Fireflies vs Otter vs Fathom: AI Note Taker Comparison and Real Pricing

What a five-person team actually pays

Take a realistic US small business case: five people, each averaging six hours of meetings a week. That is 360 minutes a week each, or about 1,560 minutes a month once you account for 52 weeks across 12 months. Now run it through each vendor's meter rather than its price list.

• Otter Basic (free): does not fit. 300 minutes a month against 1,560 needed, and the 30-minute cap means a standard hour-long meeting is cut off halfway through.
• Otter Pro ($8.33 a seat annually): still does not fit. 1,200 minutes a month against 1,560 needed. This is the finding most buyers miss, because $8.33 is the cheapest paid seat any of the three offers and it looks like the obvious answer. It runs out with a week of the month left.
• Otter Business ($19.99 a seat annually): fits. Unlimited transcription, 4-hour meetings. Five seats comes to $1,199.40 a year.
• Fireflies Free: does not fit. 400 storage minutes is the allowance for the entire team rather than per person, so across five people that is about 80 minutes each, and there is no video recording on the free plan at all.
• Fireflies Pro ($10 a seat annually): fits, with a caveat. Unlimited transcription and 8,000 storage minutes per seat, which at 1,560 a month is about five months of accumulation before you are managing what to delete. Five seats is $600 a year.
• Fireflies Business ($19 a seat annually): fits with no caveat. Unlimited storage. Five seats is $1,140 a year.
• Fathom Free: fits. Unlimited recordings, transcription and summaries. $0 a year.
• Fathom Team ($15 a seat annually): fits, and adds the team layer. Global search across everyone's calls, shared playlists, comments and keyword alerts. Five seats is $900 a year.

Fireflies vs Otter, the head to head most people are actually running

These two are the pair that gets compared most, and they are genuinely close on transcription quality. The choice comes down to two questions that have nothing to do with accuracy.

Where do your meetings happen? Fireflies covers more ground than anything else here: Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Webex and more, and it pushes what it hears into more than fifty downstream tools. If your clients each picked a different meeting app and you need one searchable record of all of them landing in your CRM, Fireflies wins on breadth and it is not close. Otter is strongest inside its own app rather than across many.

Do you need the transcript while the meeting is happening, or after? Otter runs live captions as the meeting happens rather than delivering a transcript afterward, and its mobile app is the best of the three for recording an in-person conversation across a table. If you take client meetings in a room rather than on a call, that is a real and specific advantage nobody else here matches.

On price, Fireflies Pro at $10 a seat annually is unlimited transcription, and Otter Pro at $8.33 is 1,200 minutes. Otter is cheaper on the sticker and more expensive in practice for anyone with a normal meeting load, because the tier above it more than doubles to $19.99. Fireflies going from Pro to Business is $10 to $19, a similar jump, but the thing that forces it is storage rather than transcription.

On free plans, both are now weak next to Fathom. Otter gives you 300 minutes with a 30-minute meeting cap. Fireflies gives your whole team 400 storage minutes and no video recording at all, a limitation people routinely discover after they have started relying on it. We cover the case for looking past each of them on the Otter.ai alternative and Fireflies alternative pages.

Where Fathom changes the arithmetic

Fathom is the reason this comparison is less interesting than it was two years ago. Its free plan does the core job of the category, unlimited recording, transcription and AI summaries, at no cost and with no seat minimum, which means the honest advice to most people shopping this shortlist is to try it before paying anyone.

The paid tiers are aimed mainly at sales teams. Premium is $20 a month or $16 billed annually and adds advanced summaries, AI action items and a conversational meeting assistant. Team is $19 or $15 annually with a two-user minimum. Business is $34 or $25 annually and adds CRM field sync, Deal View, coaching metrics and AI scorecards, which is the call-coaching layer at a fraction of what the enterprise revenue-intelligence platforms charge.

One quirk worth knowing because it inverts the usual logic: Team at $15 a seat is cheaper than Premium at $16, so two people together pay less per head than one person alone. If you are a pair, do not buy two Premium seats.

