Otter.ai vs Notta: which one actually fits your meetings?

The short answer, by who you are

An English-only team in the US or UK: Otter. Live transcription during the call is Otter's actual strength, the shared workspace and commenting are better built, and the Business plan gives you unlimited meeting minutes. Language coverage does not matter to you, so the thing Notta wins on is worth nothing.

A team working across languages: Notta. Fifty-eight transcription languages against six is not a close call. Notta also translates finished transcripts into dozens more languages, and sells a paid bilingual mode for sessions with two languages in the room. If your meetings happen in Portuguese, Arabic, Korean, Turkish or Hindi, Otter cannot transcribe them at all.

A student or a solo user on a budget: Notta, narrowly. Notta Pro is cheaper than Otter Pro every month, gives you 1,800 minutes instead of 1,200, and lets a single recording run five hours instead of ninety minutes. A three-hour lecture fits in Notta and gets cut off in Otter. Notta's free tier is worse though, so read the free-plan section before you rely on it.

Neither, if your meetings happen in a room rather than on a call, or if two languages get mixed in one sentence. Both of these tools are web-first products with a phone app bolted on, and both make you commit to a language before you record. There is a section near the end on that.

Otter vs Notta, side by side

Everything in this table comes from Otter's and Notta's own pricing and help pages, checked September 2026. Monthly figures are the list price when you pay month to month.

Language coverage: the gap is enormous

Otter transcribes six languages. English (US and UK), Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese (Simplified). That is the whole list, and it has grown slowly. If your meeting is in Italian, Dutch, Polish, Vietnamese, Thai, Russian, Hindi or Arabic, Otter has nothing for you. There is no partial support to fall back on. You get a transcript that is wrong from the first word.

Notta transcribes 58 languages, and translates finished transcripts into dozens more. Notta does not put a single fixed number on the translation list in its own pricing page, so treat the translation side as wide rather than as an exact count. Either way it is a real advantage, and it is why Notta shows up in so many non-English markets. Notta also sells a bilingual mode that runs two languages side by side in one session, priced as an add-on on top of your plan, roughly $9/month on annual billing or $15/month on monthly billing at the time of writing.

One caution before you treat the 58 as a promise. Language counts on transcription pricing pages are a coverage list, not an accuracy claim. Every vendor's list is strongest in English, Spanish, French, Japanese and Mandarin and thinner at the far end. Notta's own help pages say the same thing in gentler words. So test your actual language on your actual audio before you commit a year of budget, whichever tool you choose. The same warning applies to every app that publishes a language count.

What "supports 100 languages" usually means in practice

Here is the part almost nobody explains. When a transcription tool says it supports 58 or 100 languages, it nearly always means one language per recording, chosen before you press record. The list is a menu you pick from, not something the app works out while listening.

That is fine when a meeting is genuinely in one language. It falls apart in two ordinary situations.

You forget to change the setting. You transcribed a French call yesterday, today's call is in German, and you never touched the dropdown. The tool does exactly what you told it and hands back a German meeting transcribed as if it were French. Nothing warns you. You find out when you read it.

People mix two languages in one sentence. This is normal life in a lot of the world. A Gulf team runs a meeting in Arabic and says "budget", "deadline" and "KPI" in English. An Indian team switches between Hindi and English every few sentences. A Mexican team drops English product names into Spanish. When the tool is locked to one language, the second language does not get flagged as unknown. It gets forced through the model for the language you chose, so the English words come back spelled out phonetically in Arabic script, or the Hindi comes back as English gibberish that looks almost like words. The transcript reads as broken even though the audio was perfectly clear.

Notta's answer to this is the bilingual add-on: you pay extra and you nominate two languages instead of one. Better than nothing, and genuinely useful for interpreted sessions, but you are still declaring the languages up front and still paying for the privilege. Otter, at the time of writing, does not document any mixed-language mode at all. Both tools also lack automatic language detection, so nothing catches the mistake for you.

Minutes, caps, uploads and what the free plans allow

The minute limits are where the two products diverge more than the price does.

