Fireflies vs Otter: the archive that records everything, audited

By the WorkKitly Team · Last tested: November 2026 · 7 min read

Read this pairing from the other side — our Otter vs Fireflies comparison starts from the live transcript — and Otter looks like the natural default: notes while the meeting is still running, the simplest setup in the category. This page starts where the work of a heavy call schedule actually happens: after the call, in the archive. Fireflies joins your meetings by itself, records all of them, transcribes without a monthly minute cap and files the result where you can search it months later. “Unlimited” is the most persuasive word in this category, and Fireflies has earned the right to use it — about recording.

Because the two free plans ration opposite ends of the same pipeline. Otter meters what you record: 300 transcription minutes a month, and no conversation transcribed past its first 30 minutes. Fireflies meters what you keep: unlimited transcription, but a shelf of 400 stored minutes, after which older recordings make room for newer ones. One tool can fail to hear a call; the other can hear everything and quietly lose January’s calls by March. Which failure you can live with depends on when you use the notes — during the call, or after it. That is the axis of this comparison: automation against control.

Three facts frame the answer. The shelf is a function of your diary, not a fixed grace period: at 900 recorded minutes a month it fills in about twelve days; at 200 a month it lasts two months. Otter’s cap is per conversation, so an hour-long discovery call exists on the free plan only as its first half — the half where decisions usually are not. And when either free plan runs out, the upgrades sit close together — $99.96 a year for Otter Pro against $120 for Fireflies Pro at starting prices — so the free plan’s shape, not the paid price, is the real fork in this decision.

The free plans, read from the shelf

Both free plans are real products, not seven-day trials — but they run out in opposite places. Figures checked November 2026.

The automation side of the table is Fireflies’ shape: connect a calendar once and a recording participant joins call after call without being invited by hand, then files a transcript and summary against each one. The control side is Otter’s: the transcript is produced in front of you, in the meeting, where you can steer by it. Neither shape is a feature list advantage — they are different answers to the question of when a freelancer reads their notes.

The diary maths: what each free plan actually hears

Free-plan limits only mean something against a diary. We ran three call loads — plus the long-workshop pattern — through both plans’ published limits. A month is four working weeks, the same convention as our Otter-first comparison.

Read the Otter column carefully: its cap is not just a monthly budget. Because no conversation is transcribed past 30 minutes, the discovery diary loses the back half of every call even before the monthly allowance is spent — and the back half of a discovery call is where scope, price and deadlines get agreed. Fireflies hears all of it, every time. Its problem is purely archival: the shelf. At the heavy load, the shelf holds about twelve days of calls; at the check-in load, exactly a month. Export the calls that carry decisions — a five-minute weekly habit — and the free plan’s archive problem mostly evaporates.

When a free plan does run out, the paid gap is smaller than the free-plan drama suggests. Otter Pro starts from $8.33 a month billed annually — $99.96 a year. Fireflies Pro starts from $10 a month billed annually — $120 a year. The difference is $20.04 a year, about $1.67 a month (checked November 2026 — prices change). Nobody should choose a notetaker over $1.67 a month; choose over which limit your diary hits.

Scores from our tests

Scores are out of 10, from the calls described in our test method — the same tests, and the same scores, as our Otter-first comparison and our homepage. The columns are swapped; the verdicts are not.

The shape of the scores is the shape of the products. Fireflies wins the two categories a solo’s archive runs on — what the free plan gives you, and how findable it stays. Otter wins the in-call categories — accuracy by a hair, ease by a distance — and the cheaper upgrade. Averages conceal that split; your diary reveals it.

Automation is the product: a clerk who attends every call

Fireflies’ real feature is not transcription — both tools transcribe. It is attendance. The assistant joins from your calendar, meeting after meeting, without you remembering to invite it, and each call comes back as a transcript with a summary, filed against the day it happened. For a freelancer running several clients in parallel, that removes the exact step that manual note-taking dies on: the busy week when recording “most calls” quietly becomes recording none of them.

The automation has two honest costs. The first is social: the assistant announces itself as a recording participant, which is legally and socially necessary — tell clients beforehand anyway, because a surprise “notetaker has joined” has ended calls, and a new client’s guardedness on a recorded first call is a real, if small, tax. The second is discipline: an archive that builds itself still needs emptying decisions. Fireflies files everything; on the free plan, the shelf decides what survives unless you do. Automation moves the clerking from recording to curating — it does not abolish it.

