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Last we checked, G2 has over 142 products listed in its “conversation intelligence software” category. The names range from well-established brands like Gong and Clari to non-descript tools you have never heard of.
The overwhelming variety of choices for a single software category makes it extremely tricky to filter through the noise and choose the right tool for your business needs.
For instance, if you’re evaluating between Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai for your RevOps team, it’s a waste of time to review speech-to-text tools. It’s also misleading to find sales intelligence tools in the list that offer basic conversation intelligence capabilities as part of their larger offerings.
This post will help you avoid all the confusion. We’ll give you a detailed breakdown of the two tools across their features, pricing, and integrations to help you decide which one fits your needs best.
In short, here’s a one-line summary of our findings about both tools:
- Otter is great for accurate transcriptions and a perfect fit for individual or small teams’ needs.
- Fireflies has better features for cross-team collaboration. But it’s not built with just SaaS teams in mind.
Let’s dive into the comparison by analyzing their product focus from a higher level.
Otter Vs Fireflies: Key Differences
Over the past couple of years, Otter and Fireflies have quickly evolved from being simple meeting recording apps to emerging contenders in the conversation AI niche. Here’s how they differ from the product and positioning point of view.
Otter
Sam Liang and Yun Fu launched Otter (it was named AISense back then) in 2016 as a speech-to-text transcription mobile app. Their app initially found success in academic circles, helping students and educators upload their recorded speech and translate it into text.
It wasn’t until 2019, when the company partnered with Zoom video, that Otter pivoted as a SaaS meeting recording app for business teams. Since then, Otter has secured $50 million in Series B funding, strengthened its workforce to 170+ employees, and earned 14 million users.
Currently, Otter.ai offers pure-play SaaS solutions with features such as:
- AI Meeting Assistant
- Otter AI Chat
- AI Channels
While the tool hasn’t entirely left serving the education sector, it has since expanded its focus to other areas including media, recruiting, marketing, and sales. From the product-focus standpoint, Otter.ai wants to be the AI-powered meeting assistant for...well, everyone.
Fireflies
Krish Ramineni and Sam Udotong founded Fireflies as a drone delivery product in 2016.
Because they were continuously reiterating the product and struggling to keep track of all the conversations with users, the duo decided to build an AI app that could help them do so. That’s how Fireflies’ SaaS version was born.
Fireflies’ market focus isn’t much different from Otter.ai. It’s more accommodating considering it caters to education, sales, marketing, recruiting, engineering, consulting, management, education, media, and podcasting. Phew!
Its notable features include:
- AI Notetaker Bot
- AI-Powered Search
- Collaborative features
Next, let’s do a block-by-block comparison of Otter vs Fireflies features.
Evaluating Product Functionalities Between Otter and Fireflies
We’ll compare Fireflies and Otter features across five areas that are most sought-after among teams looking for conversation intelligence software.
- Ease of Use
- Transcription Accuracy
- Recording Functions
- Meeting Summary
- Collaborative Features
1. Ease of Use
Otter
Otter is extremely easy to use with a minimal learning curve for basic transcription and note-taking use cases. You can quickly find your way around locating the meeting recorder, the option to upload audio or video files, meeting transcripts, and shared meetings.
You can use Otter as a standalone app to record your speech and convert it into written transcripts. Or, you can connect it with your Slack, Microsoft, or Google accounts to record virtual meetings.
Otter shows you all your upcoming meetings inside the app if you integrate it with your calendars. Once you click on a specific meeting, you can join it right from Otter and toggle the microphone icon to start recording the meeting.
The few complaints Otter gets are for its mobile app UI. Users complain that Otter makes it difficult to edit the transcript and sync between the video to text can be chaotic. Some even complain of not finding their transcripts at all after the recording is over.
Fireflies
Fireflies’ interface is a bit noisier in terms of the number of things that you’ll see once you sign in. But it’s fairly easy to locate your Notebook, Uploads, Playlist, Integrations, and Analytics in the dashboard.
You can also download its Chrome extension to easily record your meetings on Loom, Soapbox, or Google Meet in just a few clicks.
