AI meeting notetakers, tested: Otter vs Fireflies vs Granola
Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, and Granola all promise to take your meeting notes for you. After a month of real meetings across all three, the real differences are the bot in your call, the summary quality — and what happens to your data afterward.
AI meeting notetakers have quietly become one of the most-used categories of AI software. They join your calls, transcribe everything, and hand you a summary and action items before you've closed the tab. The three names that come up in nearly every comparison are Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, and Granola — but they solve the problem in fundamentally different ways.
This review draws on a month of real meetings across all three tools, cross-checked against published hands-on testing (notably FutureLume's 200+ meeting benchmark from September 2026) and current vendor documentation. Scores and pricing below are from those sources and verified September 2026 listings — pricing moves, so treat the figures as directionally current rather than gospel.
How the three approaches differ#
The single biggest design decision in this category is the bot. Otter and Fireflies send a visible participant — OtterPilot and Fred, respectively — into your Zoom, Meet, or Teams call to record it. Granola takes the opposite approach: a desktop app that captures your device audio locally, transcribes it, and never appears in the participant list.
Neither design is strictly better; they solve different problems:
- Bot-based (Otter, Fireflies): No software to install for anyone but you; capture works from any device. But every attendee sees a recording bot join, which can feel awkward on client calls.
- Bot-free (Granola): Invisible and discreet, great for 1:1s and sensitive conversations. But it requires the desktop or mobile app, and with no visible participant, you become responsible for telling people they're being recorded.
That consent question isn't theoretical: a proposed class action filed in July 2026 alleges Granola failed to adequately disclose recording, and a separate consolidated case on consent and AI training is underway against Otter.ai in the same court. Neither case has been decided. But the practical takeaway is real: with a bot in the call, consent is at least visible; with bot-free tools, disclosure is entirely on you.
Accuracy: transcription and speaker identification#
Raw transcription accuracy is close enough among the three that it shouldn't be your deciding factor. Published hands-on tests put them in the same band: Fireflies around 82/100, Granola around 76/100, and Otter around 72/100 in one independent benchmark — while another detailed reviewer rated Otter's real-world transcription as consistently strong, around 95%+, even with accents and crosstalk. Your mileage will vary with audio quality, accents, and jargon; custom vocabulary features (available on Otter Pro and Fireflies Pro) matter more in practice than headline scores.
The more important metric is speaker identification — who said what — because it determines whether notes are usable after a group call. Here the gap is stark:
| Tool | Transcription (approx.) | Speaker ID | Best meeting size |
|---|---|---|---|
| Otter.ai | Strong | 58/100 | Small-to-medium teams |
| Fireflies.ai | Strong | 28/100 | 1:1s and sales calls |
| Granola | Good | 10/100 | Solo, 1:1, small standups |
Granola's speaker ID is the weak point of the trio — fine when it's you and one other person, unreliable beyond that. Otter leads here, which is why it reads better on multi-person calls. Fireflies sits in the middle. All three extract action items, but quality varies: Otter and Fireflies assign owners automatically; Granola leans on the notes you typed during the meeting, enhanced by AI, which suits people who already take notes and want them polished rather than replaced.
Language support also differs. Fireflies supports transcription in 100+ languages (multi-language mode is a separate beta); Otter covers six languages with one per meeting; Granola supports 10 languages on desktop and more on iPhone, with no Chinese.
Summaries and integrations#
All three produce a post-meeting summary, key takeaways, and action items. The workflows diverge afterward:
- Otter.ai offers a searchable meeting archive, Otter AI Chat (ask questions about your meetings — 20 queries/month on the free plan), and Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zapier integrations on Pro and above. Its strength is turning meetings into queryable team knowledge.
- Fireflies.ai has the deepest integration story: 50+ apps, CRM sync, topic tracking, talk-time analytics, and soundbites for sharing clips. Conversation intelligence (sentiment, talk ratios, custom trackers) is gated to the Business tier. A notable caveat: AI features like AskFred consume a monthly credit allowance (20 on Pro, 30 on Business), which heavy AI users can exhaust.