Otter Pro gives 1,200 minutes a month with a 90-minute cap on any single conversation. That cap is the one to watch. A two-hour workshop, a long training session or a board meeting gets cut off partway through. Otter Business lifts the cap to four hours and removes the monthly minute limit.

Notta Pro gives 1,800 minutes a month with a five-hour cap per recording. For long-form work, lectures, depositions, day-long workshops, that is a meaningfully better fit at a lower price. Notta Business removes the monthly limit and keeps the five-hour cap.

Uploading files you already have is where Otter is stingiest. The free plan allows three imports for the lifetime of the account, not three a month. Pro allows ten a month. If your workflow is "I recorded it on my phone, now transcribe it", ten files a month is tight and three forever is not a plan at all. Notta allows 50 uploads a month free, 100 on Pro and 200 on Business.

AI summaries run the other way. Notta meters them: 10 a month on free, 100 on Pro, 200 on Business. Otter does not document a separate monthly summary cap on paid plans. If you transcribe a lot and summarise everything, Notta's counter is a real ceiling.

The free plans on both are testing tiers, not usable ones. Here is what each one gives you before you pay.

• Otter free: 300 minutes a month, 30 minutes maximum per meeting, three file imports total, ever. The lifetime import limit is the harshest single restriction in this comparison.
• Notta free: 120 minutes a month, but only three minutes per recording. Three minutes is shorter than most stand-ups. In practice the free plan lets you check whether the transcript looks right, and nothing else.
• Which free plan is better: Otter's, clearly, if you are recording live meetings. Thirty minutes gets you through a real call. Three minutes does not.
• Which is better for testing accuracy in your language: Notta's, because it will at least accept 50 uploaded files a month and it supports your language in the first place.
• Neither is a long-term answer. Both companies design the free tier to end. Budget for the paid plan or pick a tool whose paid plan you can actually afford.

What one seat and five seats really cost

Notta is cheaper than Otter at every equivalent tier, monthly or annual. The gap is small for one person and turns into real money for a team, because both products bill per seat.

These are list prices at monthly billing, checked September 2026. Annual billing cuts all of them, and locks you in for a year.

• One person, English only: Otter Pro at $16.99 buys live transcription and a better shared workspace. Notta Pro at $13.99 buys more minutes, longer recordings and more uploads. Notta wins on value, Otter wins on live experience.
• One person, working in another language: Notta, because Otter probably cannot transcribe your language.
• Five people: Notta Business is cheaper than Otter Business, roughly $139 versus $150 a month, and both are a real line item. Per-seat pricing means the bill grows every time you hire.
• Watch the annual trap on both. Otter's headline $8.33 and Notta's $8.17 are annual-billing rates. The monthly price is roughly double. Notta in particular has a well-documented trail of complaints about trial-to-annual charges and slow refunds, so read the checkout screen carefully.

Mobile apps and recording away from a desk

Both companies ship iOS and Android apps, and neither app is the main product. Otter is built for the web and for its bot joining Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet. The phone app is a companion for viewing notes and capturing the occasional conversation. Notta's mobile app is closer to a wrapper around the web product, and reviewers consistently flag it as the weaker half of a good service.

This matters more than it sounds if a lot of your important conversations are not on a video call. Client visits, site walks, doctor appointments, one-on-ones at a desk, interviews in a cafe. For those, the tool you need is one built around a phone in your pocket, not a browser tab. Neither Otter nor Notta is that, which is why plenty of people who like both end up carrying a separate app for recording meetings that happen in a room.

One practical note on Notta's mobile app: the bilingual mode is available there, so if you do need two languages in a room, Notta on a phone is at least a workable option once you have paid for the add-on and told it which two languages to expect.

Live transcription and export

Both tools transcribe in real time, so the words appear while people are still talking. Otter has been doing it longer and it shows. The live view is smoother, the shared workspace around it is more mature, and comments and highlights during a call are a genuine team feature. If a live scrolling transcript is the thing you are buying, Otter is the better product.

