Read the full Krisp 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 profileKrisp 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.