Fireflies vs Otter on Mac: Bots, Limits, Privacy and Pricing

Fireflies and Otter are the two names that come up first when a team decides it wants AI meeting notes, and on paper they look interchangeable: a bot that joins your calls, a transcript, a summary, a searchable library, a free tier, and paid plans between $8 and $39 a seat. The differences show up after a month of use: what the free plan actually meters, how long one meeting can run, which languages work, what the vendor does with your recordings, and how each behaves on a Mac when you don’t want a bot in the call. This Fireflies vs Otter comparison covers those details, with prices checked on both vendors’ pages in November 2026, and ends with the option neither offers: keeping the whole meeting on your Mac.

In this guide 12 sections

The short answer

• Pick Otter if you’re one person or a small team working in one of the six languages it transcribes, and you want the most recording for the money: Pro is $8.33 a month billed annually, and Business drops the monthly meeting-minute meter and allows 4-hour meetings.
• Pick Fireflies if you need integrations on every paid plan, conversation analytics for a sales or customer team, or transcription in many languages.
• Pick neither if the audio shouldn’t leave your Mac. Both transcribe and summarize in their own cloud, with or without the bot. The on-device option is covered at the end.

How each one records a meeting

Both started with a bot, and both have since added a way to record without one.

Otter sends its Notetaker bot (formerly OtterPilot) into Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams calls from your calendar, where it shows up in the participant list as a named attendee. Since October 2025, Otter also has a Mac and Windows desktop app that records a call from your computer with no bot in the meeting. Either way, the recording is uploaded to Otter, transcribed and summarized there, and kept with the transcript, so you can play a passage back later.

Fireflies has its own bot, the Fireflies Notetaker, which also joins calls from your calendar. For bot-free capture it offers two routes: a Chrome extension that captures Google Meet calls without the bot, and a Take Notes mode in its Mac and Windows desktop app that records your computer’s system audio. In Take Notes mode, Fireflies says no separate audio or video file is saved. After the meeting it processes the recording into a transcript and summary in your Fireflies workspace, and that’s what you keep.

That’s the first practical difference. If you want bot-free recording and the audio afterwards, Otter’s desktop app gives you both; Fireflies’ desktop mode gives you the first. The general mechanics of recording a call from your computer instead of sending an attendee are in the no-bot meeting recorder guide.

The meters: minutes, storage and meeting length

This is where the two diverge most, and where free plans run out.

Otter meters minutes. The free Basic plan gives 300 transcription minutes a month per user, with a 30-minute cap per conversation, three file imports in total, and a history of your 25 most recent conversations. Pro raises that to 1,200 minutes a month and 90 minutes per conversation. Business removes the monthly meeting-minute meter and allows up to 4 hours per conversation.

Fireflies meters storage and recording length. Its free plan includes 400 minutes of storage for the whole team (a total, not a monthly allowance), with limited transcripts and AI summaries. Pro gives unlimited transcription with 8,000 minutes of storage per seat; Business and Enterprise make storage unlimited. Separately, Fireflies lists a recording limit per meeting: 2 hours on Free and Pro, 3 hours on Business, and 4 hours on Enterprise.

What that means in practice:

• A weekly 60-minute team meeting hits Otter’s free plan cap on the first call, since conversations stop at 30 minutes. On Fireflies’ free plan it fits for a few weeks, until the 400 stored minutes fill up.
• Daily standups on Otter Pro rarely get near 1,200 minutes a month. The same habit on Fireflies Pro eventually reaches 8,000 stored minutes, and then you delete old meetings or move up a plan.
• A 2-hour workshop runs past Otter Pro’s 90-minute limit and sits exactly at Fireflies Pro’s. Anything longer needs a Business plan on either side.

Neither meter is better in the abstract. Otter limits how much you record each month; Fireflies limits how much you keep.

Where Otter is stronger

• Price for one person. Otter Pro at $8.33 a month billed annually (about $100 a year) costs less than Fireflies Pro at $10 ($120 a year). Month to month, Otter’s $16.99 also undercuts Fireflies’ $18.
• Long meetings on the team plan. Business allows 4 hours per conversation with unlimited meeting minutes. On Fireflies, 4-hour recordings are an Enterprise feature.
• Bot-free with audio. The desktop app records without a bot and keeps the recording, so you can listen back to a passage instead of trusting the transcript.
• Exports from the free plan. Basic exports MP3 audio and TXT transcripts, and Pro adds PDF, DOCX and SRT. Fireflies lists downloading transcripts and recordings as a paid feature.

Where Fireflies is stronger

• Integrations on every paid plan. Fireflies lists all of its app and CRM integrations from Pro up. Otter’s Pro plan includes Salesforce and HubSpot subject to user limits, with synced notes to either CRM on Business.
• Conversation intelligence. Speaker talk-time, sentiment, question detection and topic trackers start on Pro. That’s built for coaching a sales or support team.
• Languages. Fireflies supports English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian, lists 100+ more languages in beta, and detects the language automatically; Business adds a mode for calls that switch languages partway. Otter lists AI transcription in English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese.
• No monthly transcription cap on Pro. There’s only total storage to plan around.
• Video. Fireflies captures meeting video at 720p on Pro and Business, and 1080p on Enterprise.

What they share: both label speakers, both search across your whole library, both offer an AI chat over your meetings (Otter’s AI Chat, Fireflies’ AskFred), and both link summary items back to the spot in the transcript they came from.

Pricing (checked November 2026)

Prices are per user (Otter) or per seat (Fireflies) per month in USD, from each vendor’s pricing page on November 2, 2026. Both repackage plans regularly, so check before you buy.

