Otter.ai is an AI meeting notetaker. It transcribes meetings, calls, lectures and in-person conversations in real time, labels speakers, and writes summaries, action items and outlines. It captures audio two ways: Otter Notetaker (formerly OtterPilot) joins Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet calls as a visible guest from your connected calendar, while the desktop app for Mac and Windows records from your own device with no bot. Our verdict: a strong fit for individuals and small teams who spend their week on video calls. The plan that matters is Pro, at $8.33 per user a month billed annually. Its 1,200-minute monthly cap is the limit to plan around.
How Otter.ai works: a visible bot or a bot-free app
Connect a Google or Microsoft calendar and the Notetaker auto-joins by default every event that carries a Zoom, Meet or Teams link. It shows up as a guest named after you, posts a chat link to the live transcript soon after joining, and posts a summary with action items right before the meeting ends. It cannot join hidden. Any participant can remove it, even someone without an Otter account, and typing stop otter in the meeting chat removes every Notetaker at once. Only the primary calendar of each connected account syncs, and an ad hoc meeting is added by pasting its link on the Otter home page.
The bot-free route is the desktop app. It records supported meetings from your device without adding a participant, and it keeps working with headphones once microphone and system audio permissions are on [1]. The Chrome extension offers on-device recording for Google Meet only. For in-person talks, the web, iOS and Android apps record directly, and you can import audio or video files of up to 5 GB each. Imports get the same automatic summary, action items and outline. Otter says the Notetaker transcribes more accurately than manual recording, because it takes the meeting's internal audio stream.
After the call, Otter AI Chat answers questions across all your conversations and the ones shared with you: 20 queries per user a month on Basic, 50 on Pro and 200 on Business and Enterprise. The Otter MCP server, on every plan, lets Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other MCP clients search and fetch your transcripts after an OAuth sign-in. Transcription covers six languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese (Simplified), with German and Chinese still in beta. You pick one language per conversation. A 30-minute meeting yields a final transcript in about 1.5 to 3 minutes, with the summary 2.5 to 6 minutes after it ends.
Switch the default auto-join to meetings you select manually and pick who receives notes, then connect your calendar. Otherwise the Notetaker joins every meeting with a video link.
Who Otter.ai suits, and who should skip it
Otter suits people whose work runs through scheduled video calls on Zoom, Teams or Meet: consultants, managers, sales reps and students who want searchable notes without typing them. Pro is sized for one heavy user. Its 1,200 minutes equal 20 hours a month, about 4.6 hours a week, or twenty one-hour meetings. Small teams fit too. A Pro workspace holds at most 5 billed users, Business up to 25, and anything larger goes to Enterprise through sales. The Notetaker and the bot-free app live in one workspace, so a team can choose per meeting whether a visible guest is acceptable.
Skip it in four cases. Your calls run in a language outside the six, such as Portuguese or Cantonese. You handle patient health information and will not sign an Enterprise contract. You need your data stored outside the United States, since Otter hosts on AWS in the US and does not publish a choice of data region. Or you mainly record phone calls. Otter cannot record them directly on iOS or Android, so you record with the phone and import the file. If one of these applies, our Otter.ai alternatives guide covers the other options.
The plan that matters: Pro, until you pass 20 hours a month
Prices shown are what Otter.ai lists for visitors in the United States, in US dollars. Your price can differ by country, currency and local taxes such as VAT.
| Plan | Price per user | Minutes per user a month | Per conversation | File imports |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | Free | 300 | 30 minutes | 3 per user, lifetime |
| Pro | $16.99 per user a month billed monthly, or $8.33 per user a month billed annually | 1,200 | 90 minutes | 10 a month |
| Business | $30 per user a month billed monthly, or $19.99 per user a month billed annually | No cap on meeting and in-app recording | 4 hours | 6,000 imported minutes a month |
| Enterprise | Through sales, no published price | As Business | 4 hours | As Business |
The minutes on Basic and Pro form one shared pool across meetings, in-app recordings and imports [2]. The pool resets on your billing-cycle date, not on the first of the month. Unused minutes do not roll over, and extra minutes are not for sale; the vendor tells you to upgrade instead. Deleting a conversation gives no minutes back. On Business, the word unlimited covers meeting and in-app recording minutes only, because each conversation still stops at 4 hours and imports stop at 6,000 minutes per user a month.