- Granola is the minimalist of the three: transcript plus AI-enhanced notes shaped by what you marked important during the call, AI chat within and across meetings, shared folders, and custom templates. Integrations (Notion, HubSpot, Slack, Salesforce, Attio, Zapier, MCP) are strongest on the Business tier. What you don't get is CRM-grade pipeline automation — Granola is a personal notes tool with team sharing, not a sales workflow.
Pricing: the limits that actually matter#
All three have free tiers, and the meaningful differences hide in the fine print:
| Plan | Otter.ai | Fireflies.ai | Granola |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 300 min/mo, 30 min per conversation, 3 lifetime file imports | 800 min/mo transcription, limited storage | Unlimited meetings, only last 30 days of notes visible |
| Mid tier | Pro: $16.99/mo (monthly) or $8.33/mo (annual) — 1,200 min/mo, 90-min cap | Pro: $18/mo (monthly) or $10/mo (annual) — 8,000 min storage, unlimited transcription | Business: $14/user/mo — unlimited history, advanced models, integrations |
| Top tier | Business: $30/mo or $19.99/mo annual — unlimited, 4-hr conversations, admin controls | Business: $29/mo or $19/mo annual — unlimited storage, video, conversation intelligence | Enterprise: $35/user/mo — SSO, team-wide training opt-out, admin controls |
The traps to know about: Otter's free tier caps conversations at 30 minutes, so an hour-long meeting gets cut off. Granola's free tier is generous on capture but stingy on history — older notes disappear behind the paywall. Fireflies has no annual discount published on Granola's side (Granola's pricing page shows no annual discount), while Otter and Fireflies both cut prices substantially on annual billing. Enterprise tiers at all three add SSO; HIPAA compliance is available on Otter Enterprise (add-on) and Fireflies Enterprise, and custom data retention on Fireflies Enterprise.
The privacy fine print#
This is the section most reviews skip, and it's the one that should influence your choice as much as features.
- Otter.ai: Audio is retained by default; data is US-based. A consolidated case over consent and AI training is underway (undecided). If your meetings involve sensitive HR or client conversations, confirm the vendor's current retention and training policies against your compliance requirements before deploying.
- Fireflies.ai: Audio retained by default; US-based data. The most CRM-integrated of the three, which is a feature for sales teams and a data-exposure surface for everyone else. Custom data retention is Enterprise-only.
- Granola: The privacy story is mixed but distinctive. Meeting audio is not retained — desktop audio is transcribed in real time and mobile audio is cached only until transcription, then deleted. It holds SOC 2 Type II certification. The catches: notes live in Granola's US-hosted cloud with no EU option, processing runs through third-party providers (Deepgram, AssemblyAI, OpenAI, Anthropic), and — the one that surprises people — Granola uses anonymized customer data for AI model improvement unless you opt out. Individual users can opt out in settings; only Enterprise opts out the whole team by default.
Note the irony: the bot-free tool that feels most private still trains on your data by default. If you choose Granola, the opt-out toggle is the first setting to flip. If you choose any of the three, read the current privacy policy rather than relying on marketing language.
The takeaway#
After a month across all three, there's no universal winner — there are three different tools for three different meeting lives:
- Choose Otter.ai if you want the most polished all-rounder with the best speaker identification and a searchable meeting archive. It's the best fit for knowledge workers drowning in internal meetings. Watch the 30-minute free-tier cap.
- Choose Fireflies.ai if your notes need to land in a CRM. Its 50+ integrations and conversation intelligence make it the sales-team pick, and the Pro plan's unlimited transcription at $10/month (annual) is the best value in the category. Watch the AI credit allowance.
- Choose Granola if you hate bots in your meetings and want your own typed notes polished by AI. The $14/month Business tier is cheap for what it does, and deleting audio after transcription is genuinely privacy-forward. Flip the training opt-out on day one — and don't expect it to keep up on a six-person call.
One closing note: the most underrated feature in this entire category is consent. Whether your notetaker shows up as a bot named Fred or hides in your menu bar, the people on the other end of the call deserve to know they're being recorded. The tool won't do that for you — and as the 2026 lawsuits suggest, courts may soon ask whether anyone did.