Otter vs Fireflies: Which Fits How You Meet?

Dana manages five account executives, and her finance lead wants an answer on Otter vs Fireflies by Friday: one notetaker, on the company card.

She has two pricing pages open. Otter's says Pro is $8.33 a month. Fireflies' says Pro is $10 a seat. Both join Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, both write summaries, and both have a free plan.

So the cheaper one wins? Not quite.

Otter and Fireflies meter different things. Otter counts the minutes you record each month and caps how long one conversation can run. Fireflies doesn't count minutes on paid plans, but it caps total storage, recording length and a shared pool of AI credits. Which bill stays small depends on how much your team records and how long its meetings run.

This Otter vs Fireflies comparison uses each vendor's own pricing page and help center, checked on October 2, 2026. You'll get the prices side by side, the meter behind each bill, a year-one cost for three kinds of buyer, and a quick way to decide.

A disclosure: ParrotNotes publishes this blog and appears in one section near the end, for conversations that happen across a table rather than on a call. If that's most of your week, you can try ParrotNotes free at your next in-person meeting.

Otter vs Fireflies at a glance

Otter is the better pick for a solo user or a team of up to five whose calls stay under 90 minutes and happen in one of its six languages. Fireflies is the better pick for teams that keep a growing library of recordings, run longer meetings, or work in more languages. Otter Pro is $8.33 a month billed annually; Fireflies Pro is $10 a seat billed annually.

Sources: otter.ai/pricing, Otter's help center, fireflies.ai/pricing and Fireflies' help center, all read on 2026-10-02.

Otter vs Fireflies pricing, side by side

Both price in USD, per user or seat, with a bigger discount for paying a year up front.

Prices from otter.ai/pricing and fireflies.ai/pricing, both billing tabs, read on 2026-10-02. They match our Otter AI pricing guide (checked 2026-09-22) and our Fireflies AI pricing guide (checked 2026-09-27). Otter sometimes shows a time-limited promotional price on Pro billed annually; the table uses the standard price.

Two notes on the small print. Otter's Monthly tab shows Business at $24 with "20% off for 3 months", an offer "valid for first-time subscribers only", so budget on $30. And Otter's page opens on the Annual tab, which is why $8.33 is the first Pro price you see. On monthly billing it's $16.99, a dollar under Fireflies' $18.

Otter also gives students and teachers with a .edu address 20% off Pro: $79.99 a year, or $13.59 a month.

The meter behind each bill

The price per seat is the easy part. What decides whether a plan still works in month three is the meter running underneath it, and Otter and Fireflies use different ones.

Otter meters minutes per month, and the length of each conversation

Every Otter plan below Business has a monthly minute pool: 300 minutes on Basic and 1,200 on Pro, per user, with "no rollover". Imported files draw on the same pool. When it runs out, you wait for the next cycle or upgrade.

The second cap is per conversation: 30 minutes on Basic, 90 on Pro, 4 hours on Business and Enterprise. A weekly 60-minute pipeline review is fine on Pro. A two-hour quarterly business review isn't.

Business removes the monthly cap for meetings and in-app recordings. Otter's comparison table says "Unlimited", with imported files capped at 6,000 minutes a month per user.

Fireflies meters storage in total, recording length and AI credits

Fireflies' paid plans list "Unlimited transcription" and "Unlimited AI summaries". The meter is storage: 400 minutes per team on Free, 8,000 minutes per seat on Pro, unlimited on Business and Enterprise. As our Fireflies pricing guide found in Fireflies' help center, storage "does not reset monthly", so Pro's 8,000 minutes is a runway, not a refill.

The recording limit is 2 hours on Free and Pro, 3 hours on Business, 4 hours on Enterprise.

Then there are AI credits: 20 on Free and Pro, 30 on Business, 50 on Enterprise. They pay for tools such as AI Skills, the Personal Assistant and Voice Agents, and they're pooled across the team, so five Pro seats share 20 credits. Transcription and summaries don't use them.

The free plans fail in different places

Otter Basic gives you 300 minutes a month, but each conversation's transcript stops at 30 minutes, you can import three files for the life of the account, and you see your 25 most recent conversations.

Fireflies Free transcribes without a monthly cap, on one condition. Its free-plan transcripts article says that with Auto-join calendar meetings on, there is "no cap on the number of transcriptions"; with it off, "You're limited to the Free plan's default of 3 meeting transcriptions." And 400 minutes of storage is under seven hours for the whole team, in total.

In short: Otter Free works for short calls; Fireflies Free works for a week or two of testing.

Day-to-day differences between Otter and Fireflies

How each one joins your meetings

Both send a notetaker into scheduled video calls. Otter's Notetaker overview says it joins Zoom, Google Meet and Teams "as a participant", named "[Your Name]'s Notetaker (Otter.ai)", once you connect a Google or Microsoft calendar. Fireflies' notetaker works the same way, and its pricing FAQ says sign-in "is only possible via Google Auth or Outlook Auth". On Pro and Business you can buy an add-on to rename the bot.

