Fireflies and Otter are the two tools most teams end up with when they don't want to pay enterprise pricing for Gong. They're positioned as nearly identical: both record Zoom and Google Meet calls, both produce transcripts, both generate summaries, both send everything to Slack. The differences only matter if you know what to look for.
I've used Fireflies for over a year and I just stopped using it. Here's the honest version of the comparison, including the part nobody writes about — what happens when Google Meet's native transcription gets good enough that you don't need either of them.
The meeting bot debate is mostly fake
Every comparison article opens with hand-wringing about meeting bots. Will people be uncomfortable? Do you need explicit consent every time? Is the bot in the meeting creepy?
In my experience, mostly no. People who know what an AI notetaker is don't flinch. People who don't usually ask, and once they understand what it does, they conclude it's probably useful for them too. There's a genuine network effect here — seeing someone else use a notetaker is how most people first discover these tools. The bot's presence is usually its own form of consent.
The one pattern I do see: people occasionally ask to remove the bot before a personal or sensitive conversation. That's fine. It's also what you'd do with a human note-taker in the room. The bot being there is the transparency — it's harder to secretly record someone when there's a visible attendee named "Fireflies Notetaker" in the participant list.
So the bot question isn't actually what differentiates these tools. The real differences are elsewhere.
What Fireflies gets right
Fireflies wins cleanly on two things: data export and breadth of integrations.
The export matters. Fireflies is the only mainstream notetaker with a genuine "export all" feature on its paid tier. It's not buried behind an API — you can literally download your entire meeting archive. I know this because I've done it. For anyone who cares about data portability (and you should), this is a meaningful advantage over Otter, which doesn't offer the same thing.
Why the difference? My guess is GDPR compliance. If you're a European user asking for all your data, Fireflies has a working answer. Otter's export path is more restrictive, and I suspect the product architecture would make a true "export all" button harder to implement than it sounds. I'm speculating — but it's the most plausible explanation for why such an obvious feature is missing from one and not the other.
Breadth of integrations is the other Fireflies strength, and it's also where their messaging went sideways. Last quarter Fireflies launched a splashy rollout of 200+ integrations — Slack, Notion, HubSpot, Salesforce, Zapier, and 195 others. The launch got real coverage. The problem was that after reading the announcement, I still couldn't tell you what any of them actually did. No clear use cases, no workflows, no before-and-after. Just a list of logos.
When a product launches 200 features without articulating a single concrete use case, that's a tell. It means the team shipped capability before understanding what customers would do with it. I'm still a fan of Fireflies as a tool, but the integration launch is the moment I started wondering if the team was running out of ideas about what problem they were solving.
What Otter is better at
Otter is genuinely good at transcription accuracy, particularly for American English. For solo users, consultants, and journalists, Otter is the more polished product. If you're recording interviews or dictating notes, Otter has better real-time handling and cleaner output.
Otter also has a more consumer-friendly UI. Fireflies feels like a B2B SaaS tool. Otter feels like an app you'd recommend to a friend.
What Otter lacks is the export story. If you ever want to leave Otter, migrate your data, or do strategic analysis on your meeting archive, you're going to spend significantly more time than you would on Fireflies. For teams that plan to stick with Otter forever, this is invisible. For anyone who wants optionality, it's the dealbreaker.
Transcription accuracy is everything
Here's a point both comparison articles and vendors underweight: transcription quality is not just a feature, it's the prerequisite for everything else downstream.
I learned this the hard way running a call intelligence analysis for a client whose data came from Zoho CRM's native call recording. The transcription was bad enough to be actively misleading — the model confused speaker names within the same call, switching between "Raja" and "the agent" as if they were different people. Every downstream analysis had to account for the possibility that a quote I thought came from a customer was actually said by the sales rep, or vice versa.
Bad transcription doesn't just make notes harder to read. It contaminates the signal. Any feature built on top of unreliable text — search, summaries, action items, pattern detection — inherits the error. If you're picking a notetaker with the intent of doing anything serious with the output later, accuracy isn't negotiable. It's the foundation.
Both Fireflies and Otter are reasonably good at this. Neither is perfect. Both are better than Zoho CRM's built-in transcription by a significant margin.
The reason I stopped using Fireflies
I was a happy Fireflies user for over a year. I used it daily. I recommended it to founders. I liked the export, I liked the Slack integration, I liked the summary format.
Then Google Meet's native transcription got good.
This happened quietly after Google integrated Gemini 3 into Workspace earlier this year. The Meet transcripts went from "usable but rough" to "genuinely accurate" almost overnight. Speaker identification is solid. Punctuation is clean. The transcript appears in the organizer's Google Drive automatically after every meeting with no bot to install, no seat license to manage, no monthly cap to hit.
That last point matters. Fireflies has a seat cap of around 8,000 minutes per month on most plans. If you're on a lot of calls, you hit that limit faster than you'd expect. Google Meet has no comparable restriction — if you're paying for Workspace, you're already paying for unlimited meeting capture via the native transcription feature.
For me, the math became obvious. Google Meet captures the same transcript I was paying Fireflies for. The export path is Google Drive → Takeout → text files. I lose the automatic Slack summaries. I gain unlimited capacity, zero extra cost, and no bot dependency.
I haven't opened Fireflies in weeks.
The three-part recommendation
If you're not already recording your calls: pick either Fireflies or Otter. Fireflies if you want data portability and plan to ever leave or export. Otter if you're a solo user who just wants clean transcripts and isn't thinking about what comes next. Both are fine. Both will improve your meeting hygiene.
If you have Google Workspace: seriously consider skipping both. Google Meet's native transcription (post Gemini 3) is good enough for most teams and it's already included in your subscription. The transcripts land in Drive automatically. There's no seat license to worry about, no meeting cap, no bot to manage. For most Workspace customers, adding Fireflies or Otter is paying twice for the same thing.
If you want to find patterns across all your calls: none of these will help you. Fireflies, Otter, and Google Meet are all notetakers. They record what was said in a single meeting. None of them will tell you what patterns repeat across 100 meetings, which objections cluster in your stalled deals, or what your customers are saying that your team hasn't noticed.
For that, you need something more powerful. You could build it yourself — Claude or Gemini have gotten good enough that a determined engineer could get a rough prototype running in a week. I know because I did all of that, and then spent another year of work turning it into Moat. If you'd rather skip the build and just run the analysis on your existing call archive, book a discovery call. We'll tell you what's in it.
Fireflies vs Otter is the wrong question for most teams. The right question is: "what am I doing with the transcripts once I have them?" If the answer is "nothing, really" — consider whether you need a notetaker at all. If the answer is "use them to make better decisions" — consider whether a notetaker is enough.