Billing term is the bigger lever. Pro costs $16.99 per user a month billed monthly, which comes to $203.88 a year by our arithmetic, against $99.96 a year on annual billing at $8.33 a month. The annual plan wins if you keep Pro six months or more. Business costs $19.99 per user a month billed annually, or $30 billed monthly; first-time subscribers on monthly billing pay $24 a month for the first three months. Against the $30 per user a month list price billed monthly, annual Business is cheaper from 8 months of use; a first-time subscriber paying $24 per user a month billed monthly for the first three months breaks even from 9 months, by our arithmetic. Moving one user from annual Pro to annual Business adds $11.66 a month.
Two billing rules deserve attention before you pay. Otter advertises a 7-day free trial for Business, not for Pro. Under Otter's Terms, subscriptions are non-refundable; Otter documents narrow exceptions elsewhere (a Domain Capture migration, an Enterprise contract ended for Otter's breach), and you must cancel at least 24 hours before renewal. Seats added mid-cycle on Business are charged pro rata, and removed seats may leave a prorated credit, depending on plan and contract, never cash. The Otter.ai pricing guide runs the team totals and both billing terms in full.
The limits you will hit first
On Basic, the 30-minute conversation cap bites before the monthly pool does. Recording does not stop at 30 minutes, but only the first 30 minutes of transcript are viewable until you upgrade and unlock the rest [3]. A weekly hour-long team call therefore shows half its transcript. Basic also shows only the 25 most recent conversations, allows 1 concurrent Notetaker meeting, and exports mp3 and txt only. Pro raises concurrency to 2, keeps full history, and adds pdf, docx and srt exports. That is a real step up.
Each meeting platform adds its own friction. In Microsoft Teams the Notetaker joins as an anonymous guest labelled Unverified, the organization must allow anonymous users, and someone may have to admit it from the lobby. Google Meet may show a potential-risk warning that Otter cannot switch off. Zoom hosts must allow local recording (Record to computer files), and either auto-approve the bot's recording request or approve it each time. The Notetaker also cannot join meetings that require signing in to the conferencing app. Plan a test call first.
Some features sit high up the price list. Zapier starts on Pro, and Salesforce or HubSpot note sync covers 1 user on Pro and 5 on Business. The Public API and workspace webhooks are Enterprise only. So are SSO and SCIM, which also carry a 100-user minimum licence. Bulk export, admin activity logs and the Dropbox sync start on Business. YouTube links cannot be pasted for transcription; you download the file and import it.
The 7-day Business trial needs a card and converts automatically at the Business monthly rate for every seat unless an admin cancels before it ends. Subscriptions are non-refundable under Otter's Terms; Otter documents narrow exceptions elsewhere.
Is Otter.ai safe? Consent, training and HIPAA
Recording consent is your job. Otter's Terms leave the user solely responsible for notice and consent, and Otter advises applying all-party consent practices everywhere. The Notetaker is visible and posts a chat message, but bot-free desktop recording shows nothing to the other people on the call. Auto-share can also send notes to every calendar guest, guests on your domain, your workspace or nobody. Check auto-join and auto-share settings before you connect a calendar, because both act on every future meeting.
On training, Otter's privacy policy lists training its own AI on de-identified audio recordings and on transcriptions, which may contain personal information [4]. Otter's privacy pages name no opt-out from training on de-identified data. A separate Help improve Otter setting decides whether Otter and third-party providers may access your conversations for training, including human review. Enterprise workspaces are opted out of model training by default. Security basics are standard: Otter says it holds SOC 2 Type II, data sits on AWS in the US, and content is encrypted with AES-256 at rest and TLS in transit.
HIPAA is narrower than many buyers assume. It exists only on Enterprise, as an add-on with a signed business associate agreement, and Otter is not a business associate by default. Basic, Pro and Business are not for patient data. Even on Enterprise, Otter tells healthcare customers to control when health data enters the product, including switching off the auto-joining Notetaker for members, and to disable public link sharing. Our Otter.ai buyer's checklist walks through each security and admin question.
