Otter vs Fireflies (2026): which one to pay for, and what each does with your calls

Otter vs Fireflies comes down to who is paying and how much you mind a bot. Both are cloud notetakers that send a participant into Zoom, Google Meet and Teams calls, and both now have a desktop app that records without one. Otter is cheaper for one person and has the more usable free plan. Fireflies is cheaper per seat for a team, and its Pro plan has no monthly minute cap. If you searched for Fireflies vs Otter, the answer is the same.

Prices and plan limits come from Otter's pricing page and Fireflies' pricing page, both checked on 29 October 2026. The rest comes from each company's help center and security pages, and from the court dockets. For the full plan breakdowns, see Otter.ai pricing and Fireflies pricing.

Otter vs Fireflies at a glance

	Otter	Fireflies
Pro, billed monthly	$16.99 per user a month	$18 per seat a month
Pro, billed annually	$8.33 per user a month	$10 per seat a month
Business	$30, or $19.99 billed annually	$29, or $19 billed annually
Enterprise	Quote from sales	$39 per seat a month, annual only
Free plan	300 minutes a month, 30 minutes per conversation	3 meetings for new accounts, unlimited with Auto-join; 400 minutes of storage
Pro transcription	1,200 minutes a month	Unlimited, 8,000 minutes of storage per seat
Longest meeting on Pro	90 minutes	2 hours
Bot	"[Your Name]'s Notetaker (Otter.ai)"	Fred (fred@fireflies.ai)
Recording without a bot	Mac and Windows desktop app	Mac and Windows desktop app, Chrome extension for Google Meet
Languages	6	100+, English primary, others in beta
Trains AI on your meetings	Yes, after de-identification	Says no
HIPAA	Enterprise add-on	Enterprise with Private Storage

Otter vs Fireflies pricing: Otter for one person, Fireflies for a team

For one person on annual billing, Otter Pro is about $100 a year and Fireflies Pro is $120. Month to month, Otter is $203.88 a year and Fireflies is $216. Otter is the cheaper Pro plan either way.

What you get for it differs. Otter Pro gives 1,200 transcription minutes a month and stops at 90 minutes per conversation. Fireflies Pro has no monthly minute cap, records up to 2 hours per meeting, and stores 8,000 minutes per seat. A two-hour workshop fits on Fireflies Pro and does not fit on Otter Pro. If you record more than 20 hours of meetings a month, Otter Pro runs out. Fireflies Pro has no monthly cap, though its 8,000 minutes of storage, about 133 hours, fill up over time.

For teams the order reverses. Five seats of Business on annual billing cost $1,199.40 a year on Otter and $1,140 on Fireflies. On monthly billing that is $1,800 against $1,740. Otter's monthly tab also shows Business at $24 for the first 3 months, for first-time subscribers only. Otter caps a Pro workspace at 5 billed users and Business at 25.

Fireflies has one cost Otter does not. AI credits pay for extras such as AskFred during a live meeting and CRM autofill, and Pro comes with 20 credits for the whole team. Our Fireflies pricing post has the credit prices and the auto-subscription setting to switch off. Otter meters its AI chat by question count instead: 20 a month on Basic, 50 on Pro, 200 on Business.

The free plans work in opposite ways

Otter Basic is free with no end date. You get 300 minutes a month across meetings and recordings, 30 minutes per conversation, 3 file imports for the life of the account, and your 25 most recent conversations. The bot can join on Basic, one meeting at a time. Ten half-hour calls use up the month.

Fireflies Free changed for accounts created on or after 1 September 2026. The help article "Unlock Unlimited Transcriptions on the Fireflies Free Plan" says new free accounts get 3 meeting transcriptions by default. Turn on "Auto-join calendar meetings" and the cap goes away, which means Fred joins your calendar meetings. The setting "Only when I invite fred@fireflies.ai" does not count. The same article calls the unlimited transcripts "your full raw text," and summaries and action items still depend on your AI credit balance. Storage on Free is 400 minutes, and downloading transcripts starts on Pro.

