Fireflies.ai vs. Otter.ai: Which AI Meeting Assistant Should You Choose?

AI meeting notetakers have become a crowded category, but Fireflies.ai and Otter.ai remain two of the most recognized names for transcribing, summarizing, and searching through work conversations. Both promise to eliminate manual note-taking, but they differ in language support, integrations, and how far they go beyond basic transcription. Here's how they compare.

What Fireflies Offers

Fireflies positions itself as a broader AI assistant that spans meetings, email, chat, and CRM, not just transcription. It's used across more than a million companies and holds a 4.8 rating on G2.

Key strengths include:

• Transcription accuracy and language reach, with a claimed 95% accuracy rate, support for 100+ languages, automatic speaker recognition, and auto-language detection between meetings.
• Multiple capture methods, including a note-taker bot that auto-joins calendar meetings, a Chrome extension for Google Meet, mobile and desktop apps, and support for dialers like Aircall and RingCentral, plus direct audio/video file uploads.
• AI-powered search and Q&A, letting users search meeting content down to a specific sentence and timestamp, or ask "AskFred" questions across their meeting history.
• Live Assist, offering real-time suggestions and coaching during a live meeting rather than only after it ends.
• 200+ AI Skills, which extract details, draft follow-up emails, score candidates, and handle other task-specific automations tailored to sales, recruiting, marketing, and other functions.
• Deep integrations, including CRM auto-fill (Salesforce, HubSpot, and others), project management tools, ATS platforms, Slack, and an MCP server that brings meeting insights directly into tools like Claude and ChatGPT.
• Enterprise-grade security, with SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA compliance, zero data retention for AI training, and private, dedicated cloud storage.

What Otter Offers

Otter is one of the longest-standing names in AI meeting transcription, well known for its free tier and straightforward focus on recording, transcribing, and summarizing calls.

Key strengths include:

• A genuinely usable free tier, offering 300 transcription minutes per month with a per-meeting cap, plus a limited number of lifetime file imports — enough for light or occasional use without paying anything.
• Simple, established core features, including an AI meeting assistant that auto-joins calls, "meeting gems" for adding action items and comments, and integrations with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet.
• Otter AI Chat, letting users chat live with Otter or teammates to get answers about meeting content.
• Sales-specific tooling on higher tiers, including a dedicated Sales Notetaker and CRM integrations, though meeting analytics and coaching features are reserved for the Enterprise plan.

Where Otter is more limited is language support — restricted to English, French, and Spanish, compared to Fireflies' 100+ languages — and its free and Pro plans cap both per-meeting length and monthly minutes fairly tightly. Pricing runs from a free Basic plan up to Pro at roughly $8.33–$16.99/user/month and Business at $19.99–$30/user/month depending on billing cycle, with Enterprise available by custom quote.

Head-to-Head Comparison

Which One Should You Choose?

If your team operates in multiple languages, wants live in-meeting coaching, or needs meeting data to flow directly into CRMs, task tools, or AI assistants like Claude, Fireflies' broader automation layer and stronger compliance credentials make it the more capable option for teams scaling this across an organization.

If you mainly need straightforward transcription for occasional meetings, interviews, or lectures, and want to test the waters without paying anything, Otter's free tier and simpler feature set may be enough, particularly for individuals or very small teams that don't need deep CRM or workflow automation.

For sales, recruiting, or cross-functional teams that want their meeting data actively feeding other tools rather than just sitting in a transcript, Fireflies' combination of AI Skills, integrations, and multilingual support generally makes it the stronger long-term pick.

You can try Fireflies.ai for yourself here to see how it fits your team's meeting workflow.