Things that changed at Fathom since our last check, none of them price changes: paid plans now carry a 90-day guarantee, nonprofits get 10 free seats, an affiliated-startup program offers up to two years free, and there is an explicit offer to Gong customers of a free Business plan through the remainder of their existing contract plus data migration. That last one is a competitive displacement play rather than a feature, but if you are locked into a contract you regret, it is worth knowing it exists.

Where Fathom is weaker: platform coverage is narrower than Fireflies if your calls are scattered, and like every tool on this page it stops at the summary. It tells you what was said. It does not do the work the meeting created.

Why every comparison you find is written by someone selling something

This is worth naming, because it explains why the search results for this question are unsatisfying and why so many people append "reddit" to it. We checked the page-one results for "otter vs fireflies vs fathom" on August 30, 2026. Three of the six are published by vendors: one by Granola, a competing notetaker; one by Fathom itself, judging its own rival; and one by TicNote, whose page is titled so that TicNote appears first in a list of four and which concludes that TicNote wins. The other three are agency and staffing-company content marketing, one still carrying 2025 pricing.

That is not a knock on any individual page. It is a structural fact about the category: the people with the strongest incentive to publish a comparison are the people with the strongest incentive to reach a particular conclusion. It is also why the details on most of those pages drift out of date. Both Otter and Fathom changed what is inside their plans since our last check without moving a single price, and a comparison that only re-checks dollar figures would report that nothing had happened.

We have an incentive too and it is fairer to state it than to pretend otherwise. We sell an AI office assistant, not a notetaker, so we are not in the table below and we do not benefit from you choosing any particular one of these three. What we would benefit from is you concluding, correctly or not, that a notetaker alone is not enough. So treat the next section skeptically.

Where we fit, and why we are not in the comparison table

Officeagent is not an AI note taker and putting ourselves in this table would be selling you something we do not do. All three tools here record a meeting, transcribe it and summarize it. That is a narrow, well-solved job, and on a straight notes-per-dollar basis a $149 a month assistant loses to a free Fathom seat so badly that any page claiming otherwise is not worth reading.

The job we do starts after the summary exists. Booking the next call, drafting the recap and sending it, logging the tasks with owners and dates, filing the document, and chasing the person who never replied. A transcript does not do any of that, which is why plenty of teams end up with an excellent record of meetings whose outcomes still did not happen.

The test that sorts it honestly: think about your last ten meetings. If the problem is that you cannot remember what was said or you missed a call, buy a notetaker and stop reading here, because Fathom is free and it is good. If you remember perfectly well what you promised and it still did not get done, a better transcript will not help you, because recall was never the failure. That case is what our AI meeting assistant and follow-up pages are about, and the best AI note taker roundup places all three of these tools above us for the recall job.

How to choose in five minutes

Four questions settle this faster than any feature list, because they map onto the meters rather than the marketing.

• Roughly how many meeting minutes a month, per person? Under 300 and every free plan works. Between 300 and 1,200 and Otter Pro is the cheapest paid option at $8.33. Above 1,200 and Otter Pro is out, which puts Fireflies Pro at $10 or Fathom at $0 ahead of it.
• How long is your typical meeting? Over 30 minutes rules out Otter's free plan. Over 90 minutes rules out Otter Pro. Over 2 hours rules out Fireflies Pro. Fathom's free plan has no length limit.
• How many meeting platforms do you actually use? One or two, and any of the three is fine. Four or more, and Fireflies is the answer on coverage alone.
• Does it need to reach your CRM automatically? If yes, that is Fireflies on breadth of integrations or Fathom Business at $25 a seat annually for native CRM field sync. If no, do not pay for it.
• Then do this before you buy anything: run Fathom's free plan for two weeks on real meetings. It costs nothing, it has no seat minimum, and it will tell you more about whether a notetaker solves your actual problem than any comparison page, including this one.