Once Auto-join is on, the guide says recordings from the Chrome extension and the mobile app are unlimited too. But Fred still goes to every calendar meeting that matches the filter you pick: all meetings with a web-conference link, only meetings you own, or only meetings with teammates. For someone with a few short calls a week who doesn't want a bot in every one, Otter Basic is the better free plan.

Do Otter and Fireflies join as a bot?

Yes, by default. Otter's bot is called Otter Notetaker. The Notetaker overview says it joins as a guest named "[Your Name]'s Notetaker (Otter.ai)" and cannot join anonymously or without other participants seeing it. Otter's recording permissions page says it also posts a message in the meeting chat with a link to the live transcript. It leaves after 12 minutes of silence.

Fireflies' bot is Fred. You invite fred@fireflies.ai to a meeting or let Auto-join send it to your calendar events. The shared bot on team workspaces can join meetings organised by anyone in the workspace.

In the Reddit threads I read that compare the two, the bot was the most common complaint. In an r/ITManagers thread, someone running an IT services firm wrote that with Otter some clients got nervous "and a few have flat out asked for it to be removed from the call." They tried Fireflies next and hit the same problem.

Can you use Otter or Fireflies without the bot?

Yes. Otter's desktop app for Mac and Windows records Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, Slack huddles, phone dialers and messaging apps without the bot. Its desktop help article, updated on 28 October 2026, says that in Teams it can post "I am using Otter to record this meeting." in the meeting chat when recording starts. On other platforms the only indicator it describes is a floating control on your own screen.

Fireflies has a desktop app for Mac and Windows that it calls "Botless Meetings, Finally," and its pricing table ticks "Record using Chrome extension without Fireflies bot" on every plan. The desktop page says "A Fireflies indicator will be present to let participants know when the notetaker is on."

With no bot in the participant list, getting consent is up to you. Both companies say so in their desktop documentation. Our post on meeting recording consent laws covers the states where everyone on the call has to agree.

Skipping the bot does not keep the meeting on your computer. Otter's help article says that if you lose your connection mid-recording, the app will "automatically start uploading and transcribing the file once a connection is detected." Fireflies' desktop page does not say any of the processing happens on your computer.

What each one does with the recording

The training policy is where the two differ most.

Otter's privacy and security page says Otter "uses a proprietary method to de-identify user data before training our models," and that audio and transcripts are not reviewed by a person during that training. Its outside AI providers do not train on customer data. So your conversations do go into Otter's own model training, after de-identification.

Fireflies says the opposite. Its pricing page says "Your data is never used for AI training or any purpose outside your direct business needs," and the security page says "We don't train on it by default" and describes a 0-day retention policy with its vendors. "By default" suggests a setting exists. I could not find one described on either page. Our post on whether Fireflies is safe goes through the rest of its security page.

Both store recordings in their cloud. Otter uses AWS S3 with server-side encryption, and deleted conversations sit in Trash for 30 days. Both hold a SOC 2 Type II report, and Fireflies also lists ISO 42001. Custom data retention is Enterprise only on both. So is HIPAA: Otter sells it as an Enterprise add-on, and Fireflies says its BAA is "available on Enterprise with Private Storage." Neither covers a therapist or clinic on Pro or Business. More on that in which AI notetakers are HIPAA compliant.

Both are being sued over the bot

Otter's case is further along. In In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation, No. 5:25-cv-06911 in the Northern District of California, the court granted Otter's motion to dismiss only in part on 13 August 2026, so federal wiretap, California privacy and Illinois voiceprint claims went forward. Otter filed its answer on 17 September 2026. It admits the Notetaker "appears as a participant in meetings that it is allowed to join" and denies the rest. The case is now in discovery, and our Otter safety post explains the claims.