The downside is that Fireflies’ Fred bot can be annoying at times. You can either invite the AI bot to join a meeting or give it permission to join automatically.
But it can be annoying if multiple people’s bots join the meeting, or if you didn’t realize Fireflies was a meeting that doesn’t require recording. And the process of removing Fireflies from all your meetings is not very intuitive.
Otter’s user experience fares better in comparison.
2. Transcription Accuracy
Otter
Otter.ai is between 85-90% accurate in its speech-to-text transcription.
But every other meeting transcription tool claims that it has the most accurate transcription in the market. So who do you believe?
Thankfully, Otter has good endorsements. In its 2023 article, PCMag reported that Otter’s accuracy for its real-time transcription was respectable—but Rev proved to be more accurate.
And that matches our findings too. Otter might miss punctuation marks and distort non-dictionary words (e.g. “Yelp” or “Hotmail”), but it’s more or less faultless with the standard word choice.
Fireflies
Fireflies claims to be 90% accurate in its transcription quality test, but the public opinion differs from the company’s marketing. For instance, TechPP reported that Fireflies’ AI transcription didn’t match the accuracy of the file that they uploaded for the review.
Our take: it’s manageable for the most part. Fireflies’ transcription accuracy might miss the mark occasionally, but it’s certainly not a deal-breaker.
Fireflies also compensate for the lack of transcription accuracy with its nearly flawless voice recognition capability.
And because Fireflies supports transcription for over 69 languages, it transcribes different accents and dialects better than Otter—which only offers English transcriptions. That means Fireflies is a better choice for a global company with remote teams spread across the world.
3. Recording Functions
Otter
Like we mentioned earlier, you can use Otter as a standalone app. You can sign in to your Otter account, hit the record button, start speaking, and see the real-time transcriptions appear on the screen.
If that’s your use case, you can use Otter either on your browser or mobile phone without having to connect it to other apps.
However, you can connect Otter with 20+ apps across multiple software categories such as video conferencing, CRM, calendar, and dialer. The downside is that Otter’s video conferencing integration is limited to Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams.
If you need transcription for meetings not recorded in Otter, you can upload the file and get it transcribed within a few minutes—depending on the file size.
Fireflies
Fireflies doesn’t offer a native recording feature like Otter. You have to connect it with a video conferencing tool to record audio and video meetings and transcribe them.
On the bright side, Fireflies has more wide-ranging integrations with video conferencing tools including Google Meet, Skype, Webex, Dialpad, Lifesize, and GoToMeeting. You can connect to a host of other video conferencing apps through Fireflies API or its Zapier integration.
You can also get around its lack of native recording capability by recording voice memos on iPhone and uploading it on Fireflies.
With Fireflies, you can also sync your transcripts across your mobile and web apps and access it from anywhere.
4. Meeting Summary
Otter
Once a meeting is over, Otter sends you and your other meeting participants a summary of the conversation within the next two hours. Here’s everything Otter includes in the meeting summary:
- Meeting date, time, and duration
- Automated summary
- Keywords
- Action items created during the meeting
- Any slides or action items discussed in the meeting
If you have disabled the option to automatically share the meeting summary with other guests, you can go to a particular meeting and enable the automatic sharing for that event.
Fireflies
Fireflies’ meeting summary is strikingly similar to what Otter offers. The app automatically emails the summary to all meeting participants and includes the following items:
- Outline
- Overview
- Keywords
- Meeting notes
- Action items
Fireflies, however, does a better job at taking voice commands to automatically create tasks on your project management app. For instance, if you mention keywords like “task,” “action item,” “follow-up,” “send report,” or “schedule meeting”—Fireflies will create a corresponding task on ClickUp, Asana, or Monday (whatever is connected to your Fireflies account).
5. Collaborative Features
Otter
Otter allows you the option to highlight meeting notes in real time. You can add comments, create a linked note, add action items, or assign the highlights to yourself, other meeting attendees, or people from your team.
Once the meeting is over, you can export the highlights in PDF, TXT, or DOCX format to share them with others.
