Otter is the transcription specialist in a category that mostly sells summaries — it produces accurate, searchable, speaker-attributed transcripts you can replay and verify, which is exactly what summary-first tools give up. Pricing runs a free tier at 300 minutes a month, Pro at $8.33 per user annually or $16.99 monthly, and Business at $19.99 annually or $30 monthly. Two details decide fit: the free plan caps each individual conversation at 30 minutes regardless of your monthly balance, and Business bills a minimum of five seats even if your team is three people.
Reviewed by EdGrows·Updated Aug 18, 2026Affiliate link — we may earn a commission
This analysis is based on documentation, public user reports, and vendor materials — not yet on our own hands-on testing. How we rate
The meeting-AI category has split. Most tools now sell summaries — a tidy paragraph and some action items, with the recording treated as an implementation detail.
Otter sells the archive. Accurate transcription, speaker attribution, full searchable history, and audio you can replay.
That distinction decides everything. If your relationship with meetings ends when you read the summary, Otter is more tool than you need and cheaper options match it. If you ever go back — searching for what a client said in March, checking whether something was actually agreed, pulling an exact quote — Otter is built for that and the summary-first tools structurally aren't.
Granola stores text only with no playback on any tier. Fathom and Fireflies lean summary-first. Otter keeps the recording, and that's the product.
Basic gives 300 transcription minutes a month — genuinely useful, and the second limit is the one people trip over.
Each individual conversation is capped at 30 minutes. A one-hour meeting is cut in half whether or not you've used a single minute of your monthly balance. There's also a lifetime limit of three file imports.
Within those bounds it's a real product: live transcription, speaker identification, the meeting bot for Zoom, Teams and Meet, and AI Chat. Enough to cover occasional calls or to evaluate properly.
But if your meetings routinely run an hour, the free tier can't cover a single one of them completely, which is a different limitation from "you'll run out by the third week."
| Plan | Annual | Monthly | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | Free | Free | 300 min/mo, 30 min per conversation |
| Pro | $8.33/user | $16.99/user | Individual and small teams |
| Business | $19.99/user | $30/user | Minimum 5 seats |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Meeting Agent sales coaching |
Business bills five seats regardless of your actual headcount. For a three-person team that's roughly $100 a month minimum against $25 for three Pro seats — and Business adds admin controls, usage analytics and higher limits rather than a different product.
So the real question for small teams isn't Pro versus Business on features. It's whether admin tooling justifies paying for two people who don't exist. For most teams under five, it doesn't.
One more thing worth planning around: Otter changes prices and plan limits fairly often, and rolled out a suite of AI meeting agents through 2025. Treat any published figure, including this table, as a snapshot.
Otter joins your call as a visible participant. Everyone sees it.
For internal meetings that's frequently a feature — recording becomes explicit and consented rather than quiet. For client calls, investor conversations or anything sensitive, it's the single reason people migrate to Granola's silent system-audio capture.
The Meeting Agent, added through 2025, extends this further: real-time participation during the call rather than post-hoc summarising. It's a genuine capability, and it speaks up as a voice bot, which is more presence rather than less. Sales coaching features sit behind Enterprise pricing.
If the bot already bothered you, the Meeting Agent is not the feature that fixes it.
Summary-only needs. You're paying for transcription depth you won't open — Fathom's free tier is more generous.
Bot-sensitive calls. Visible participant on every meeting.
Teams of three or four wanting Business. The five-seat floor makes Pro the rational choice.
Hour-long meetings on the free tier. The 30-minute per-conversation cap makes it structurally unusable for them.
Against Granola: Granola captures silently and builds notes on your own typing, at $14 per user for Business — with no audio playback on any tier and accuracy that degrades past three participants. Otter gives you the verifiable archive and puts a bot in the room. Reviewers summarise it well: hate bots, choose Granola; live in old transcripts, choose Otter.
Against Fathom: Fathom offers unlimited free recordings, which beats Otter's 300 minutes comfortably for casual use, and leans summary-first. If you don't need Otter's transcription depth, Fathom's free tier is hard to argue with.
Against Fireflies: Fireflies is reported around $10 per user for Pro with stronger CRM integration and team-wide search — better for sales organisations, less strong on raw transcript quality.
Against Zoom AI: Zoom's built-in AI is included for teams already paying for Zoom, which makes a separate subscription hard to justify unless you work across multiple platforms or need Otter's search depth.
Against Descript: Descript transcribes in order to edit audio and video, which is a production workflow rather than a meeting one. Different job, occasionally the same starting point.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual | Key limits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $0 | $0 | 300 min/month, 30 min per conversation, 3 lifetime imports |
| Pro | $16.99/user | $8.33/user | Higher limits, 20% student discount with .edu |
| Business | $30/user | $19.99/user | 5-seat minimum, admin controls, analytics |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Meeting Agent sales coaching, SSO |
Checked August 2026. Pro works out to roughly $99.96 a year on annual billing. Business bills a minimum of five seats regardless of team size. The free plan's 30-minute per-conversation cap applies independently of the 300-minute monthly allowance. Otter changes prices and plan limits fairly often — confirm current figures on otter.ai/pricing before purchasing.
