Check what you already pay for

Before pricing Otter against Fireflies or Fathom, price it against the subscription you already hold. This is the step most buying decisions in this category skip, and for a lot of teams it ends the evaluation.

Zoom. Zoom's own FAQ states that eligible paid Zoom Workplace plans continue to include core AI features at no additional cost. If you pay for Zoom and what you want is transcripts, summaries and action items, you already have them. ZoomMate, which launched on 1 June 2026 from $20 a user a month, is an extra agentic layer on top and is not required for meeting summaries. Free Zoom Basic accounts do not qualify.

Microsoft Teams. The opposite answer. Microsoft's licensing documentation, updated 9 July 2026, is explicit that intelligent recap requires a Teams Premium or Microsoft 365 Copilot licence. Teams Premium is $10 per user a month paid yearly. That is half the price of Otter Business, with no third-party bot in the meeting and no additional data processor holding your conversations.

So the honest first question is not how good Otter is. It is whether the capability already sits inside something you fund.

The tiers, and the word lifetime

Checked on otter.ai/pricing on 28 July 2026.

• Basic, free: 300 transcription minutes a month, 30 minutes maximum per conversation, three audio or video file imports, and only the 25 most recent conversations kept.
• Pro, $8.33 a user a month on annual billing ($16.99 month to month): 1,200 in-app recording minutes, up to 90 minutes a meeting, 10 file imports a month, unlimited history.
• Business, $19.99 a user a month on annual billing ($30 month to month): unlimited meetings and recordings, up to four hours a meeting, unlimited imports.
• Enterprise: quote only, with SSO and administrative controls.

The iOS App Store listing corroborates the annual rates independently at $99.99 and $239.99 a year, which divide into $8.33 and $20.00 a month.

Now reread the free tier. Those three file imports are lifetime, not monthly. Otter's pricing page words it exactly that way, and it is the only allowance on the page that never resets. The 300 minutes come back every month and so do Pro's ten imports. Upload three old recordings on your first afternoon and that capability is finished permanently.

A second piece of arithmetic trips people up. Pro's 1,200 minutes are described as in-app recording minutes, and imported files are metered separately under the import allowance. It is not one pooled budget to spend however suits you.

For context on how these limits move: Otter cut the free tier from 600 minutes to 300 in August 2022, capped it at the 25 most recent conversations and locked playback to single speed, while opening the recorder bot to everyone including free users. A widely repeated claim that Pro's minutes were later cut from 6,000 to 1,200 appears only in competitors' blog posts and could not be verified against Otter or an archived pricing page, so treat that one as unconfirmed.

How accurate it actually is

Otter's homepage made no accuracy percentage claim when it was checked on 28 July 2026. It leads with "trusted by 40 million+ people". The "up to 95% accuracy" figure that circulates in reviews could not be traced to any page Otter controls, so it should not be attributed to the company.

One peer-reviewed measurement exists, and it needs its caveats attached. A 2023 study in JMIR Mental Health compared transcription services across 65 recorded psychiatric interviews and found a 19.2% median word error rate for Zoom's Otter-powered live transcription, against 14.8% for OpenAI's Whisper, 8.9% for the best automated service tested and 7.6% for professional human transcription. Three things limit it: the study is three years old, it measured Zoom's Otter-powered live transcription rather than the Otter app itself, and psychiatric interviews are not sales calls.

What users report runs in the same direction. Clean audio and clear native-English speakers transcribe well. Accents, overlapping speech, background noise and domain jargon degrade it materially, and speaker labelling in a five-person call goes wrong often enough that manual cleanup becomes routine. Custom vocabulary helps. It does not reliably fix a term the model has never seen.

On reputation, use the numbers that survive checking. Otter's iOS app holds 4.8 out of 5 from around 69,000 ratings and carries an Apple Editors' Choice badge, which makes it the best mobile experience in this category by some distance. Capterra shows 4.4 from 102 reviews, with customer support the lowest sub-score at 4.0. G2 and Trustpilot could not be verified, and at least one Trustpilot page surfacing in searches belongs to a restaurant-software company with a similar name.

