Fireflies vs Otter (2026): Which AI Notetaker Should You Actually Pay For?

Short answer: buy Fireflies. Pro at $10 per seat per month on annual billing — roughly £8 — gives you unlimited transcription and unlimited AI summaries. Otter’s equivalent tier costs about the same and caps you at 1,200 minutes a month with a 90-minute limit per conversation. For anyone who takes more than a few hours of calls a week, that difference decides it.

Buy Otter instead if you need live captions displayed during the meeting for accessibility, or if you’re transcribing English-only audio where every percentage point of accuracy matters. Those are real advantages, and they’re the only two that survive contact with the pricing.

This is a research-based comparison built from both vendors’ published plans and documentation plus third-party pricing trackers and independent accuracy testing, cross-checked in August 2026. It is not a hands-on lab test. Where sources disagree — and on Fireflies’ AI credit allowances they do — we flag it rather than picking a number.

Pricing (checked August 2026)

GBP figures are approximate conversions at roughly $1 ≈ £0.79 and exclude VAT. Both tools bill in USD, so your sterling cost moves with the exchange rate on your card.

Read the entry tiers carefully. Otter Pro looks cheaper at $8.33/month annual against Fireflies’ $10. It isn’t, in any meaningful sense — 1,200 minutes is twenty hours of audio, and the 90-minute per-conversation cap means a long workshop gets truncated mid-sentence. Fireflies charges £1.40 more a month for no ceiling at all.

The Catch on Both Sides: Credits and Minutes

Neither tool is as unlimited as its marketing suggests, but they ration you differently, and that difference is the whole decision.

Otter rations minutes. The Free plan gives 300 minutes a month with a 30-minute conversation cap and three lifetime file imports. Pro raises that to 1,200 minutes, a 90-minute cap and ten imports a month. Business removes the monthly cap and raises the per-meeting limit to four hours. It’s a simple model and you always know where you stand.

Fireflies rations AI features. Transcription genuinely is unlimited on every tier, including Free. What’s metered is AI credits — the currency for summaries, action-item extraction, file uploads and the AskFred assistant. Free includes 20, Pro 20, Business 30 and Enterprise 50.

Here the sources contradict each other, and it matters: some describe the Pro allowance as a one-time shared workspace pool, others as a monthly refresh. Those are wildly different products. If AI summaries are the reason you’re buying — and for most people they are — confirm this on the pricing page before you commit. Add-on credit bundles are available either way.

The Fireflies Free plan has a second sting worth knowing: you can transcribe as much as you like, but you can’t download transcripts, audio or video without upgrading. It’s a genuinely useful evaluation tier and a genuinely bad long-term home.

Where Otter Genuinely Wins

Accuracy. Independent 2026 testing puts Otter at roughly 93-95% on clean audio versus Fireflies at 90-93%, with better speaker recognition out of the box. The gap narrows once Fireflies has meeting history with repeat participants — it learns your team’s voices — but on a first call with strangers, Otter is more likely to get the names right.

Real-time. Otter transcribes live, displays captions during the meeting, and lets multiple people annotate the running transcript together. If you have a hard-of-hearing colleague, or you run public sessions where captioning is an accessibility obligation, this isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s the requirement, and Fireflies doesn’t answer it.

Simplicity. Minutes are easier to reason about than credits. You know what 1,200 minutes means. Nobody intuitively knows what 30 AI credits buys them.

Where Fireflies Genuinely Wins

Volume. Unlimited transcription on a £8/seat plan is the headline and it holds up. If you run six hours of calls a day, Otter Pro is not an option and Otter Business at $20/seat is your floor.

Languages. 100+ against 6. If your team operates outside English at all, this ends the comparison on its own.

Integrations. 100+ connections, with native Salesforce, HubSpot and Pipedrive links. Meeting notes that land in the CRM record without anyone copying and pasting are worth more than two accuracy points.

Cross-meeting intelligence. AskFred searches across your whole meeting history — and on the right plan across email, Slack and CRM too. “What did we agree with this client about scope in June” is a question Fireflies can answer and Otter mostly can’t.

Automation. AI Skills apply repeatable processing across sales, recruiting, marketing and ops calls. This is the feature set Fireflies has been building while Otter refined transcription.

Head to Head

Annual Cost at a Glance

For a five-person team, Fireflies Business runs roughly £900 a year against Otter Business at roughly £950 — near-identical money for materially more product.