Decide whether you need the archive. That's the whole question. Summaries are available cheaper everywhere.
Small teams should stay on Pro. Five seats billed for three people is a bad trade for admin controls.
Check your typical meeting length against the free cap. Thirty minutes per conversation is the binding constraint, not the monthly total.
Students should use the .edu discount. Twenty percent off Pro is worth the two minutes.
Otter does the unglamorous half of meeting AI properly. While the category drifted toward summaries and elegant note-taking, Otter kept building the thing you need three months later: an accurate, speaker-attributed, fully searchable transcript with audio you can replay and verify. It leads the field on raw accuracy and attribution, and it's the only major option here where you can check whether the transcript is right.
The pricing needs reading carefully. The free tier's 300 monthly minutes come with a 30-minute cap per conversation, so hour-long meetings can't be covered completely at any point in the month. Business bills a five-seat minimum regardless of headcount, which makes it roughly $100 a month for a three-person team against $25 on Pro — and the features it adds are administrative rather than transformative. Otter also changes prices and plan limits fairly often, so any comparison ages quickly.
The other consideration is social rather than commercial. Otter joins calls as a visible bot, and the Meeting Agent added in 2025 makes it more present rather than less by speaking up in real time. For internal meetings that's usually fine; for client-facing work it's exactly why Granola exists.
For anyone who searches old transcripts, needs verifiable records, or handles meetings where precision matters, recommend at Pro. For clean summaries and nothing more, Fathom's free tier does the job without the subscription.
Note: Otter AI does not currently have an affiliate program with AIVario. We earn no commission, and this rating carries no commercial incentive.
Best for: Anyone who searches old meetings, work requiring verifiable records, teams needing speaker attribution, students with a .edu discount Not ideal for: Summary-only workflows, client calls where a bot is unwelcome, small teams tempted by Business, hour-long meetings on the free plan Bottom line: The archive-first choice in a summary-first category — genuinely the best transcription here, with a free tier capped per call and a team plan that bills five seats minimum.
Four tiers. Basic is free with 300 transcription minutes a month. Pro is $16.99 per user monthly or $8.33 billed annually. Business is $30 monthly or $19.99 annually with a five-seat minimum. Enterprise is custom. There's a 20% student discount on Pro with a .edu address. Worth noting that Otter changes prices and plan limits fairly often, so treat any published figure as a snapshot rather than a fixed rate.
Two caps, and the second one surprises people. You get 300 transcription minutes a month, but each individual conversation is limited to 30 minutes — so a one-hour meeting gets cut in half regardless of how much monthly balance you have left. There's also a lifetime limit of three audio or video file imports. Within those limits it's a real product rather than a trial: live transcription, speaker identification, the meeting bot for Zoom, Teams and Meet, and AI Chat all included.
It's a floor Otter sets regardless of team size, so a three-person team pays for five. At $19.99 annually that's roughly $100 a month minimum, which changes the calculation considerably for small teams — Pro at $8.33 each for three people is $25. The features Business adds are admin controls, usage analytics and higher limits, so the honest question is whether those justify paying for two seats nobody uses.
It keeps the recording and produces a searchable, speaker-attributed transcript you can replay. Granola stores text only with no playback on any tier; Fathom and Fireflies lean summary-first. If you ever need to verify what someone actually said, check a tone, or search across months of meetings for a phrase, Otter is built for that and the others aren't. That's the entire reason to choose it.
Otter leads the category on raw accuracy and speaker attribution, which is the consistent finding across comparisons — and no transcription is perfect. Clean audio with clear turn-taking produces reliably usable output; heavy accents, crosstalk and poor microphones degrade it as they do everywhere. The advantage over summary-only tools isn't that Otter never errs, it's that you can play back the audio and check.
Otter's real-time layer, rolled out through 2025 — it participates during the call rather than only summarising afterwards. The trade-off is that it speaks up as a voice bot, which is a different social experience from silent capture, and the sales coaching capabilities sit behind Enterprise pricing. For teams that want live assistance it's a genuine capability; for anyone who found the recording bot intrusive already, it's more of the thing they disliked.
Yes — Otter joins Zoom, Teams and Google Meet as a visible participant, which everyone in the call can see. For internal meetings that's usually fine and occasionally useful, since it makes recording explicit rather than covert. For client calls, VC conversations or anything where a recorder changes the room, it's the main reason people look at Granola instead.
Archive versus discretion. Otter gives accurate transcripts, speaker attribution, searchable history and playback, with a bot in the room. Granola gives bot-free capture and notes built on your own typing, with no playback at all. If you live in old transcripts, Otter. If you hate meeting bots and take notes anyway, Granola. Plenty of people would genuinely benefit from both, which is an awkward answer and an honest one.
Anthropic's AI for deep reasoning, long documents, and writing that doesn't sound like AI.
AI meeting recorder for Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams. Unlimited free recording; AI summaries capped at 5/month on the free tier.
Deepest Workspace integration and the best-value $20 subscription, provided you need the Google ecosystem. Free tier context is small.