The bot, and the lawsuit

Otter's Notetaker connects to your calendar and joins scheduled meetings by itself. That is the feature, and it is also the complaint. Once calendar access is granted the bot tries to join everything, which has produced a long tail of documented friction: a 2022 Hacker News thread from a user who declined the assistant and found it inside two confidential meetings, consumer guides on how to stop it appearing, university IT pages on blocking it, and the University of Massachusetts banning it over that state's all-party consent rule.

That behaviour is now in front of a federal court. Four class actions were consolidated in October 2025 as In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation, No. 5:25-cv-06911-EKL, in the Northern District of California before Judge Eumi K. Lee. The lead case, Brewer v. Otter.ai, was filed on 15 August 2025 by a plaintiff who says he held no Otter account and had no chance to decline when another participant's bot recorded his sales call.

The consolidated complaint alleges that Otter recorded and transcribed participants without consent from everyone present, that it sought permission at most from the meeting host while leaving the consent obligation with account holders, and that it used recorded content to train its models without adequate disclosure. It pleads the federal Wiretap Act, the California Invasion of Privacy Act, Illinois biometric privacy law and others. Otter moved to dismiss on 20 January 2026, denying that any interception occurred.

These are allegations, and no court has ruled on them. As of 28 July 2026 the motion to dismiss appears to remain undecided, no class has been certified and no settlement exists. The practical point for a buyer is not that Otter is in trouble. It is that roughly a dozen US states require every party to consent to a recording, Otter's design leaves that duty with you rather than with Otter, and the legal question is genuinely open while your team is already using it.

Whether your meetings train the model

Otter's privacy policy states that it trains its technology "on de-identified audio recordings and on transcriptions (which may contain Personal Information)". That parenthetical is Otter's own. Its security page says a proprietary method de-identifies user data before training, and that imported third-party documents, such as files from Google Workspace, are not used for training.

What is missing is a documented way to say no. Otter's security page describes no training opt-out for the consumer tiers, and the "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" link in the footer is a California privacy request, which is a different mechanism entirely. If an opt-out exists somewhere in account settings, Otter does not document where.

Watch how a competitor sells against that. Granola prints "opt out of model training any time" on its pricing page, at $14 a user a month. When a rival puts a policy line in its price list, it is aiming at something.

The rest of the compliance posture is solid enough: SOC 2 Type 2, a GDPR data processing agreement, AES-256 encryption at rest, and trash purged after 30 days. Read the ISO wording carefully, though. Otter says its security policies are "created based on the ISO 27001/2 framework", which is alignment with a framework rather than certification against it. HIPAA compliance was announced in 2025 and is reported to be an Enterprise matter, which is worth confirming with sales rather than assuming.

What else to buy

Prices checked on 28 July 2026, at annual billing rates.

• Fathom is the free-tier problem. Unlimited recordings, transcriptions and AI summaries at $0, against Otter's 300 minutes and three lifetime imports. Paid plans run $16 to $25 a user a month, and a bot-free capture mode is in beta, which sidesteps the etiquette objection and the consent one together.
• Fireflies.ai gives unlimited transcription even on its free plan, using storage rather than minutes as the constraint. Pro is $10 and Business $19 a user a month, marginally under Otter Business.
• Granola is $14 a user a month, sends no bot into the call, and makes the training opt-out an advertised feature.
• Rev is the answer when a 19% error rate is not acceptable. Human transcription is $1.99 a minute, AI transcription $0.25 a minute, and subscriptions start at $25.49 a user a month.

Verdict: who should buy it

Buy Otter Business at $19.99 a user a month if your meetings are genuinely split across Zoom, Google Meet and Teams and you want one searchable archive covering all three, or if your team works from phones, where Otter's app leads this category by a wide margin. Cross-platform coverage and that mobile experience are what the premium actually buys.

Do not buy it if you already pay for Zoom, because you already own the feature. Do not buy it if you are a Microsoft shop, where Teams Premium does intelligent recap for $10 a user a month with no outside bot. Light users should take Fathom's free plan over Otter's, which is not a close comparison at all. And if you operate in California, Illinois, Florida or Washington and cannot reliably obtain consent from everyone in the room, choose a tool that puts no recording bot in the meeting, such as Granola or Fathom's bot-free mode, and look at Otter again once the court has ruled.

If you do try the free plan, spend the three imports last. They are the only thing on it you cannot get back.