Otter.ai vs Fireflies.ai: a straight comparison

The short answer

Both products do the same basic job. A bot joins your video call, records it, and gives you a transcript, a summary and a list of action items afterwards. Both bill per person. Both keep everything in the cloud. The differences are narrower than the marketing suggests, but they are sharp where they exist.

• Buy Otter if your meetings are in English and you want to watch the transcript scroll during the call. Live transcription is what Otter is genuinely best at, and its entry paid plan is the cheaper of the two on annual billing.
• Buy Fireflies if you record in any language other than English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese or Chinese Simplified. Otter simply does not support anything else. This one line decides a lot of purchases.
• Buy Fireflies if the CRM workflow is the point of the purchase: more connectors, Pipedrive and Zoho as well as Salesforce and HubSpot, an API, and rules about which meetings write in. But check the price first. Otter documents Salesforce and HubSpot from its cheaper Pro tier, so basic CRM sync costs less on Otter.
• Buy Fireflies if you run Webex. Otter documents its assistant for Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet; Webex support is not documented in the same way.
• Neither, if most of your meetings happen in a room rather than on a call, or if two languages get mixed in one conversation. Both are bot-first products and both bill per person. There is a section on that near the end.

Otter vs Fireflies at a glance

Prices below are the published rates as of September 2026. Both companies advertise a lower per-person rate when you pay for a year up front, so both numbers are shown.

Transcription quality and language coverage

This is the clearest gap between the two, and it is not close.

Otter transcribes six languages: English (US and UK), Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese Simplified. You pick one before the recording starts. There is no automatic detection. If your meeting is in Arabic, Portuguese, Hindi, Korean, Turkish, Dutch, Polish, Thai or Vietnamese, Otter is not an option at all. That is not a quality judgement, it is a hard wall.

Fireflies claims 100+ languages with automatic detection, and labels most of them as beta on its own site. Beta is worth taking seriously: coverage on a rare language is not the same as coverage on English. But for the mainstream non-English languages that most buyers actually need, Fireflies works and Otter does not.

On English specifically, both are good. Neither company publishes a verifiable accuracy figure, and you should be sceptical of any comparison page that gives you one. What actually decides quality in a real meeting is more boring than a percentage: microphone distance, crosstalk, accents, and whether the tool got confused by jargon and names. Both let you edit the transcript afterwards to fix a misheard product name.

A caution for bilingual teams. Neither product is built for a conversation that switches language mid-sentence. Otter locks to one language by design, with one documented exception: set the default language to French and Otter switches to English on its own when it hears it. No other pair is covered. Fireflies detects a language for the recording, which is a different thing from following a speaker who moves between two languages inside one sentence. If that is your situation, read our roundup of apps that handle multilingual meetings before you commit to either.

The bot, the phone, and where each one can record

Both products work the same way on a video call. You connect a calendar, or paste a meeting link, and a named participant joins the call and records it. Everyone in the meeting can see it sitting there.

Fireflies covers one more platform. Its notetaker joins Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Webex. Otter documents its assistant for Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet. At the time of writing, Otter does not document Webex support in the same place, so if Webex is your main platform, treat that as a reason to pick Fireflies rather than a detail to check later.

Both bots get refused. This is the failure mode nobody warns you about at purchase time. Plenty of enterprises, law firms, hospitals, universities and government departments block unknown participants from joining calls. When that happens the product does nothing at all, on either side. Some hosts will also object socially to a visibly named recorder sitting in the participant list, even when the policy allows it. If you meet a lot of external clients, expect to lose some meetings this way.

Both have real mobile apps and both can record a room. Otter records through the phone microphone. Fireflies records in person from its mobile app. In both cases the phone app is the smaller half of a product that mostly lives in a browser, and in both cases the in-person recording still counts against your plan limits. If recording face-to-face meetings is the main thing you need rather than an occasional extra, see the best apps for recording in-person meetings, because a bot-first tool is the wrong shape for that job.

Search and chat across past meetings

Both let you ask questions of your meeting history instead of scrolling through transcripts. Fireflies calls it AskFred. Otter calls it Otter AI Chat.

Fireflies has the edge here for two reasons. First, AskFred is designed to reach across your whole workspace, which is what makes it useful for a question like "what did we promise this client in Q2". Second, Fireflies pairs it with conversation analytics: talk-time ratios, topic tracking and sentiment across a team. Sales and customer success managers use those numbers to coach people, and Otter does not offer the same depth.

