Fireflies.ai vs Otter.ai: Which AI Note Taker Wins in 2026?

Fireflies.ai and Otter.ai are the two AI meeting notetakers everyone ends up comparing. Both transcribe, summarize, and archive your calls — but they bill differently, limit differently, and suit different people. Every price and feature below was checked against the vendors' official pages in October 2026.

The Short Answer

Pick Fireflies.ai if you attend a lot of meetings or work in sales, recruiting, or any customer-facing role: its paid plans transcribe without a minute cap, so there is no meter running while you talk. Pick Otter.ai if you want the best live transcript during the call itself, the simplest interface, or the education discount — it is the friendlier choice for students and light users.

For most teams, Fireflies is the better value. The rest of this comparison explains why.

Pricing Compared

The core difference is the pricing logic: Otter sells minutes; Fireflies sells seats plus storage. That single design choice shapes everything below.

Fireflies.ai (from the official pricing page): Free costs $0 and includes unlimited transcription, limited AI summaries, 400 minutes of storage per team, and 20 AI credits. Pro is $18 per month or $10 per seat per month billed annually, with unlimited transcription, unlimited AI summaries, 8,000 minutes of storage per seat, and 20 AI credits. Business is $29 per month or $19 per seat per month billed annually, with unlimited storage, 30 AI credits, conversation intelligence, and team analytics. Enterprise is $39 per seat per month (annual only), adding SSO/SCIM, audit logs, HIPAA compliance, private storage, a dedicated account manager, and 50 AI credits.

Otter.ai (from the official pricing page): Basic is free and includes 300 transcription minutes per user per month, a 30-minute cap per conversation, 3 lifetime file imports, and only your 25 most recent conversations are kept. Pro is $16.99 per month or $8.33 per user per month billed annually, with 1,200 minutes per month, a 90-minute cap per conversation, and 10 file imports per month. Business is $30 per month or $19.99 per user per month billed annually, with unlimited meeting transcription, a 4-hour cap per conversation, 6,000 import minutes per month, and 3 concurrent meetings. Enterprise is custom-priced.

Two takeaways. First, Otter's annual Pro looks cheaper ($8.33 vs $10 per month), but those 1,200 minutes are a hard ceiling with no rollover — when the meter runs out, transcription stops. Fireflies Pro transcribes without limit; what you are really buying is storage (8,000 minutes per seat) and AI credits. Second, Fireflies has a hidden cost most older reviews never mention: the AI credits system. AskFred cross-meeting Q&A and AI Apps draw from a one-time credit pool (20 to 50 credits depending on plan) that does not reset monthly; top-up packs start at $5 for 50 credits. Budget for it if you plan to lean on the AI features.

Free Plan Showdown

Fireflies' free tier is the more usable one: transcription is unlimited, and you get 400 minutes of team storage plus 20 AI credits to try the AI features. The catch is storage — once those 400 minutes fill up, old meetings stop being kept unless you upgrade or delete.

Otter's Basic plan is tighter in ways that bite. The 300 monthly minutes go fast, only 25 recent conversations are retained — and the 30-minute cap per conversation is the real killer: a one-hour team sync gets cut in half. If your meetings routinely run long, Otter's free plan is a demo, not a tool.

Transcription Quality and Accuracy

Both are strong on clean audio and degrade the same predictable way: heavy accents, crosstalk, background noise, and jargon all hurt. Reviewer sentiment on G2 reflects a small but consistent edge for Fireflies (4.7/5 across roughly 750 reviews vs Otter's 4.4/5 across roughly 500). Our advice matches what we wrote in our Otter.ai review: treat the transcript as a faithful-ish record, not a court stenographer, and give important calls a decent microphone.

Where they genuinely differ: Otter's live transcript is the best in the business — real-time, speaker-labeled, genuinely glanceable mid-call. Fireflies offers real-time notes too, but its strength shows after the call, in summaries and search. Language support is lopsided: Fireflies transcribes 100+ languages, while Otter covers six (English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese).

AI Features: AskFred vs Otter AI Chat

Fireflies' AskFred is a cross-meeting AI assistant: ask "what did we promise Acme in Q3?" and it searches your entire meeting history. Powerful — but every query burns AI credits from that one-time pool, so heavy users will feel the meter. Otter AI Chat works per-conversation (ask questions about this meeting), with monthly quotas: 20 queries on Basic (max 3 per conversation), 50 on Pro, 200 on Business.

Neither replaces reading the summary yourself for anything that matters. Both are good starting points; both need human review before you forward anything to a client or your boss.

Meeting Platforms and Recording

Both cover Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, and both offer mobile apps for in-person recording. Fireflies has one notable option: it can record via its Chrome extension or desktop app without its bot joining the call — no "Fireflies.ai Notetaker" sitting in the participant list, which some attendees prefer. Otter's OtterPilot auto-joins scheduled meetings straight from your calendar, which is the more hands-off setup.

Worth repeating: tell participants the call is being recorded. A bot in the meeting changes the dynamic, and in some jurisdictions you need consent.

Conversation Intelligence

This is where Fireflies pulls ahead for sales and customer teams. On Business and above you get topic trackers, speaker talk-time analytics, sentiment analysis, and question detection — the kind of coaching data sales managers actually use in 1:1s. Otter's answer is lighter: AI Chat plus workflow automations, and Salesforce/HubSpot sync from the Pro plan up. If your job is "talk to customers and get better at it," Fireflies Business is the purpose-built tool.

Security and Compliance

Both are SOC 2 Type II compliant and GDPR-aligned. Fireflies adds HIPAA compliance on Enterprise plus a notable policy: your data is never used for AI training, with a zero-data-retention option. Otter encrypts real-time content with AES-256; HIPAA is available as an add-on, and SSO requires a minimum 100-user license. If you work in healthcare or handle regulated data, read the vendors' actual compliance pages before committing — do not take any review's word for it, including ours.

Who Should Choose Which

Pick Fireflies.ai if: you are in sales, recruiting, consulting, or any role with heavy meeting volume; you want unlimited transcription without watching a minute counter; you need conversation intelligence (talk-time, sentiment, topic tracking); or you work across many languages.

Pick Otter.ai if: you want the best live transcript during the call itself; you are a student or teacher (there is a 20% education discount on Pro with a .edu email); you live in the Google ecosystem and want simple calendar auto-join; or your meeting volume is light enough that 1,200 minutes a month is plenty.

Consider neither if: you live entirely inside one platform. Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams all ship native transcription and AI summaries now, some included in plans you already pay for. A dedicated notetaker earns its keep when meetings are your raw material and you need a searchable archive across platforms — we covered this tradeoff in our Otter.ai review.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Fireflies.ai's free plan really unlimited?

Transcription is unlimited, but storage is capped at 400 minutes per team and AI summaries are limited. It is generous for evaluating the product — not for archiving a year of meetings.

Does Otter.ai cut off long meetings on the free plan?

Yes. The Basic plan caps each conversation at 30 minutes of transcription, so a one-hour call is only partially transcribed. Pro raises the cap to 90 minutes; Business to 4 hours.

Which is better for sales teams?

Fireflies, on the Business plan. Unlimited transcription removes minute-counting anxiety, and the conversation intelligence features (talk-time, sentiment, topic trackers) are built for coaching. Otter's per-minute pricing punishes high-volume call schedules.