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πŸ“– The AI Tool Bible

Fireflies.ai vs Otter.ai

A side-by-side look at pricing, capabilities, pros, cons, and our editorial scores.

Tagline
Fireflies.ai
AI meeting assistant that joins calls, transcribes them, and turns the talk into searchable notes and action items.
Otter.ai
AI meeting notetaker that transcribes calls, summarizes them, and pulls out action items in real time.
Pricing
Fireflies.ai
FreemiumΒ· Basic: $10 Β· Pro: $20 Β· Enterprise: Contact sales
Otter.ai
FreemiumΒ· Basic: $20 Β· Pro: $50 Β· Enterprise: Contact sales
Lowest paid tier
Fireflies.ai
$10 Β· Basic
captured 2026-08-09
Otter.ai
$20 Β· Basic
captured 2026-08-10
Free trial
Fireflies.ai
Yes
Otter.ai
Yes
API
Fireflies.ai
Yes
Otter.ai
Not listed
Platforms
Fireflies.ai
api
Otter.ai
api
Company
Fireflies.ai
Fireflies AI, Inc.
Otter.ai
Otter.ai Inc
Model used
Fireflies.ai
Multi-model (proprietary ASR + LLM layer)
Otter.ai
Proprietary speech + LLM stack
Best for
Fireflies.ai
Pick Fireflies.ai if your team lives in Zoom/Meet/Teams and you want call notes, CRM updates, and searchable transcripts to happen without anyone typing.
Otter.ai
Pick Otter.ai if you live in Zoom/Meet/Teams calls and want automatic transcripts, summaries, and action items pushed into Slack or your CRM.
Not for
Fireflies.ai
Skip it if you need an on-device or self-hosted transcriber, or if your meetings cover material where a third-party bot attendee is a non-starter.
Otter.ai
Skip it if you need a programmable speech-to-text API, on-prem deployment, or transcription of pre-recorded archives at scale.
Editorial score
Fireflies.ai
8.2 / 10
Otter.ai
6.8 / 10
Use cases
Fireflies.ai
meeting transcriptioncall summariesaction item extractionsales call analysisrecruiting notesvoice search
Otter.ai
meeting-transcriptionmeeting-summariesaction-itemssales-call-noteslive-captions
Pros
Fireflies.ai
  • Joins all major meeting platforms plus dialers and uploaded files with one workflow
  • Strong CRM/ATS sync (Salesforce, HubSpot, Greenhouse) keeps notes out of inboxes
  • AskFred chat and AI Apps make weeks of past calls actually searchable
  • Free tier is genuinely usable for solo evaluators
  • Public API for programmatic transcription and summary retrieval
Otter.ai
  • Genuinely free tier covers casual meeting notes without a trial clock
  • Joins Zoom/Meet/Teams as a bot and ships desktop bot-free recording
  • Strong CRM and workspace integrations (Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Notion)
  • MCP server lets Claude/ChatGPT query your meeting history directly
Cons
Fireflies.ai
  • Visible bot attendee can feel intrusive in client or candidate calls
  • Conversation intelligence and unlimited storage are gated to Business+
  • Summary quality drops on noisy multi-speaker calls in less-supported languages
  • Closed-source, fully cloud-hosted - no self-hosted option
Otter.ai
  • No general developer API for programmatic transcription workflows
  • Bot-in-meeting model can feel intrusive on sensitive calls
  • Accuracy on heavy accents and crosstalk still lags dedicated ASR vendors
Website
Fireflies.ai
fireflies.ai
Otter.ai
otter.ai

Editorial score: rule-based, 0–10, from AI-assisted profile inputs (see /methodology) β€” not a user rating; β€œβ€”β€ means unscored. β€œNot listed” means we have no record of it, not that it is absent. GitHub figures and prices carry the date they were checked or captured; prices are shown as published, unconverted.

Pick Fireflies.ai if
  • βœ… Joins all major meeting platforms plus dialers and uploaded files with one workflow
  • βœ… Strong CRM/ATS sync (Salesforce, HubSpot, Greenhouse) keeps notes out of inboxes
  • βœ… AskFred chat and AI Apps make weeks of past calls actually searchable
  • βœ… Free tier is genuinely usable for solo evaluators
Pick Otter.ai if
  • βœ… Genuinely free tier covers casual meeting notes without a trial clock
  • βœ… Joins Zoom/Meet/Teams as a bot and ships desktop bot-free recording
  • βœ… Strong CRM and workspace integrations (Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Notion)
  • βœ… MCP server lets Claude/ChatGPT query your meeting history directly