The Mac and Windows app records meetings from your device without adding a participant. You still owe everyone notice and consent.
How we score Otter.ai
One product covers the whole meeting-notes job: real-time transcription of meetings, calls, lectures and in-person conversations; the Otter Notetaker (formerly OtterPilot) that auto-joins Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet from a connected Google or Microsoft calendar; bot-free capture through the desktop app for Mac and Windows (meeting detection, automatic recording, also Slack huddles and dialers) and a Chrome extension; imports of audio and video files up to 5 GB each in common audio and video formats; speaker identification, custom vocabulary, automatic summaries, action items, outlines and slide capture; My Action Items across meetings; search, highlights, comments, channels and a shared workspace (up to 5 members even on Basic); exports in mp3 and txt on Basic and pdf, docx and srt from Pro; Enterprise adds SSO, SCIM, domain capture, user groups, custom retention, title-keyword blocking, video replay for Zoom and Google Meet, the Sales Notetaker and the Public API. Held back by caps on every plan: Basic 300 and Pro 1,200 transcription minutes per user a month in one shared pool with no rollover and no extra minutes for sale, a per-conversation cap (30 minutes Basic, 90 minutes Pro, 4 hours Business and Enterprise), imports capped at 3 per user lifetime on Basic, 10 a month on Pro and 6,000 minutes per user a month on Business, Basic history limited to the 25 most recent conversations, and 1, 2 or 3 concurrent meetings by plan. Transcription runs in six languages only (English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Chinese Simplified; German and Chinese in beta), one language at a time; Otter records no video itself, cannot record phone calls directly, cannot take a pasted YouTube link, cannot trim audio, and real-time transcription needs a connection.
AI is the product: automatic summaries, action items and outlines on meetings and imports, Otter AI Chat that answers across all of a user's conversations during and after meetings with source references (AI Chat 2.0 with Chat and Work modes on web and desktop), image questions on screen captures, Standard meeting templates on Basic and Advanced templates from Pro applied automatically by rules, Work Mode producing pre-meeting briefs, follow-up emails, proposals and CRM updates (Otter says it launched in October 2026), and on Enterprise Live Assist (private real-time coaching built with Agent Builder from playbooks), the Sales Notetaker with BANT and MEDDIC extraction, Insights and Advanced Agentic AI Chat. The Otter MCP server is on every plan including Basic, so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Perplexity and other MCP clients can search and fetch Otter transcripts over OAuth. Otter says its speech recognition and speaker identification are built in-house and trained on 150 million hours of proprietary voice data; Anthropic powers AI features as a subprocessor without training on or storing customer data. Held back by AI Chat quotas of 20 queries a month on Basic (3 per conversation), 50 on Pro and 200 on Business and Enterprise, custom template use capped at 5, 15 and 30 meetings per user below Enterprise, the mobile apps still on AI Chat 1.0, the AI Chat connectors to Gmail, Google Drive, Notion and Jira listed with Enterprise on the pricing page, Live Assist and the sales features on Enterprise only, AI Chat opt-out only workspace-wide by an admin, no summary for conversations of 500 words or fewer, Otter itself saying it cannot guarantee zero hallucinations, and model training on de-identified recordings and transcripts by default outside Enterprise (a separate Help improve Otter setting decides whether Otter and third-party providers may access your conversations for training, including human review, and Enterprise workspaces are opted out by default).
The meeting stack is covered on every plan: Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet through the Notetaker; Google Calendar, Microsoft 365 Outlook and iOS Calendar for auto-join; the Slack app (reminders, summary posts, action-item DMs, auto-posting for recurring meetings) and the Chrome extension on all plans; and the Otter MCP server on every plan, a verified connector in Claude (May 2026) and approved in the ChatGPT App Store (April 2026). Zapier (trigger New Recording, action Import New Recordings) runs from Pro; synced notes to Salesforce or HubSpot cover 1 user on Pro, 5 on Business and unlimited on Enterprise; Dropbox auto-sync, Zoom Live Notes and Zoom Cloud Sync are Business features; exports go to Google Drive, Notion, OneDrive and SharePoint; the directory also lists Jira, Glean, Egnyte, Outreach, Salesloft, RingCentral, Microsoft Dynamics, Asana and others. Held back by a developer platform that is Enterprise only (the Public API at 10 requests per second with 2 keys per user, and workspace webhooks for conversation.completed and conversation.shared), workspace-wide CRM connection and field mapping on Enterprise, Salesforce limited to Sales Cloud Enterprise, Unlimited or Developer Edition with no Sandbox, most directory entries showing Contact sales rather than a self-serve button, ClickUp, Trello and Greenhouse only through Zapier, the Chrome extension limited to Zoom and Google Meet links, no on-premises Exchange or secondary calendars, and Zoom Live Notes and Cloud Sync also needing a paid Zoom plan.
