Fireflies.ai vs Otter.ai

Fireflies.ai is an AI meeting assistant founded in 2016 and based in San Francisco. Its bot, called Fred, joins calls on Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex and other platforms to record, transcribe and analyze conversations, and it can also process uploaded audio and video files. Transcription supports more than 100 languages, including Turkish.

After each meeting Fireflies produces a summary, action items, outline and topic trackers, and AskFred lets users ask questions about one meeting or across their whole meeting history. Conversation intelligence shows talk time, sentiment and question counts, which sales and customer success teams use for coaching. Notes and tasks can be pushed automatically into Salesforce, HubSpot, Asana, Notion, Slack and many other tools. The free plan offers limited transcription, AI summaries and storage, while paid seats on Pro, Business and Enterprise add unlimited summaries, more storage, video recording, analytics, SSO and compliance options.

Fireflies fits teams that want a searchable archive of meetings at a low per-seat cost. Accuracy depends on audio quality and accents, and some participants dislike a bot joining the call. Otter.ai is a close competitor focused on live transcription, Gong is a far more expensive revenue intelligence platform, and Granola or Krisp take notes without a bot by capturing audio on the user's device.

Recent additions include a mobile app, AI apps that generate specific outputs such as sales notes or interview scorecards, and real-time AI assistance during meetings.

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.