The catch is that Fireflies rations these features with AI credits. Basic transcription is not metered, but the AI layer sitting on top of it is. Fireflies charges credits dynamically per request rather than handing you a flat monthly count, so the same allowance stretches further or runs out sooner depending on what you ask it for. The allowance is small enough that heavy users hit it, and running out mid-month is a common complaint. Check the current per-tier number on the Fireflies pricing page before you buy, because this is the limit they revise most often, and a figure quoted on any comparison page, including this one, goes stale fast. Otter meters differently, by minutes rather than credits: 1,200 minutes a month on Pro with a 90 minute cap per conversation, unlimited minutes on Business with a four-hour cap per conversation.

Work out which limit you would hit first. A person in six half-hour calls a day will run out of Otter Pro minutes before the month ends. A person in four long calls a week who wants a summary of every one will run out of Fireflies credits instead.

Integrations, and the CRM question

Fireflies wins this on breadth. It documents connectors for Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive and Zoho, along with Slack, Notion, Asana and dozens of other tools, plus an API. If your requirement is "the call notes must appear on the contact record without anyone copying and pasting", Fireflies is the safer bet.

Otter is not empty here, and it is cheaper than most comparison pages claim. Its pricing page lists Salesforce, HubSpot and Zapier integrations from the Pro tier, not Business, with a footnote that the Salesforce and HubSpot connectors are subject to user limits. That changes the maths for a small team: if all you need is "the call notes appear on the contact record", Otter Pro at $8.33 per user already documents it, and you do not have to move up to Otter Business at $19.99 to get it. Zapier is how most Otter users bridge to everything else, Notion, Asana, a project tracker, since Otter does not document native connectors for those the way Fireflies does. The one Otter CRM feature that really is locked high is the sales-specific Otter Sales Notetaker, which sits on Enterprise.

One warning before you buy on this point. Third-party write-ups disagree about exactly which Fireflies tier includes full CRM sync, and the rules around which meetings are allowed to write into a CRM sit on the higher tier. Confirm the tier with Fireflies directly for your specific CRM rather than trusting a comparison table, including this one. Integration tiering changes more often than headline pricing does.

Free tiers, and what each costs at 1, 5 and 20 seats

Both free plans are trials wearing a costume. They are useful for testing, not for working.

Otter Basic gives you 300 minutes a month with a 30-minute cap on any single conversation, one meeting at a time, and three file imports for the entire life of the account. That last limit is the one people trip over. It does not reset. Once you have imported three files you cannot import a fourth without paying.

Fireflies Free gives you 800 minutes of stored recording per seat, audio only, and a small pool of AI credits. Transcription itself is not capped the way Otter's minutes are, which makes the Fireflies free tier better for seeing whether the transcription works on your accent and your subject matter. The storage fills up in a few weeks of normal use, and once it does you are choosing between deleting old meetings and upgrading.

For a real evaluation: use Fireflies Free to test transcription quality, and use an Otter trial to test whether live transcription changes how you run a meeting. Those are the two questions the free tiers can actually answer.

Both price per person, so the number you care about is not the sticker price, it is the sticker price multiplied by your team. All figures are annual billing unless noted, checked September 2026.

• At one seat, Otter Pro is cheaper on annual billing, $8.33 against $10. If you only speak English, that is a real saving.
• At five seats on the entry plan, Otter is still cheaper, about $42 a month against $50.
• At the higher tier the per-person price flips, but only just. Fireflies Business is $19 a seat against Otter Business at $19.99. That $0.99 is not the number that should decide anything. CRM sync is where the real gap is, and it favours Otter. Otter documents Salesforce and HubSpot from Pro at $8.33, while Fireflies puts full CRM sync on Business at $19. For five people who just need notes on the contact record, that is about $42 a month with Otter against about $95 with Fireflies.
• Monthly billing punishes you on both. Otter Pro doubles from $8.33 to $16.99 and Fireflies Pro nearly doubles from $10 to $18 if you refuse the annual commitment.
• Everyone who needs notes needs a seat. That is the structural cost with both products. A team of twenty on the higher tier is spending around $380 to $400 a month, every month, and that bill grows with every hire.

The verdict, buyer by buyer

A comparison is worthless if the same product wins every row, so here are six real situations and the answer for each.