Ask honestly whether you need it, though. Live captions are useful for accessibility, for following a call in a second language, and for someone joining halfway. For most people the value is entirely in what arrives after the meeting: a clean transcript, a summary, and a list of who agreed to do what. If that is you, a live view is a demo feature you will stop looking at in week two.

Export is close to a tie. Otter exports TXT, DOCX, PDF, SRT and the MP3 audio. Notta exports TXT, DOCX, PDF, XLSX and SRT, and supports batch export of multiple records at once. Notta's spreadsheet export is unusual and useful if you process transcripts in bulk. Otter giving you the audio file back matters if you need to keep the original recording somewhere else.

The verdict between the two

If you want the longer single-product write-ups rather than the head-to-head, there is a full Otter.ai comparison and a full Notta comparison.

• Live English meetings, team collaboration, budget not the main issue → Otter. Business at $30/user/month removes the minute limits and raises the cap to four hours.
• Any work outside Otter's six languages → Notta, without hesitation. Otter is not an option, not a weaker option.
• Long recordings: lectures, workshops, depositions → Notta. Five hours per recording versus ninety minutes on Otter Pro.
• You mostly upload files you already recorded → Notta, if you are on Otter's free or Pro plan. Three imports for the lifetime of a free account, and ten a month on Pro, will stop you quickly. Otter Business does lift imports to unlimited, against 200 a month on Notta Business, so at team tier this reason flips the other way.
• You summarise everything you transcribe → Otter. Notta meters summaries per month.
• Lowest price for the same job → Notta at every equivalent tier, at one seat and at five.
• Interpreted or two-language sessions and you can pay extra → Notta's bilingual add-on. Otter does not document an equivalent.

A third option: Noter AI, if the language problem is the reason you are here

Most people land on an Otter versus Notta page for one of two reasons: language coverage, or the price of seats. Noter AI is built differently on both, and it is worth 60 seconds if either is your reason.

No language selector at all. Noter AI transcribes 60+ languages with automatic detection always on. You never choose a language before recording, so the "I forgot to change the dropdown" failure cannot happen. More importantly, the language is tagged word by word rather than once per recording. A meeting that runs half in Arabic and half in English comes back with both rendered properly in one transcript, instead of the second language coming out as phonetic nonsense. That is a different mechanism from Notta's bilingual mode, which still asks you to nominate two languages in advance and charges an add-on for it. There is a fuller ranking of the options on the multilingual meeting transcription page.

Built for a phone, not a browser. Recording starts in one tap from a Control Center widget and keeps running with the screen locked, so an in-person meeting is as easy as a Zoom call. For online calls, a bot joins Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Webex, and it can pull the schedule from Google Calendar or Outlook. You can also share an existing audio file into it from Voice Memos, WhatsApp or the Files app.

Per-person pricing, not per seat. $9.99/month or $49.99/year, per person. At the annual rate that is about $4.17 a month each, so five people is $249.95 for the year, or about $50 a month if everyone pays monthly. Compare that with roughly $139 to $150 a month for five seats of Otter or Notta Business. Be clear about what you are buying: there is no team plan, so five people means five separate subscriptions with no shared workspace and no single invoice. What you avoid is the seat minimum and the tier that jumps when someone joins.

What you get after the recording. Speaker labels, timestamps on every segment, and synced playback so tapping a line in the transcript jumps the audio to that moment. Summaries come in six output styles: minutes of meeting, key bullet points, email, to-do list, formal report, and a custom instruction where you describe in your own words exactly how you want it written. Action items are pulled out automatically. You can fix a misheard name in the transcript and re-run the summary so the correction carries through. AI chat answers questions about one note or across every note you own. Finished notes translate into 18 languages, and export goes to PDF, Word or plain text.

Be fair about the limits. There is no web app and no desktop app. There is no live transcript during the meeting, notes arrive after. Transcription runs in the cloud, not on the device. Translation output covers 18 languages, which is narrower than Notta's translation list, so if you need finished notes written in a language outside that list, Notta is the better tool and this page will not pretend otherwise. There is a free trial, so test it on a real meeting in your own language before deciding. It is on iOS and Android.