If your meetings happen on Zoom or Teams, Otter and Fireflies are excellent and you should probably use one of them. If your meetings happen in a room with a table in it, none of the bot-based tools were designed for you, and that is the single most useful thing this page can tell you.
Below is what each of the main tools is actually built for, the one number worth checking before you commit, and a 30-minute test that settles the question on your audio rather than on anybody's marketing page.
The category split nobody puts in the comparison table
Almost every "best AI note taker" list ranks these products against each other as though they do the same job. They don't. There are four genuinely different things being sold:
Meeting bots — Otter, Fireflies, Fathom, tl;dv, Read (Granola sits next to them, but captures the call from your computer with no bot). A bot joins your video call and transcribes the stream it is given. Because it receives clean, per-participant audio directly from the conferencing platform, speaker separation is close to free and quality is high. There is no bot you can send into a conference room.
Hardware recorders — Plaud Note, Plaud NotePin and similar. A dedicated microphone with transcription software attached, around ₹17,000–21,000 in India and typically a subscription on top. They earn that money for all-day wearable capture and for picking up phone calls, which a phone app genuinely cannot do well.
Transcription services — Rev, Sonix, Descript, Notta. Built to turn a file into a polished document, with editor-first workflows and, in Rev's case, human transcribers. Strong output; a workflow built around a file rather than around a meeting that ends at 6pm and needs sending at 6:10.
In-room meeting apps — this is the category MeetNotes is in. Phone on the table, press record, transcript with speaker names and finished minutes a few minutes after everyone stands up.
Pick the category first. Then the comparison inside it is easy, and comparisons across it are mostly noise.
The head-to-head
| Otter | Fireflies | Notta | Plaud (device) | MeetNotes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Built for | Virtual meetings | Virtual meetings + CRM workflows | Files, uploads, cross-platform capture | All-day and phone-call capture | Meetings in a room |
| Captures a room | Via phone app, not the design centre | Via phone app, not the design centre | Yes, mobile capture | Yes, dedicated mic | Yes — the entire design |
| Transcription languages | 6, named on Otter's pricing page | 5, plus 100 labelled beta | 58, plus a bilingual mode | 112 | No language to select — the room speaks, it transcribes |
| Minutes written in | English-centric | Multiple | Multiple | Multiple | 110 languages |
| Mixed-language sentences | Not the design case | Multi-language mode, beta | Bilingual mode | Varies | The normal case |
| Hardware to buy | None | None | None | Yes, $159–189 per device | None |
| Live transcript while recording | Yes | Live-transcript API (March 2026) | — | — | No — transcript and minutes after the recording |
| Joins calls from your calendar | Yes, auto-joins Zoom, Teams, Meet | Yes, calendar-triggered | — | No bot | No — joins when you send it |
| Ask across meetings | AI Chat, free up to 20 a month | AskFred | — | Ask Plaud | From ChatGPT or Claude |
| Free to start | 300 min a month, 30-min cap per conversation | In-person mobile: "unlimited free transcription" (Fireflies' claim) | — | 300 min a month | 100 minutes, then packs or a subscription |
| Output you send | Web link, export | Web link, export, CRM sync | Export | App/dashboard export | PDF + editable Word, straight to WhatsApp |
Every third-party figure above comes from the vendor's own public documentation: first checked on 24 August 2026, with the Otter, Fireflies and Plaud rows refreshed in October 2026 — and every one of them can change next month. A dash means we did not find it in what we read (Notta was not re-checked in October), not that the product lacks it. Check theirs on their own site before you buy anything, including ours on our pricing page. Apart from Plaud's device price, we deliberately do not quote competitor prices here, because a stale price on a comparison page is a false statement about someone else's business.
October 2026 sources: Otter pricing, Otter on the App Store, Fireflies pricing, Fireflies mobile app, Fireflies release notes, Plaud Intelligence, Plaud release notes.
For scale, as reported by third parties and not checked by us: Otter cited 25M+ users and $100M+ ARR (March 2025, UC Today), Fireflies reached a $1B valuation (June 2025, CXO Today), and Granola raised $125M at a $1.5B valuation (March 2026, Reworked). These are large, well-funded call tools; the question on this page is still which one fits where your meetings happen.
