The two names that come up in every AI meeting-notes conversation are Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai. Both launched in 2016, both plug into Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, and both promise to end manual note-taking. But they price and limit very differently — and the wrong pick means paying for transcription minutes you never get to use.
The short version
Otter.ai is the real-time transcription veteran. Its OtterPilot bot joins your call and produces a live, searchable transcript with speaker identification while people talk, plus post-call summaries, action items, and an AI chat that answers questions about any conversation. Its standout is search-and-replay: months later you can find the exact moment a client agreed to a deadline.
Fireflies.ai leans into conversation intelligence. Its AskFred AI chat queries your entire meeting history, it runs sentiment analysis and talk-time analytics, and it supports 100+ languages with auto-detection — Otter covers six. It also has a Chrome extension that records without a visible bot joining the call, which matters if your clients react badly to "notetaker has joined."
Real pricing, October 2026
Otter: free tier (300 min/month, but a 30-minute per-meeting cap — hour-long meetings get cut off); Pro $16.99/user/month or $8.33 annual (1,200 min/month, 90-minute cap); Business $30 or $19.99 annual (unlimited meetings, 4 hours each); Enterprise custom. The caps matter more than the headline prices.
Fireflies: free tier with unlimited transcription but only 400 minutes of storage per team and limited AI summaries; Pro $10/seat/month annual ($18 monthly); Business $19 annual ($29 monthly) with unlimited storage, conversation intelligence, 720p video recording, and CRM sync; Enterprise $39 annual with HIPAA compliance. Watch the AI credit pool: summaries and AskFred queries draw from a shared workspace pool, and AI features pause when it runs out.
Who should pick which
Multilingual teams and sales teams analyzing calls: Fireflies. Live reading along and searching months of history: Otter. Bot-free capture: Fireflies. HIPAA-regulated work: Enterprise on either — the lower tiers are not compliant.
The full breakdown — head-to-head comparison table, the free-tier face-off, per-meeting-cap warnings, and FAQ — is on NeurAITool: Best AI Meeting Notes Tools 2026: Otter vs Fireflies. Also see the 10 best AI tools for small business for the wider productivity stack.
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