Sign-up for Basic needs no card, and once a calendar is connected the Notetaker joins meetings with a Zoom, Meet or Teams link and sends the summary without anyone pressing record; there are web, iOS, Android, Mac and Windows desktop apps, a Chrome extension and an iPhone widget; imported files get a summary, action items and an outline automatically, and Otter's help puts a 30-minute meeting's final transcript at about 1.5 to 3 minutes after it ends. Typing stop otter in the meeting chat removes all Notetakers, and auto-join can be set to meetings you select by hand. Held back by set-up friction on each platform: Zoom hosts must allow local recording or approve the Notetaker each time, Teams labels it an unverified guest and may hold it in the lobby, Google Meet may show a Potential risk warning and require admission, and it cannot join meetings that require signing in; the default auto-join and auto-share settings can send a bot and share notes with guests before a new user has changed them; browser recording with headphones or in Safari can miss the meeting audio; and buyers must track a monthly minute pool, a per-conversation cap and separate import and AI Chat quotas, with the Basic over-cap transcript hidden beyond 30 minutes until an upgrade.
Basic is free forever with no card (300 transcription minutes per user a month, the Notetaker, AI Chat with 20 queries a month and the MCP server), and Pro costs $8.33 per user a month billed annually ($99.96 a year by our arithmetic) or $16.99 per user a month billed monthly for 1,200 minutes a month; Business costs $19.99 per user a month billed annually or $30 per user a month billed monthly, with $24 a month for the first three months for first-time subscribers billed monthly, and lifts the monthly cap on meeting and in-app recording minutes. Students and teachers with a .edu email get 20% off Pro ($6.67 a month billed $79.99 annually, or $13.59 a month billed monthly), and nonprofits get a Business discount through TechSoup. Held back by the gap between billing terms (Pro billed monthly costs about twice the annual rate, so annual pays off from 6 months of use, our arithmetic), fees that are non-refundable under the Terms including the unused part of a forgotten renewal (Otter documents narrow exceptions elsewhere), no way to buy extra minutes (Otter says upgrade instead), deleted conversations still counting against the pool, Pro capped at 5 billed users and Business at 25, the Business trial needing a card and converting to the monthly rate for every seat unless an admin cancels, and Enterprise, the HIPAA add-on, SSO and SCIM (100-user minimum licence) sold only by quote.
Otter says it holds a SOC 2 Type II report, publishes a VPAT for Section 508, takes part in the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework with the UK Extension and the Swiss-U.S. framework, offers a DPA in the Terms, encrypts content with TLS in transit and AES-256 at rest on AWS, keeps daily database backups, offers HIPAA compliance on Enterprise as an add-on with a signed BAA, opts Enterprise workspaces out of model training by default, and runs a public status page with per-component history; Enterprise customers get an account manager, a dedicated Enterprise help center and a Customer Success Program. Held back by support that is a submitted request answered by email with no phone support (prioritized only on Business and Enterprise), no uptime commitment published, data hosted on AWS in the United States with no published choice of data region, security policies only based on the ISO 27001/2 framework with no ISO certification claimed, and Terms that keep fees non-refundable (Otter documents narrow exceptions elsewhere: a Domain Capture migration, an Enterprise contract ended for Otter's breach), give no warranty of transcription accuracy, let Otter suspend or terminate any account at any time and cap liability at the greater of 12 months of fees or $100.
