AI meeting assistants have become essential for anyone who sits through more than a few calls per week. Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai lead the category, but they’ve optimized for different use cases.

Both transcribe meetings. Both use AI to summarize and extract action items. But the details of how they work—and how they integrate into your workflow—differ meaningfully.

Core Positioning

Otter.ai positions itself as a meeting collaboration platform. Transcription is the foundation, but real-time features, search, and team collaboration get equal emphasis.

Fireflies.ai focuses on meeting intelligence. It emphasizes analysis, CRM integration, and using meeting data to inform business decisions.

Feature Comparison

Feature	Otter.ai	Fireflies.ai
Transcription Accuracy	Excellent	Excellent
Real-time Transcription	Yes	Yes
Speaker Identification	Good	Good
Meeting Summaries	AI-generated	AI-generated
Action Item Extraction	Yes	Yes
Search Across Meetings	Yes	Yes
Zoom Integration	Native	Native
Google Meet Integration	Native	Native
Teams Integration	Native	Native
CRM Integration	Limited	Extensive
Custom Vocabulary	Yes	Yes
Mobile App	Strong	Good
Free Tier	300 min/month	800 min/month
Pro Price	$16.99/month	$18/month
API Access	Yes	Yes

Where Otter.ai Excels

Real-time Collaboration

Otter’s live transcription isn’t just readable—it’s collaborative. Team members can highlight text, add comments, and insert photos during the meeting. The transcript becomes a shared working document.

For teams that take detailed meeting notes, this live collaboration beats reviewing recordings later.

Mobile Experience

Otter’s mobile app works well for in-person conversations and phone calls. The interface is polished, and offline recording (with later transcription) fills gaps.

If you interview people in person or record conversations outside video calls, Otter handles this gracefully.

Conversation Intelligence

Beyond meetings, Otter transcribes any conversation. Lectures, interviews, brainstorming sessions, voice notes—the use cases extend beyond the conference room.

OtterPilot for Sales

Recent additions include sales-specific features: automatic CRM logging, sales playbook tracking, and conversation intelligence for coaching. Otter is expanding into Fireflies’ territory.

Import Flexibility

Upload audio and video files directly. Have recordings from other sources? Otter processes them and applies the same AI summarization. Historical meeting archives become searchable.

Where Fireflies.ai Excels

CRM Integration Depth

Fireflies connects deeply with Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and other CRMs. Meeting notes, action items, and transcripts flow automatically into contact records. For sales teams, this automation eliminates manual CRM updates.

Otter has CRM integrations too, but Fireflies built this as a core use case earlier.

Meeting Analytics

Fireflies provides metrics on talk time, sentiment, topics discussed, and question frequency. Managers can identify coaching opportunities without reviewing every recording.

Topic Tracker

Track specific topics, competitors, objections, or keywords across all meetings. Get notified when certain subjects come up. This competitive intelligence feature matters for sales and product teams.

Automation via API

Fireflies’ API and webhook support make it more developer-friendly. Build custom workflows: trigger actions when specific keywords appear, auto-send summaries to Slack channels, or feed data into analytics platforms.

Channel Variety

Beyond video meetings, Fireflies captures audio from dialers like Aircall and RingCentral. Sales teams using phone-based outreach benefit from unified transcription across all conversation channels.

Generous Free Tier

800 minutes/month on the free tier exceeds Otter’s 300 minutes. For low-volume users, Fireflies offers more before requiring payment.

Transcription Accuracy

Both services deliver approximately 90-95% accuracy on clear audio with native English speakers. Results degrade similarly with:

• Heavy accents
• Technical jargon
• Multiple overlapping speakers
• Poor audio quality

Custom vocabulary training helps both tools handle company-specific terms, product names, and industry jargon.

In blind tests, accuracy differences are negligible. Don’t choose based on transcription quality—choose based on workflow fit.

AI Summary Quality

Both generate meeting summaries, action items, and key points. The quality is comparable—useful but not perfect. Expect to correct occasional misattributions and missed context.

Otter’s summaries feel more conversational. Fireflies’ summaries trend more structured and bullet-point focused. Neither approach is objectively better.

Team Collaboration

Otter: Shared workspaces, comment threads on transcripts, highlight clips, collaborative editing during live transcription.

Fireflies: Shared folders, commenting, soundbites (shareable clips), but less real-time collaborative editing.

For teams who process meeting content together, Otter’s collaboration tools are slightly more polished.

Pricing Deep Dive

Otter.ai:

• Basic: Free (300 min/month, 30 min/conversation)
• Pro: $16.99/month (1,200 min/month, 90 min/conversation)
• Business: $30/month per user
• Enterprise: Custom

Fireflies.ai:

• Free: 800 min/month, limited transcripts stored
• Pro: $18/month (unlimited transcription)
• Business: $29/month per user
• Enterprise: Custom

Pro tier comparison favors Fireflies slightly on minutes, but Otter includes more features at the Pro level. Business tier pricing is similar.

Who Should Choose What

Choose Otter.ai If You:

• Value real-time collaboration during meetings
• Record conversations beyond video calls
• Want polished mobile transcription
• Prioritize the transcript as a working document
• Have existing workflows built around Otter

Choose Fireflies.ai If You:

• Need deep CRM integration
• Want meeting analytics and coaching insights
• Track competitors or specific topics
• Use phone dialers for sales
• Plan to build custom integrations via API
• Need more free minutes

Privacy Considerations

Both services process audio through cloud servers. Both offer enterprise plans with enhanced security. Both have had to address concerns about recording consent and data handling.

Key questions for either tool:

• Where is data stored?
• Who can access transcripts?
• How long is data retained?
• What happens when you cancel?

For sensitive industries (healthcare, legal, finance), verify compliance certifications before adopting either tool.

The Bot Visibility Issue

Both tools join meetings as visible participants (“Otter.ai” or “Fireflies.ai Notetaker”). Some meeting participants find this awkward. Others appreciate the transparency.

Both offer alternatives: browser-based recording (no bot visible) or manual upload. But the automatic join feature—the main convenience—makes the AI assistant visible.

My Verdict

Otter.ai wins for collaboration-focused teams who want transcripts as living documents. The real-time editing, mobile flexibility, and polished user experience make it feel less like a utility and more like a productivity tool.

Fireflies.ai wins for sales and revenue teams who need meeting data flowing into CRMs and analytics. The integration depth, topic tracking, and automation capabilities serve sales operations better.

For most knowledge workers with standard meeting loads, either tool improves your workflow significantly. The free tiers let you test both—start with whichever integrates with your primary meeting platform, then switch if the workflow doesn’t click.

Meetings don’t have to disappear into memory. These tools make them searchable, shareable, and actionable. The choice between them is about how you want to use that captured information.