Fellow vs Otter.ai

Fellow is a meeting management platform made by a Canadian company headquartered in Ottawa. It covers the whole meeting cycle: collaborative agendas prepared before the call, notes and decisions captured during it, and action items and recaps followed up afterwards, with a strong focus on recurring one-on-ones and team meetings run by managers.

Agendas live in a shared notes document attached to each calendar event, with a template library for one-on-ones, stand-ups, retrospectives and board meetings. Fellow's AI notetaker joins Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams calls to record, transcribe and summarize, and privacy controls let organizations decide which meetings are recorded and who can see transcripts. Action items sync to tools such as Asana, Jira and Slack. There is a free plan with limits, then per-user Team and Business plans that unlock AI notes, longer history and admin controls, plus an Enterprise tier.

Fellow fits managers and organizations that want to improve meeting habits, not just capture transcripts. Solo users who only need a recorder get more for less from Otter, Fireflies or tl;dv, and teams already standardized on Notion or Confluence may find the agenda features overlap with what they have. Compared with Fathom or Fireflies, Fellow is stronger on pre-meeting preparation, one-on-one workflows and governance, while the pure notetakers are cheaper for transcription alone. Its value depends on the whole team adopting it, so rollout matters.

Otter.ai is an AI meeting assistant from a Mountain View, California company founded in 2016 by Sam Liang and Yun Fu. It records conversations, transcribes them live with speaker identification, and produces summaries, outlines and action items. It works through OtterPilot, a bot that joins Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams meetings from your calendar, and through mobile and web recording for in-person conversations, interviews and lectures.

Transcripts are searchable and shareable, slides shown during meetings are captured into the notes, and Otter AI Chat answers questions about a single meeting or across a whole workspace of past meetings. Business and Enterprise plans add admin controls, usage analytics, CRM sync and specialized agents, such as a sales agent that assists during calls and updates CRM records. Pricing is per user with monthly minute allowances and per-conversation length limits: a free Basic tier, then Pro, Business and Enterprise.

Otter suits English-speaking teams, journalists, researchers and students who value accurate live transcripts. Its language support is limited to a few languages: English, Spanish and French, plus Japanese since late 2025. Turkish is not supported, so it is a poor fit for multilingual teams. Fathom offers a generous free plan for recording and summaries, Fireflies and tl;dv support many more languages, and Granola captures notes from device audio without a bot joining the call, which some clients prefer.