• Solo user, English only, wants to follow along live: Otter. It is cheaper at one seat on annual billing, its live transcript is the best version of that feature in this pair, and none of Fireflies' advantages, extra languages, extra platform, CRM sync, apply to a person working alone in English.
• Solo user, any other language: Fireflies. Not a preference, a requirement. Otter's six languages exclude most of the world.
• Five-person sales team: it depends how much you want the CRM to do. On price alone Otter wins, and by more than you would expect. Otter documents Salesforce and HubSpot from Pro, so five seats with CRM sync is about $42 a month, against about $95 for the Fireflies tier most sales teams end up on. Fireflies wins on everything around the CRM: a wider connector list, Pipedrive and Zoho as well, an API, rules about which meetings are allowed to write into the CRM, plus AskFred and talk-time analytics for coaching, which Otter does not match. So: if "put the call notes on the contact record" is the whole requirement and everyone speaks English, buy Otter Pro and keep the difference. If the CRM workflow is the actual reason for the purchase, pay for Fireflies and watch the AI credit limit.
• Large org with a CRM and mixed languages: Fireflies. Broader integrations, an API, Webex coverage, automatic language detection and per-seat pricing a shade below Otter's at the Business tier. The main thing to test in a pilot is whether your IT policy lets the bot into calls at all.
• Large org where the calls are all in English and compliance is the priority: Otter. Otter Business gives you the enhanced admin tooling, activity logs and usage analytics, and Otter is the more established brand in procurement conversations. Check one thing before you sign, though. SSO and SCIM provisioning are Enterprise-only on Otter's pricing page, and both are marked as requiring a minimum 100-user licence. So if single sign-on is a hard requirement from your IT team and you are buying fewer than 100 seats, Otter Business will not give it to you and you are into a custom Enterprise conversation.
• A team whose meetings mostly happen in a room, not on a call: neither. Both can do it, neither is built for it, and both charge you per person for the privilege.

A third option, if your meetings are in a room or in two languages

Full disclosure: this site belongs to Noter AI, so weigh this section accordingly. It is here because there are two situations where the honest answer is that neither Otter nor Fireflies fits, and it would be dishonest to leave them out.

Situation one: the meeting is not on a video call. A client visit, a site walk, a hiring interview across a table, a doctor's appointment. Both Otter and Fireflies can record from the phone, but their products are built around a bot in a call and the phone is a companion. Noter AI is phone-first. One tap in the app or from a Control Center widget starts recording, it keeps running with the screen locked, and there is no bot to be refused by anyone's IT policy. For virtual calls it also sends a bot to Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Webex, so both halves of the week are covered. More on recording meetings without a bot in the call.

Situation two: two languages in one conversation. Noter AI transcribes 60+ languages with automatic detection, and the language is tagged word by word rather than fixed for the whole recording. So a sentence that starts in Arabic and finishes in English arrives with each half written properly. Tools that lock to one language before you press record do the predictable thing with the second one: they spell it out phonetically or drop it. Finished notes translate into 18 languages, so you can record in one language and send the summary in another.

On the analysis itself, you get speaker labels, timestamps and synced playback, so tapping a line in the transcript plays that exact moment. Action items are pulled out automatically. Six output styles reshape the same recording into minutes of meeting, key bullet points, an email, a to-do list, a formal report, or a custom instruction where you describe exactly how you want it written. The transcript is editable, so you can fix a misspelled client name and re-run the summary so it picks up the correction. AI chat works on one note or across every note you have.

On price, it is $9.99/month or $49.99/year, per person, not per seat. Five people using Otter Pro is about $42/month and five on Fireflies Pro is $50/month, because each person needs a seat. Noter AI has no team plan, so five people is five separate subscriptions: about $50 a month at the monthly rate, or $249.95 for the year, which is about $20.83 a month for the five of them. On monthly billing that is level with Fireflies and a little above Otter; on annual it is less than half of either. What you never pay for is a seat minimum, an admin seat, or a tier that steps up when someone joins. What you do not get is a shared workspace or a single invoice. There is a free trial you can run on a real meeting.

Where Noter AI does not compete. There is no web or desktop app; it is iPhone, iPad and Android only. There is no live real-time transcript during the meeting, so if that is why you were looking at Otter, Otter is still your answer. And there are no CRM or Slack integrations, so if notes must land in Salesforce automatically, Fireflies wins and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. You can see it on the App Store.

Bottom line

Fireflies is the better buy for most teams. More languages with automatic detection, Webex on top of the big three platforms, deeper integrations, cross-meeting chat and analytics, and a Business tier that costs slightly less per person than Otter's. The trade is AI credits that run out and a bot that some organisations will not let in.

Otter is the better buy in a narrower case: English-speaking, price-sensitive at one or a few seats, and genuinely wanting to read a transcript while the meeting is happening. Its six-language limit is the single fact most likely to rule it out for you, so check that first and save yourself the trial.

If neither shape fits, because your meetings happen in rooms rather than on calls, or because two languages get mixed in the same conversation, that is a different product category and worth looking at separately. If you are still shortlisting, two neighbouring comparisons help: Otter.ai vs Notta when language coverage is the deciding factor, and Fathom vs Fireflies.ai when the free plan is.