With Otter, you can share the context of your meetings in several different ways. In addition to the automated sharing of meeting summaries, you can share the entire transcription or just the selected highlights manually. It also helps to set reminders within Otter if you want to keep a tab on a specific task after you assign it to others.
Unlike Fireflies, Otter doesn’t support automatic task creation. Instead, you have to manually import them into your favorite project management app. In short, Otter has a range of collaboration features on its platform. But Fireflies easily wins this round. Let’s discuss why.
Fireflies
We have already touched upon two of Fireflies’ collaborative features:
- Automatic sharing of meeting summaries to all participants
- Voice commands to automate task creation in project management apps
In addition, Otter also lets you download the audio, video, summary, or the entire transcript for you to share with others.
One of its most distinguished collaborative features is the Soundbites—short audio clips that you can trim from one of your recorded meetings to share with others.
This is most useful for marketing teams who might want to create a teaser from a webinar recording to share on social media platforms. Or, for sales to capture and share customer feedback with the product team.
Besides, Fireflies gives you options to highlight texts within a transcript, bookmark it, leave comments, add a reaction, or insert an action item for a colleague. It’s just like Otter.
All of these features, combined with Fireflies’ extensive integrations across 50+ apps, make Fireflies much better for collaboration than Otter.
Choosing Between Otter vs Fireflies
Business Needs
When selecting a transcription tool, it's essential to consider how each platform aligns with your specific business needs. Otter and Fireflies both offer powerful features, but their strengths vary depending on the use case. Below, we break down how each tool performs in different business contexts.
Otter
Otter is well-suited for individuals or small teams looking for a reliable tool to capture and organize meeting notes. More specifically, it’s great for:
Solopreneurs and Freelancers
Otter excels in scenarios where you need an easy way to transcribe and store notes, whether for meetings, lectures, or personal memos.
It’s particularly useful for students, freelancers, or researchers who need accurate transcriptions for individual use cases.
Light Collaboration
While Otter offers some level of collaboration, it lacks the advanced features needed for complex team workflows, especially for go-to-market (GTM) teams. It doesn’t provide deep integration with CRMs or tools necessary for sales teams to monitor pipelines or deal insights.
Fireflies
Fireflies positions itself as a more team-oriented transcription tool, with a focus on collaboration and integrations. However, while Fireflies offers a broader scope in terms of feature aspirations, it may not be the best fit for all teams, especially for teams that want revenue intelligence and insights.
But it’s a great tool for: Limited Collaboration
Fireflies supports sharing and editing of transcripts, which is useful for internal discussions, project management, and team meetings. But the collaboration doesn’t lend itself to any revenue-specific outcomes, such as deal progression tracking, or insights into sales rep performance.
It also lacks features like call scoring, pipeline analysis, and AI-driven recommendations that could directly impact revenue generation. This makes Fireflies less suitable for teams focused on driving sales or managing deals.
Comprehensive Meeting Assistance
For B2B sales teams, comprehensive meeting assistance goes beyond just transcription. Both Otter and Fireflies offer useful recording and transcription features, but neither truly meets the needs of a high-performing sales team that needs a more specialized solution.
Otter
Otter offers an excellent transcription service with basic meeting assistance, but it doesn’t extend far beyond that. Here’s where Otter falls short for B2B sales teams:
Lack of Actionable Insights
Otter does not offer features like automated highlighting of key action items, which could help sales reps prioritize follow-ups. It also has a limited CRM integration (just with HubSpot and Salesforce), which means your reps will have to spend time manually transferring insights.
Basic, But Helpful Sales Coaching
Otter's sales coaching-related features show some promise, especially with the introduction of OtterPilot™, which functions as a virtual assistant for sales reps.
For example, OtterPilot automatically extracts key sales insights from meetings, writes follow-up emails, and pushes call notes to the CRM. It essentially works like a virtual assistant that helps reps be more productive.
Fireflies
Fireflies might outpace Otter on the collaboration front. But it doesn’t include advanced capabilities needed by high-growth revenue teams.
Expanded Features, But Not Tailored for Sales
While Fireflies now markets onboarding and coaching features, they are essentially namesake extensions of the platform's basic collaboration functions.