For one user over two years on annual billing, that’s roughly $200 for Otter Pro and $240 for Fireflies Pro.

Privacy and AI training: what each vendor says

Both are cloud services. Whether you use the bot or the desktop app, the audio leaves your Mac and is processed on the vendor’s side. The difference is in what each says it does with it.

Otter’s privacy policy (effective June 16, 2026) lists “training our proprietary AI technology on de-identified audio recordings and on transcriptions” among the purposes it uses data for, and notes that transcriptions may contain personal information. It doesn’t describe a training-specific opt-out beyond withdrawing consent.

Fireflies’ security page says it doesn’t train on customer data (in one place “by default”, in another “never”) and describes zero-day retention with its AI vendors. It lists SOC 2 Type II and GDPR, plus HIPAA with a BAA on Enterprise with Private Storage. Custom data retention is also Enterprise-only.

If the question is which cloud vendor has the stronger published stance on training, it’s Fireflies. If the question is whether a meeting can stay off every server, neither one answers it. A client who asked you not to upload the call, or a compliance rule that makes you list every company that processes customer audio, puts Fireflies and Otter in the same bucket.

The option both leave out: everything on the Mac

On macOS Tahoe, Apple ships on-device speech recognition (SpeechAnalyzer, which MacStories’ independent testing in June 2025 found about 55% faster than Whisper Large V3 Turbo) and an on-device language model for summaries. Dictanta is built on both.

It records Mac meetings without a bot, the way Otter’s and Fireflies’ desktop apps do. Click the menu-bar icon and it spots Zoom, Teams, Webex, Slack or a browser running Meet, pre-selects This meeting (the call’s audio plus your microphone), and shows what it will capture. Audio only: never video, never a pixel of your screen. What’s different is where everything after capture happens:

• Transcription is written live on the Mac while you record, and works offline.
• The recap (a short summary, action items with owners and due dates, decisions and open questions) is written on the Mac by Apple Intelligence the moment you stop. Long meetings are summarized part by part and merged into one recap, up to about 2.5 hours of audio per recording.
• The audio stays on the Mac that recorded it and is never uploaded. Unlike Fireflies’ desktop mode, you can go back to it: most summary lines show when they were said, hovering one plays that moment, and clicking keeps it playing. Lines Dictanta can’t source show no timecode rather than a guess.
• No account and no vendor server. iCloud syncs notes and transcripts to your other Apple devices; the audio is never copied. The App Store privacy label is Data Not Collected.

Exports are Markdown, PDF, Word, SRT and JSON, and Copy Recap turns the notes into a message with the summary, owners, deadlines and timestamps, ready to paste into email or chat.

The tradeoffs, plainly: Dictanta doesn’t label speakers (the transcript is one mixed stream). There’s no team workspace, no CRM or calendar integration, no conversation analytics, and it can’t attend a meeting you’re not in. It transcribes in your Mac’s main language instead of detecting each call’s language. It needs a Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or later) on macOS Tahoe 26.4 or later, with Apple Intelligence turned on.

Pricing: the first 3 recordings are free with every feature, then $9.99 a month, $79.99 a year, or $149.99 once for Lifetime. One purchase covers Mac, iPhone and iPad, and nothing is metered per minute or per stored hour. Over the same two years, Lifetime costs less than either Pro plan.

Side by side

Which should you pick?

Otter if you’re an individual or a small team that wants the most transcription for the money, long meetings on Business, and the audio kept whether or not a bot attends.

Fireflies if a sales, success or recruiting team needs CRM sync on every seat, talk-time and sentiment analytics, or multilingual calls, and you’d rather plan around storage than monthly minutes.

Dictanta if the deciding factor is that the meeting stays on your Mac: client calls under NDA, HR conversations, board prep, or a plain preference that something recorded on your laptop stays there. If you’re leaving one of them specifically, the Otter alternative for Mac and Fireflies alternative for Mac guides go deeper, and Otter vs Granola covers the other pairing people weigh. The first 3 recordings are free to try on real calls.

Bottom line

Fireflies and Otter are closer to each other than either is to an on-device tool. Both are cloud notetakers with a bot you can leave out, a desktop app for the Mac, speaker labels and a team library. Choose by meter and by team: Otter for cheaper individual plans, long meetings on Business and audio you can replay; Fireflies for integrations, analytics and languages, with storage instead of minutes as the limit. If what you want is no upload at all, the comparison to make isn’t Fireflies vs Otter. It’s cloud vs on-device.

FAQ

Which is cheaper, Fireflies or Otter?

For one person, Otter. Otter Pro is $8.33 a month billed annually or $16.99 monthly; Fireflies Pro is $10 billed annually or $18 monthly (both checked November 2026). On team plans they’re close: Otter Business is $19.99 billed annually and Fireflies Business is $19.

Can Fireflies and Otter record a Mac meeting without a bot?

Yes. Otter’s Mac and Windows desktop app records calls without its Notetaker bot, and Fireflies’ desktop app has a Take Notes mode that captures your computer’s audio with no bot in the call. Fireflies says that mode saves no separate audio file, only the transcript and summary. Both still transcribe in the cloud.

Is there a Fireflies or Otter alternative that keeps the audio on the Mac?

Yes. Dictanta records Mac meetings without a bot and transcribes and summarizes them on the Mac with Apple Intelligence. The audio is never uploaded and there’s no account. The tradeoffs are no speaker labels, no team workspace and no integrations, and the first 3 recordings are free.