You leave a meeting and someone asks “so what did we decide?” — and nobody remembers. AI meeting assistants fix that by joining your calls, transcribing everything, and handing you notes. The two biggest names are Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai. They look similar on the surface, but their pricing and limits are very different. Here's the honest breakdown.
Free plans: Fireflies wins this round
Otter’s free Basic plan gives you 300 transcription minutes a month and caps each meeting at 30 minutes — fine for short standups, painful for hour-long calls. Fireflies’ free plan offers unlimited transcription (with some limits on AI features like summaries and storage). If you just want raw transcripts without paying, Fireflies is the clear winner.
Paid pricing: read the fine print
Otter Pro costs $16.99 per user per month on monthly billing, dropping to about $8.33 per user per month on annual billing. You get 1,200 minutes a month and longer meeting limits. Fireflies Pro is $10 per user per month on annual billing or $18 month-to-month — but Fireflies also runs on an AI-credits system for advanced features, so heavy users of summaries and analysis can burn through credits faster than expected. Both offer team plans with admin controls.
Accuracy and languages
Both transcribe English well in quiet conditions. Fireflies supports 100+ languages, which matters if your team isn't English-only. Otter supports fewer languages but offers real-time captions during the call, which is genuinely useful for accessibility and for following along in noisy environments.
Features that actually differ
Otter's standout is live collaboration — teammates can highlight and comment on the transcript while the meeting is still running. Fireflies' standout is integrations and search: it plugs into CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, has a Chrome extension for browser-based calls, and its AskFred AI lets you query across all your past meetings ("what did the client say about pricing last month?"). If you live in your CRM, Fireflies fits better. If your team takes notes together, Otter fits better.
The verdict: pick by your use case
Choose Fireflies if: you want the most generous free plan, you need many languages, or you want meeting data flowing into your CRM.
Choose Otter if: you want live captions and real-time collaborative notes, or most of your meetings are short.
AiPost's take
Start with Fireflies' free plan — unlimited transcription is hard to argue with. If you hit the 30-minute meeting cap on Otter's free tier twice, that's your signal to either pay or switch. And whichever you pick, tell attendees a bot is recording — it's the law in several places and just good manners everywhere.
Comments
Post a Comment