Both also record without a bot. Otter's homepage offers "A desktop app for bot-free meetings" on Mac and Windows, plus Chrome and mobile. Fireflies' table lists "Record using Chrome extension without Fireflies bot", plus a desktop app and a mobile app.

Languages

This is the widest gap. Otter's supported languages article says: "Otter currently only supports English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese (Simplified)." Asked about Portuguese, the answer is "No." You can ask Otter Chat to translate a finished conversation.

Fireflies lists "Transcription in 100+ languages". Its pricing FAQ is more careful: "Currently English is the primarily language that is supported. We also support Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and 100+ other languages in beta." Calls that switch languages midway need Multi-language Mode, on Business and Enterprise.

AI, search and CRM

Both write summaries and action items, and both have an assistant you can question: Otter AI Chat (20 queries a month on Basic, 50 on Pro, 200 on Business) and Fireflies' AskFred (limited on Free).

On CRM, Otter Pro syncs notes to Salesforce or HubSpot for one user, Business for five, and puts Otter Sales Notetaker on Enterprise. Fireflies lists "Unlimited integrations" from Pro and conversation intelligence from Business; its advanced AI tools draw on credits.

Phones and in-person meetings

Both have iOS and Android apps on every plan, including free. Otter's minutes and per-conversation caps apply to phone recordings too, so a 40-minute site visit on Basic gives you a transcript of the first 30. Fireflies' app records in person, with the 2-hour limit and the storage meter behind it.

If you're weighing the bot question more broadly, our guides to Otter alternatives and Fireflies alternatives that don't join your call cover every bot-free option.

What Otter and Fireflies cost in year one

Here are three buyer shapes, priced with published numbers only. Each person records about 15 hours of calls a month (900 minutes), the same assumption as our Fathom vs Fireflies comparison.

Computed from otter.ai/pricing and fireflies.ai/pricing on 2026-10-02. Fireflies storage runway: 8,000 ÷ 900 = 8.9 months. Otter Pro annual: $8.33 × 12 = $99.96 per user.

The pattern: for short calls, Otter is cheaper; once meetings run long, the two land within $60 of each other. Splitting long recordings in two keeps you on Pro with either tool, if you don't mind two transcripts.

Dana's answer (she's a fictional composite): her five AEs run 45-minute discovery calls, and she hosts a two-and-a-half-hour pipeline workshop on the last Friday of each month. Otter Pro at $499.80 looks like the obvious saving, until the workshop hits the 90-minute cap. Fireflies Pro hits its 2-hour limit too.

Her real choice is Otter Business at $1,199.40 against Fireflies Business at $1,140. Two of her reps sell into Brazil in Portuguese, which Otter doesn't transcribe, so she picks Fireflies Business.

Where do your meetings happen?

The cost table assumes every meeting has a link. Before you pick, sort last week's meetings.

For meetings with no link: ParrotNotes

Otter and Fireflies are both built around the calendar invite. Tomás, a fictional sales engineer for an industrial pump distributor, spends four days a week on plant floors. None of his meetings has a link, the maintenance manager switches between Spanish and English, and he wants notes and a follow-up email before he leaves the car park.

That's the job ParrotNotes is built for. You open the app on the phone you already carry, tap record and set it on the table. When you stop, you get a transcript, a summary, the action items and a drafted follow-up email after the sales call.

Otter and Fireflies facts from their pricing pages and help centers on 2026-10-02; ParrotNotes facts from parrotnotes.app/pricing.

ParrotNotes Free gives you 100 minutes of recording a month, an AI summary on every recording, and full AI insights on 5 recordings a month. ParrotNotes Pro is $19.99 a month, or $14.99 a month billed annually, with 3,000 minutes a month, recordings up to 3 hours, every AI feature, multilingual transcription and translation in 99+ languages, speaker identification and MCP connectors.

Tomás records three visits a day at about 30 minutes each: roughly 1,800 minutes a month, well inside Pro's 3,000. You can keep Otter or Fireflies for video calls and use ParrotNotes for the room.

Meeting in person this week? Download ParrotNotes free and record your next site visit.

The verdict on Otter vs Fireflies

Choose Otter if your calls are under 90 minutes, your team is five people or fewer, and you work in English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese or Chinese. Pro at $8.33 a month billed annually is the cheapest paid plan in this comparison.

Choose Fireflies if you want unlimited transcription without counting minutes, need more languages, or have meetings that run past 90 minutes, and budget for Business if your team records every day. Pro's storage runs out in under a year for a busy user.

Check both pricing pages on the day you buy, because prices move.

And if your most important conversations happen across a table, not on a screen, download ParrotNotes free. You get 100 minutes a month with an AI summary on every recording, on the phone you already carry, with no bot to admit.