G2 4.4 from 505 reviews, Capterra 4.4 from 103 and Trustpilot 4.4 from 856 (read November 2026); the mobile app rates 4.79 from 87,912 ratings on the US App Store and 4.8 from 47,530 on Google Play. Axis score 4.8: the mean of each platform's displayed rating with at least 30 reviews, weighted by review count (136,906 reviews; computed 4.79). The two app stores carry about 99% of that weight, while the review sites, where business buyers rate the product, sit at 4.4. Trustpilot is read as a complaint map, never as a trend; the recent 100-review sample is a sample, not a share of customers.
help.otter.ai covers set-up, billing, minutes, caps, the Notetaker on each meeting platform, removal and auto-join controls, AI Chat, templates, integrations and exports, and many articles state the plan that gets a feature; a dedicated Enterprise help center covers SSO, SCIM, desktop deployment, retention and admin controls; the developer pages document the Public API (authentication, rate limits, endpoints), workspace webhooks and the MCP server with its server URL and tools; the security, privacy, subprocessor and Terms pages are dated. Held back by help and product pages that contradict the pricing page and have not been updated: help articles giving Workspaces only to Pro and above and Basic exports as TXT only, product pages listing three transcription languages or a 90-minute free file limit, blog posts with the 2021 Business price of $20, a 14-day trial and 6,000 meeting minutes on Business, the help center silent on the Business trial length, and processing-time figures on product pages that differ from the help center.
Weighted across the axes above (weights reflect what actually drives the decision in this category). How we score →
Our composite lands at 3.9/5. Otter earns its strongest marks on capture: a calendar-driven bot, a bot-free desktop app, mobile recording and file imports in one account, with AI Chat and the MCP server open on every plan. It loses ground on the meter. Minute caps, per-conversation caps, no rollover and non-refundable subscriptions push the risk onto the buyer. Compliance features sit almost entirely on Enterprise, which has no public price.
User sentiment tells a consistent story across the business review sites and the app stores, with the phone apps rated a little higher than the business review sites. We treat that as one axis among eight. Recent Trustpilot reviews lean heavily positive, but that reflects a sample of recent reviews, not a trend or a share of all customers. Ratings say people like the notes; they say nothing about whether your meeting hours fit a cap.
Frequently asked questions
Does Otter.ai keep working if my internet drops?+
Recording continues and the audio is cached, but the live transcript pauses; transcription happens after you reconnect. Closing the tab or app before the upload finishes can lose audio.
What happens to my notes if I downgrade to Basic?+
A downgrade deletes no conversations. Basic shows the 25 most recent; older ones are archived, still exportable, and come back when you upgrade.
How do I cancel Otter.ai bought on an iPhone or Android phone?+
Subscriptions bought through the Apple App Store or Google Play are managed, cancelled and refunded in the store, not by Otter. Uninstalling the app cancels nothing.
Is there an Otter.ai student discount?+
Students and teachers with a .edu email get 20% off the Pro individual plan: Pro $6.67 a month billed $79.99 annually, or Pro $13.59 a month billed monthly. It excludes Workspace features and is paid by credit card only. If you are already on a paid plan or in a Workspace, you must cancel or leave it first, with no refund of fees already paid.
The bottom line
Otter.ai is a capable meeting notetaker for people and small teams who live in Zoom, Teams and Meet. The real choice is not the features but the meter: Basic shows only 30 minutes of each conversation, Pro covers 20 hours a month per user, and Business removes the meeting-minute cap for teams of up to 25. Buy Pro on annual billing if you will keep it six months or more, settle auto-join and auto-share before connecting a calendar, and treat consent as your own duty. Our score reflects a strong product with a meter that needs watching. Regulated teams should talk to Enterprise sales first.
- [1] Otter help: Otter Desktop App (Mac & Windows) (2026-11) https://help.otter.ai/hc/en-us/articles/35973988280215-Otter-Desktop-App-Mac-Windows
- [2] Pricing (2026-11) https://otter.ai/pricing
- [3] Otter help: Conversation, import, and app limits on the Basic free plan (2026-11) https://help.otter.ai/hc/en-us/articles/360047538094-Conversation-import-and-app-limits-on-the-Basic-free-plan
- [4] Otter.ai Privacy Policy (2026-11) https://otter.ai/privacy-policy