Control is the counter-offer: the transcript while it still matters

Otter’s answer is to make the transcript a live instrument. It appears while the call is running, with the summary forming alongside, so a freelancer can catch a misheard deadline or a drifting commitment and correct it in the room, while correction is free. A client can be sent the live link and follow along without a briefing — that ease, 8.8 in our tests, is Otter’s deepest advantage, and Fireflies has no equivalent moment in its workflow.

The 30-minute cap is what that shape costs. A live instrument does not need to remember everything; a record does. For the check-in diary above, the cap never binds — every call is whole, and only the monthly allowance trims the fourth week. For long discovery calls and workshops, though, the cap stops being a detail: a tool that hears the first half of every important conversation is not keeping your record, however good its live notes are. Control is worth paying for when the call itself is the work. It is a poor trade when the work starts after the call ends.

Search: the archive’s second product

Three months into a client relationship, the valuable question is rarely “what did we say on Tuesday?” It is “what did they say about the budget — ever?” Fireflies’ search across past calls is a core strength and it shows in the scores: 8.2 against 7.6 for search and summaries. The archive compounds — every call recorded makes the next search more useful, which is precisely why the free plan’s 400-minute shelf matters: an archive that deletes its oldest layer is compounding with a leak.

Otter searches within your workspace too, and for a light diary — where its free plan captures nearly everything said — the practical gap is small. The gap opens with volume: Otter can only search what it transcribed, and on the heavy diary that is a third of your call time, skewed to the first halves of calls. Search quality in this category is downstream of capture. On that measure, for a busy solo, the unlimited recorder with a shelf beats the capped recorder with a bigger workspace — provided you keep the shelf from eating the record, which is an export habit, not a purchase.

Accuracy: the shared ceiling

Neither tool wins this category by enough to choose on. In our tests Otter scored 8.2 on transcription accuracy against Fireflies’ 8.0 — a small margin on clean audio that vanished on difficult calls. Add a strong accent, cross-talk, a bad microphone or technical vocabulary and both produced passages we had to repair by listening back; names and numbers suffered first. Fireflies’ automation does not change the ceiling, and Otter’s live view does not raise it.

Budget a minute of checking for any quote, figure or commitment you plan to act on, whichever you choose. Neither tool removes the need to listen; both reduce how much of the call you have to listen to twice. Treat either transcript as excellent notes, not as a court record — and treat the summary, on both platforms, as a map of the call rather than the territory: the flattened sentence in a summary is where a client’s “maybe, if the budget lands” loses its “maybe”.

The solo lens: an archive is only an asset if it survives

A one-person practice has no colleague who also heard the call. The transcript is not a convenience; it is the only external memory the business has of what was promised, and it ends up doing the work of evidence — in scope disputes, in “you said the price included…” conversations, in your own quarterly review of what clients actually asked for. That raises the stakes on Fireflies’ one quiet behaviour: when the shelf fills, older recordings are deleted to make room, or the archive stops growing until you clear it. No alarm is attached to the moment a January discovery call stops existing.

So run the archive like the business record it is. Five minutes a week: export the calls that carry decisions — scope, price, deadlines, changes of mind — to storage you own, and let the shelf hold the routine check-ins it can afford to lose. With that habit, Fireflies’ free plan is genuinely sustainable for a solo. Without it, the unlimited headline is renting you an archive that evaporates oldest-first, and the honest comparison is not Fireflies against Otter but Fireflies against the upgrade — $120 a year at starting prices for a shelf that does not eat the evidence.

Which one fits you?

Pick Fireflies if…

• You record many calls a week and 300 minutes would not last a fortnight
• Your work happens after the call — you search transcripts for what was said about money, scope and deadlines
• Your calls run long, and a 30-minute cap would cut the decision half out of every one
• You work across several clients and want one searchable archive of all of it
• You will spend five minutes a week exporting the calls that matter before the 400-minute shelf fills

Pick Otter if…

• You want notes and a live transcript while the meeting is still running
• Your calls are mostly short — under 30 minutes each — so the cap rarely binds
• You live in Zoom and want the least setup and the simplest interface
• Clients sometimes join the notes link and need it to just make sense
• 300 minutes a month honestly covers your call load

Questions

Related guides and tools

Both tools sit in the Meetings & Notes section of our pillar guide, the best AI tools for freelancers, organised by job alongside the tools for winning clients, doing the work and getting paid. And when a good call turns into real work, turn the brief into a document with our free proposal generator — scope, timeline and payment terms included, built in your browser with nothing uploaded.

Also compare: this pairing read from the live transcript’s side — the notes during the call, and the 30-minute cap as the price of them — is our Otter vs Fireflies comparison, which runs the same scores the other way round. Same test method, different starting point.