Otter vs Fireflies. Bot vs bot.
The two best-known meeting notetakers work the same way: a bot joins your Zoom, Meet, or Teams call, records it, and produces notes afterward. The real differences are in what happens to the notes — and who the product assumes you are.
Below: the honest head-to-head, then the option that removes the bot entirely.
The head-to-head
Otter
- The older name — built on live transcription first, AI summaries later.
- Real-time transcript in the call; strong per-meeting UX.
- Shared workspaces for teams; slides capture on video calls.
- Simplest mental model: bot joins, transcript appears.
- Integration story is decent but thinner than Fireflies'.
Fireflies
- "Fred" the bot joins your calls; same participant-list visibility.
- Built around routing — summaries pushed to Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, and a long integrations list.
- Search across your call archive; per-speaker analytics on paid tiers.
- Per-seat pricing that climbs with the features teams actually want.
- The better pick when the meeting is an input to a pipeline.
The decision
Pick Otter if you want the cleanest per-meeting experience — you watch the transcript form live, share it afterward, and mostly don't need the notes to flow into five other systems.
Pick Fireflies if the meeting is a step in a workflow — sales calls feeding a CRM, standups feeding a project tool, anything where the summary's destination matters more than its polish.
Either way, you're choosing between two bots. Both appear in the participant list, both need a scheduled call to work, and both go quiet the moment the conversation leaves Zoom.
The third option
If the bot is the problem — the participant-list entry, the client who doesn't want a third party recording, the meetings that never touch a calendar invite — the category has a different answer. Fluent captures the room from a device you carry: a Limitless or Omi pendant, or your iPhone on the table.
Nothing joins the call. On remote meetings it records what your room hears; on in-person ones it's the only option that works at all. And the output goes past notes — commitments by speaker, people profiles that deepen over months, coaching, and an MCP server that makes the whole archive queryable from your own AI client.
The honest trade: Otter and Fireflies tap the call stream directly, so remote-call audio is cleaner and the CRM plumbing is mature. Fluent trades the stream for the room — coverage everywhere, disclosed by you, owned by you.
Questions
Is Otter or Fireflies better?
For live transcription and a clean per-meeting experience, Otter. For workflow plumbing — routing summaries into a CRM, Slack, or a stack of integrations — Fireflies. Both share the same ceiling: a bot can only capture calls it can join.
Can either one record in-person meetings?
Both have mobile apps that can record manually, but neither is built for it — the product is the bot, and the bot needs a scheduled call. In-person, walking, and hallway conversations are structurally uncovered.
What's the bot-free alternative?
Fluent captures the room from your own device — a Limitless or Omi pendant, or your iPhone's mic. Nothing joins the call or appears in the participant list, and it covers in-person conversations the bots can't reach. The tradeoff: on remote calls it records what your room hears rather than tapping the call stream.
Skip the bot entirely.
Fluent captures the room — remote, in person, wherever the conversation actually happens.
See Fluent pricing