Fireflies faces Fricker v. Fireflies.AI Corp., No. 1:26-cv-02675 in the Northern District of Illinois, combined with a second case, Martinez. The complaint says that when a host turns Fireflies on, it records and stores the voiceprints of everyone in the meeting, including people who never created an account, without the written consent Illinois' biometric privacy law requires. Fireflies moved to dismiss on 15 July 2026, briefing ended on 26 August, and discovery is on hold. When I checked the docket on 29 October 2026 there was no ruling.

These are allegations. No court has found either company liable. They are worth knowing about if you record people in Illinois or California who never agreed to the tool.

Where they differ on features

Otter's pricing table lists six transcription languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese. Fireflies advertises more than 100, but its pricing FAQ says English is the primary supported language and that it also supports "Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and 100+ other languages in beta." If a call switches language halfway, Fireflies Business has a multi-language mode.

For CRM sync, Otter sends notes to Salesforce or HubSpot for 1 user on Pro and 5 on Business, with no limit on Enterprise. Fireflies lists unlimited integrations from Pro up, and conversation intelligence and team analytics on Business.

Both have iOS and Android apps for recording a conversation in the room, on every plan.

Neither company publishes an error rate, and I have not run a controlled test of both, so I am not ranking them on accuracy. Reddit users disagree with each other on this too. If accuracy decides it for you, record the same call with both on free plans and compare.

Which one I would buy

If you work alone, your calls are under 90 minutes, and you want the lowest price, buy Otter Pro on annual billing. It is about $100 a year.

If you work alone and your meetings run long, buy Fireflies Pro. The extra $20 a year removes the monthly minute cap and raises the per-meeting limit from 90 minutes to 2 hours.

If you pay for a team, I would pick Fireflies Business. It costs less per seat and its stated policy is not to train on your meetings. Otter trains on de-identified meetings, and for some companies that settles it.

If you don't want to pay at all and your calls are short, Otter Basic is the better free plan, because Fireflies' unlimited free tier only works with Auto-join on, which sends Fred to your calendar meetings.

If you want neither the bot nor the upload

I build Private Notetaker, so weigh this section accordingly. It captures the call audio on your own computer and writes the transcript, summary and action items there. Nothing joins the meeting and the audio stays on the device. It also works with Wi-Fi off. It runs on a Mac with Apple Silicon or a 64-bit Windows 10 or 11 PC. It is $15 a month or $149 once for a lifetime license. The 7-day trial needs no card, and purchases have a 30-day money-back guarantee.

It does much less than either of these. It is English only, has no team workspace and no CRM sync, and it is less accurate on bad audio than a cloud model. If your team needs a shared library of every call, Otter or Fireflies is the right tool and we would not argue. If the issue is that the meeting should not be on someone else's servers, compare them side by side: Private Notetaker vs Otter and Private Notetaker vs Fireflies. The alternatives pages for Otter and Fireflies list other options, and the best AI meeting notetakers page covers the rest of the category. To get rid of a bot that keeps turning up, see how to stop notetaker bots joining your meetings.

Otter prices, minute and meeting limits, workspace sizes, languages, integrations, AI Chat limits, Enterprise and HIPAA from otter.ai/pricing. Otter bot behaviour from "Otter Notetaker Overview" and "Recording Permissions with Otter." Otter desktop app from otter.ai/desktop and "Otter Desktop App (Mac & Windows)." Otter training, storage and deletion from otter.ai/privacy-security. Fireflies prices, storage, recording limits, languages FAQ, bot-free Chrome extension row, certifications and HIPAA from fireflies.ai/pricing. Free plan rules from "Unlock Unlimited Transcriptions on the Fireflies Free Plan." Training and retention statements from fireflies.ai/pricing and fireflies.ai/security. Desktop app from fireflies.ai/desktop. Court filings from the CourtListener dockets for No. 5:25-cv-06911 (N.D. Cal.) and No. 1:26-cv-02675 (N.D. Ill.), including Otter's answer filed 17 September 2026. Reddit quote from r/ITManagers. All checked 29 October 2026, Otter's desktop help article as updated 28 October 2026. Plans change.