For example, sales teams can add comments in transcripts, flag important moments at specific time-stamps, and create playlists of meetings or calls.
These are great for team discussions or general feedback, but they lack the depth that fast-moving sales teams need.
Lack of Tracking and Coaching Analytics
Fireflies doesn’t offer insights or specialized tracking features that can help sales teams close deals more effectively.
For instance, there’s no real sales rep performance tracking, deal progression analysis, or AI-driven coaching features in Fireflies. Without these, it’s a general meeting tool at best.
Scalability
Both Otter and Fireflies offer scalability to some degree, but neither has the sharp focus or structured roadmap needed to truly support rapid growth, particularly for larger, sales-driven orgs.
Otter
Scalability with Constraints
Otter’s pricing is small business-friendly, but its scalability is limited when you need more than just accurate transcriptions. It just doesn’t offer integrations or automation that fast-growing businesses need to scale efficiently.
Lacking Product Vision
Otter’s product roadmap lacks focus and strategy, trying to cater to everyone and their moms—from students and teachers to podcasters and business teams.
While it has helpful tools like OtterPilot, it spreads itself too thin across multiple general-use capabilities, making it a good-looking Swiss Army knife with blunt edges.
Fireflies
A Tool Still Looking for a Niche
Fireflies comes across as a tool that’s still trying to find its product-market fit. It seems to be making an effort to be everything for everyone.
For its users, this means Fireflies might leave them in the lurch, scrambling for a more reliable alternative.
Misaligned for Growth
Fireflies offers a wide array of features, but its product roadmap appears scattered. While it’s constantly adding new features, it feels that they are more incremental upgrades rather than game-changing capabilities.
For sales-driven teams, these add-ons don’t help take them to the next level of growth.
Otter vs Fireflies Pricing Comparison
Otter Pricing
Otter offers a variety of pricing plans to cater to different user needs, starting with a free plan that allows 300 minutes of transcription per month and a 30-minute limit per recording.
While this is great for light users like students or individuals needing occasional note-taking, the free plan feels limiting for power users who need more recording bandwidth.
Otter’s Pro Plan costs $8.33 a month, offering 1,200 monthly transcription minutes and advanced features like custom vocabulary and summary keywords.
The Business Plan, at $20 per month per user, has more collaboration features, longer transcription minutes, and advanced features like usage analytics and bulk user management. For sales orgs that require more advanced integrations or CRM capabilities, Otter offers a decent package that’s limited only by its lack of scalability.
Fireflies Pricing
With 800 minutes of meeting storage per seat, Fireflies’ free plan trumps Otter’s right out of the gates. On a blow-by-blow account, Fireflies’ free plan gives you a more generous view of its advanced features than Otter.
Fireflies’ Pro plan, priced at $10 per user per month, comes with 8,000 minutes of storage per user. It amps up its Pro plan offers to include useful features like AI Apps, transcript and recording downloads, keywords and topic tracking, search filters, and more integrations.
Its Business plan is priced at $19 a month and includes features like automated note-taking, more integration, and more collaboration capabilities.
What’s unique about Fireflies is that it also specifies a pricing point for its Enterprise plan ($39 a month). A rarity in the SaaS world.
Fireflies clearly takes the lead in the pricing category, only held back by its lack of good features for revenue-obsessed teams.
The Verdict: Which Tool Reigns Supreme?
When deciding between Otter or Fireflies, it's essential to consider your specific needs and use cases.
- Otter is easy to use, has near-perfect transcript accuracy, and is great for individual needs.
- Fireflies has better collaboration capabilities than Otter. But it doesn’t offer advanced coaching or analytics tracking functionalities.
If you are serious about finding a tool that comes with insights-rich conversation intelligence, consider MeetRecord.
Go Beyond AI Note-Taking With MeetRecord
While Fireflies and Otter are nimble creatures that are still evolving in the conversation intelligence jungle, MeetRecord is the beast you want.
MeetRecord provides advanced features tailored for revenue teams which means you’re just getting a meeting bot, transcripts, and summaries. You get the power to convert conversation insights into a competitive business advantage.
Want to see MeetRecord in action? Book a demo with us.
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