Fireflies or Otter: which fits transcribing meetings and tracking actions?

Same chain, different strengths: record, transcribe, assign, send

Both tools do the same job. Fireflies records, transcribes and summarizes calls on Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, extracts tasks and sends them to email, chat and CRM. Otter records, transcribes and summarizes in real time and plugs into video conferencing tools.

The differences sit at four points: how audio gets in, which languages are covered, where action items land, and which plan limit you hit first. The customer stories below are vendor-published and show workflows; they are not a head-to-head measure.

1234

Capture: calendar bot, bot-free desktop, mobile and imports

Fireflies lists the most entry points: a notetaker bot you invite by email address or let auto-join calendar meetings, a Chrome extension for Google Meet, mobile and desktop apps, dialers such as Aircall and RingCentral, an API, and uploads of MP3, MP4, WAV and M4A files. Its pricing page also lists Chrome-extension recording without the Fireflies bot. How the desktop app presents itself to other participants is not described, so try that first.

Otter can send its notetaker through a calendar connection, or record from a Mac or Windows desktop app, a browser or a phone, and it describes the desktop route as bot-free. That is the clearest documented difference for calls where a visible bot would change the conversation. The free Basic plan allows three lifetime file imports.

Visibility matters in practice. Functionally, a remote-first team, says clients unfamiliar with recording were settled by Fireflies' Autojoin settings. AdCommunal, a marketing provider, worried clients would refuse recording until it explained that the participant was an AI assistant.

1256

Transcription: languages first, accuracy unknown

Otter lists English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese, with live transcription and speaker identification. Plans cap custom vocabulary: five terms on Basic, then 100 names and 100 other terms per user on Pro. Irvine Valley College reports that Otter recognized a product name a month after the college corrected its captions once.

With Fireflies the sources disagree. The homepage and free plan claim more than 100 languages with automatic detection, yet the homepage sentence names English, Spanish and French and adds unnamed others. Treat those three as the safe floor and anything else as a claim to test.

On accuracy there is no usable comparison. Fireflies advertises 95% on its own homepage; Otter's pages give no equivalent figure, and neither is an independent test. Editorial recommendation: run one real meeting, with your accents, names and jargon, through both free plans and compare the transcripts yourself.

123789

Action items: where they land after the call

Fireflies produces notes, action items and custom summaries after each meeting; Pro adds an action-item and task manager plus AI Skills. Its homepage says tasks can be created in nine or more project tools and call logs sent to five or more CRMs. Convictional shows the CRM route: in Fireflies' story, the sales team connected it to HubSpot so calls are logged automatically, reps stopped taking notes by hand, and stored recordings are used to coach new reps.

Otter says next steps are captured and assigned from every meeting; its takeaways panel assigns action items, and its Asana integration turns notes into items with deadlines. MRI Software's sales engineers, who run demos lasting hours, used to fill in a debrief form from memory. Otter's case study describes managers jumping to the transcript moment where a newer engineer struggled, and new hires querying AI Chat instead of shadowing colleagues. MRI reports, in figures published by Otter for a 26-person team, ROI after 2.5 weeks, 20 minutes saved per meeting and $150,000 in annual savings.

The lesson is about destination, not quality: Convictional's story turns on a CRM integration, MRI's on searching and replaying transcripts. Different teams, different metrics; do not read them against each other.

1291011

Integrations: large overlap, different named tools

Both work with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Slack, and both offer an MCP server so AI chat tools can query meeting content. Otter names Salesforce, HubSpot, Notion, Asana, Jira, Glean and Dropbox; its pricing page adds Zapier and says the Salesforce and HubSpot sync is subject to user limits on lower plans.

Fireflies gives counts more than names: five or more CRMs, nine or more project tools and one or more applicant-tracking systems, with Greenhouse and Lever as examples. If your stack depends on Jira or Asana, check it in the app before buying. On data handling, Fireflies states that customer data is not used to train models by default and offers a data processing agreement.

121213

Pricing: what each plan limits

Fireflies has four tiers. Free limits AI summaries, storage (400 minutes per team) and AI credits (20). Pro is $10 per seat per month billed annually, with unlimited summaries, 8,000 minutes of storage per seat, video recording and the task manager. Business is $19 and adds unlimited storage, multi-language mode and conversation intelligence. Enterprise is $39, annual only, and adds SSO, SCIM, a rules engine, private storage and a HIPAA option. The page also shows higher struck-through prices for Pro and Business, so confirm the amount at checkout.

Otter counts limits in minutes. Basic is free: 300 transcription minutes per month, 30 minutes per conversation, 25 conversations of history. Pro, shown at $8.33 per user per month, raises that to 1,200 minutes and 90 minutes per meeting. Business, at $19.99, allows four hours per meeting and three concurrent meetings, and adds activity logs and usage analytics. Enterprise is by demo. Whether the amounts are annual or monthly rates is not clear from the page.

Because limits differ, they bite differently. Otter's conversation-length cap matters for long workshops on lower tiers; Fireflies' storage and credits matter for teams that keep video. Stax bought Otter Enterprise after staff created personal accounts, so it could control who holds subscriptions and keep recordings in one repository.

17914

Where to start

Pick Otter first when a bot in the call is a problem, when you need German, Japanese or Chinese, or when action items should reach Asana or Jira. Pick Fireflies first for calendar-bot coverage, dialer calls, an applicant-tracking handoff or a task manager inside the product, provided your languages check out.

Editorial recommendation, not a vendor feature: put one team on both free plans for a few real meetings, including an external call, a non-English meeting if relevant, and one that ends in action items for a named tool. Compare the transcripts, how visible the bot is, and whether each action arrived without retyping.

1279