The one number worth checking before you commit
Language support is where these products differ most and where the marketing is loosest, because everyone counts differently.
Otter's help centre lists six transcription languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese (Simplified), and its pricing page still names six in October 2026. That is not a criticism — it is a deliberate focus, and within those six it is very good. But if your meetings happen in Hindi, Tamil, Arabic, Vietnamese, Gujarati or Swahili, that number is the end of the evaluation, and no amount of feature comparison after it matters.
In October 2026 Fireflies lists five languages plus 100 labelled beta, Plaud lists 112, and Granola about 17 (Hindi yes, Gujarati and Tamil no, per its language page); Notta listed 58 with a bilingual mode when we checked in August. MeetNotes has no language selector at all — you press record and it transcribes whatever the room actually says — has heard meetings in 105+ languages so far, and writes the minutes in any of 110 languages, so a Hinglish meeting can produce an English MoM.
Here is the catch that applies to every entry in that row, ours included: a language count tells you nothing about what happens to a sentence containing two languages. "Toh basically we'll ship the Q3 numbers by Friday" is one sentence in two languages, it is how a very large part of the world actually talks in meetings, and it is the fastest way to break a transcription tool. Some translate it. Some drop it. Some transcribe the Hindi phonetically into English letters. No pricing page will tell you which.
Which is why the only comparison worth running is one you run yourself.
Settle it in thirty minutes
- Record one real meeting — interruptions, accents, cross-talk. Twenty minutes is plenty.
- Run the same audio through two tools. One attempt each, no re-records.
- Delete every product name and logo from both outputs. Label them A and B.
- Paste both into ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot with our blind judge prompt and ask it to be blunt.
Step 3 is the one people skip and the one that decides whether the test means anything. Leave the brand names in and the model recalls what it has read about the logos instead of reading the two documents. Take them out and it has nothing but the minutes to go on.
We publish the head-to-heads we lose, with the criterion we lost on, and anyone who sends us a meeting to test gets 300 free minutes — the full rules are here. We would rather learn we are behind from a stranger's recording than from a customer who quietly stopped opening the app.
So which should you pick?
- Your meetings are on Zoom or Teams, in English → a meeting bot. Otter or Fireflies.
- Your meetings are already Teams calls inside a Microsoft company → Teams' own transcription, which already has the audio and the names. We put it through the same blind test and published what it got right and what it got wrong.
- You need all-day wearable capture or phone calls recorded → a hardware recorder is worth the money.
- You have a pile of existing audio and video files to turn into documents → a transcription service.
- Your meetings happen in a room, in more than one language, and someone has to send an MoM afterwards → that is what MeetNotes was built for, and it is free to start with 100 minutes included.
If you are choosing between a device and an app, we wrote a longer breakdown of whether you need a ₹20,000 recorder. If your rooms switch between Hindi and English, here is what that actually does to a transcript. If you are only replacing Otter, we compared nine Otter.ai alternatives by where they capture and what they produce.
FAQ
Is Otter or Fireflies better for in-person meetings?
Both have phone apps that will record a room, but neither product is designed around that case — their strength is receiving clean per-speaker audio from a video call, which is a fundamentally easier problem than one microphone on a table with six people around it. If most of your meetings are in person, test any bot-based tool on your own room audio before you commit to an annual plan, rather than on a video call where it will look excellent.
Which AI note taker supports the most languages?
Counts as published in October 2026: Plaud lists 112, Fireflies lists 5 plus 100 in beta, Granola about 17, and Otter's pricing page names 6; Notta listed 58 in August. MeetNotes writes minutes in 110 and has heard meetings in 105+ so far. Treat all of these as starting points, not answers — the counts change, and none of them tells you how a tool handles a single sentence that switches language mid-way, which is the thing that actually breaks in real meetings.
Do I need to buy a Plaud or similar device?
Only for the jobs a phone genuinely cannot do: all-day wearable capture, and recording phone calls. For people sitting around a table, the device's microphone does nothing your phone's microphone cannot, and you have one more gadget to charge, carry and not lose. The honest full comparison is in do you need a ₹20,000 AI recorder?