Which Should You Pick?

Solo consultant or freelancer: Fireflies Pro. Unlimited transcription for about £8/month means you never think about it again, and the CRM integrations matter more than you expect once you’re chasing your own pipeline.

Small team taking client calls: Fireflies Business. Unlimited storage, conversation intelligence, team analytics and video recording, at roughly the same seat cost as Otter Business.

You need live captions: Otter, at whichever tier covers your minutes. This is the one requirement Fireflies can’t meet.

You work in more than one language: Fireflies. There is no argument here.

Regulated environment: Fireflies Enterprise carries SSO, SCIM provisioning, audit logs and HIPAA compliance at a published $39/seat. Otter’s enterprise tier is quote-only, so you’ll need a sales conversation to compare properly.

You take four calls a month: neither. Otter’s free 300 minutes will cover you, or your video platform’s built-in summaries probably already do.

FAQ

Q: Is Fireflies really unlimited? A: The transcription is, on every tier including Free. The AI features aren’t — summaries, action items, file uploads and AskFred all draw on an AI credit allowance. Sources disagree on whether the Pro allowance refreshes monthly or is a one-time pool, so verify before buying.

Q: Which is more accurate, Fireflies or Otter? A: Otter, by roughly two to three percentage points on clean English audio in 2026 independent testing — about 93-95% against 90-93%. Otter also handles speaker identification better on first contact. In practice that’s a handful of extra corrections per call.

Q: Can I use either one free forever? A: Both have permanent free tiers. Otter’s is more usable day-to-day at low volume — 300 minutes a month with real exports. Fireflies’ free tier transcribes without limit but blocks downloads of transcripts, audio and video, which makes it an evaluation tool rather than a home.

Q: Do they work with Zoom, Teams and Google Meet? A: Both cover the major platforms. Fireflies extends much further into the rest of the stack — over 100 integrations including native Salesforce, HubSpot and Pipedrive connections that write notes back to the CRM record.

Q: What about non-English meetings? A: Fireflies supports 100+ languages, Otter supports 6. If you have any multilingual requirement, this decides it immediately.

Q: Which is better for sales teams specifically? A: Fireflies. Conversation intelligence on the Business tier, native CRM writeback and AI Skills for repeatable call processing add up to a sales tool. Otter is a transcription tool that sales teams can use.

Q: Can I record longer meetings? A: Fireflies caps at 2 hours on Free and Pro, 3 hours on Business and 4 on Enterprise. Otter caps at 30 minutes on Free, 90 minutes on Pro and 4 hours on Business. If you run half-day workshops, both entry tiers will cut you off.

Q: Is there a UK data residency option? A: Both handle this at the enterprise level rather than on self-serve plans. If GDPR data residency is a hard requirement, treat it as a sales conversation with either vendor rather than something you can confirm from a pricing page.

The Verdict

Otter is the better transcription engine. Fireflies is the better product.

That distinction matters because almost nobody’s actual job is transcription. The job is remembering what was agreed, getting it into the CRM, and being able to search it six months later. Fireflies is built for that job. Otter is built for turning speech into text very accurately and then handing it to you.

At £8 a seat for unlimited transcription, Fireflies removes the only decision you’d otherwise have to keep making — whether this call is worth recording. Otter makes you count minutes at a similar price, and counting is friction, and friction is why people stop using tools they’ve paid for.

Buy Fireflies unless live captioning is a requirement. If it is, buy Otter and don’t feel bad about it — it’s the better tool for that specific job and there’s no close second.

Pricing checked August 2026. Both vendors bill in USD and change plans regularly — verify current figures on their pricing pages before purchasing.

Related:

• Best AI productivity tools
• AI tools for small business
• Descript review

Sources:

• Fireflies pricing page
• Otter.ai pricing page
• Fireflies.ai Pricing 2026: Every Plan and Credit Limit — alfred_
• Fireflies.ai Pricing Breakdown in 2026 — Lindy
• What’s included in the Fireflies Free plan — Fireflies Knowledge Base
• Otter.ai Pricing 2026: Plans, Minutes & Real Costs — Layer3Labs
• Otter AI Pricing 2026: Free, Pro & Business Plans — Claap
• Fireflies vs Otter.ai 2026 Deep-Dive Comparison — Sybill
• Otter vs. Fireflies — Otter.ai