Otter.ai vs Fireflies.ai: I Used One for a Week, Then Switched
How we tested: Side-by-side comparison of Otter and Fireflies over several test sessions. Both tested at their standard plans. Full methodology on my About page.
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June 1, 2026 · 7 min read
I didn't think AI meeting notes would change anything.
I'd tried a free trial of Otter before. Opened the transcript once. Closed it. Forgot about it. The problem wasn't transcription accuracy. The problem was that I had no system — the AI was writing notes nobody asked for, and I wasn't checking them.
So I designed a real test. One week with one tool. Switch to the other. Compare honestly.
Week one: Otter.ai. Week two: Fireflies.ai. Same meetings. Same calendar. Same Wednesday standup where the team can't remember what they decided the week before.
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Week one with Otter: transcripts are great, but who reads them
Otter joins your meeting as "Otter Assistant." It transcribes everything in real time. You can watch the words appear as people speak — speaker labels, timestamps, the works.
The transcript quality is good. I tested it on a call where three people talked over each other for 10 minutes debating sprint scope. Otter separated the speakers correctly and caught most of the words, including industry jargon like "WebSocket reconnection" and "rate limiting."
But here's the thing. After the meeting, Otter gives you a transcript, a few AI-generated highlights, and an action items section. The highlights were fine. The action items were thin. I'd get three bullet points for a 45-minute meeting, and two of them would be wrong. "Discuss Q2 roadmap" is not an action item. It's a note about a conversation that already happened.
By day three I stopped opening the transcripts. They were too long. A 30-minute call produces 4,000 words. Nobody reads 4,000 words after a meeting. Not even the person who set up the AI.
Marcus, a project manager at a marketing agency in Chicago with six recurring client calls per week, put it better than I could: "I used to spend Sunday evening writing up meeting notes. Now I spend Sunday evening deleting half of what the AI wrote. The output isn't the problem. The signal-to-noise ratio is."
Week two with Fireflies: fewer words, better extraction
Switching to Fireflies felt different immediately. Not the setup — both tools take about five minutes to connect to your calendar. But the output.
Fireflies also transcribes everything. The transcript quality is slightly lower than Otter's. Speaker separation is about equal. But Fireflies does something Otter doesn't: it structures the output around outcomes, not chronology.
Instead of "here's everything everyone said," Fireflies gives you: a short AI summary (2-3 paragraphs), a list of key topics discussed, action items with owners (it tries to extract who said what), and sentiment analysis if you care about that.
The action items were dramatically better. Where Otter gave me "Discuss Q2 roadmap," Fireflies gave me "Tom will draft the Q2 roadmap by Friday and share it in #product." Named owner. Named deadline. Named channel. That's not an AI hallucination — that's what Tom actually said in the meeting.
Nina, a remote team lead for a dev shop in Austin who handles standups, sprint reviews, and stakeholder demos, confirmed my experience: "Otter caught more of what was actually said. Fireflies was better at telling me what mattered. I don't need a transcript of the sprint retro. I need to know who owns the bug fix and when it ships."
The Slack integration sealed it. Fireflies posts a summary to a channel of your choice automatically after each meeting. No dashboard to check. No link to click. The note comes to you.
The thing nobody tells you about AI meeting notes
Neither tool solved the problem I had.
My real problem isn't writing notes during the meeting. It's finding a specific decision three weeks later. "Who approved the budget change for the mobile app?" Try searching Slack for that. You'll get 47 messages, eight emoji reactions, and one blurry screenshot.
Both Otter and Fireflies let you search past transcripts. Otter's search is faster. Fireflies' search is better organized. But both work. Both found the "budget change" conversation in about 10 seconds when I tested it. That's the feature nobody markets but everyone needs.
So here's the honest trade-off.
Otter.ai wins on raw transcript accuracy. If you need a verbatim record for legal, compliance, or editorial accuracy, Otter is better. The real time transcription is faster and catches more nuance.
Fireflies.ai wins on being useful after the meeting. Better action extraction, better summaries, better integrations. You spend less time reading its output because it already filtered out the noise.
I kept Fireflies running after the experiment. The Slack integration means I never open the dashboard. The notes just appear. But Otter stays installed for the one call a month where I need the exact transcript.
Both tools charge $20/month for the pro tier. Both have free plans that give you enough to decide in a week. The difference isn't price. It's what you do with the output.
If you read your meeting notes. Get Fireflies.
If you archive your meeting notes and hope. Get Otter.
Both is a reasonable answer too.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Which is better, Otter.ai or Fireflies.ai?
A: It depends on what you need. Otter.ai wins on verbatim transcript accuracy and real time search. Fireflies.ai wins on action item extraction, Slack integration, and cross-platform compatibility. Choose based on whether you need a complete record or a summarized action plan.
Q: Can Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai join meetings without a bot?
A: No. Both require a bot to join your calendar meetings. Otter's bot shows up as Otter Assistant. Fireflies' bot joins as Fred. You can also invite them manually to ad hoc calls. Neither works on end to end encrypted calls like WhatsApp or FaceTime.
Q: Do AI meeting note tools actually save time?
A: Yes, but not how you expect. Your first week you will read every transcript like a detective. By week two you stop opening them entirely. The real time savings come months later when you search for something specific and find it in seconds instead of scrolling Slack for 20 minutes.
Q: Is Fireflies.ai worth the $19/month?
A: If you attend 10+ meetings a week and rely on action items to do your job, yes. Fireflies' AI summaries and Slack integration turned my Monday morning cleanup from 45 minutes of note-writing into 10 minutes of verifying what the bot already wrote. If you attend fewer than 5 meetings a week, the free tiers of either tool are probably enough.