Best AI Note Taker: Otter vs Fireflies vs Granola Compared

If you sit in back-to-back calls, the best AI note taker is the one you stop thinking about: it captures what was said, who agreed to what, and what happens next, without you retyping it afterward. The three names most people choose between do that job in three different ways — Otter sends a visible notetaker bot and transcribes live, Fireflies sends a bot and builds a searchable team archive, and Granola sends no bot at all, capturing audio from your own device instead.

That one difference — bot or no bot — decides most purchases, before price even enters it. Plan details here were checked against official pricing pages in November 2026.

Quick picks

| Need | Pick | Why | |---|---|---| | No bot joining your calls | Granola Business — $14/month | Captures from your device, unlimited meetings, no minute meter | | Searchable archive for a whole team | Fireflies Business — $19/seat/month billed annually | Unlimited transcription and storage, conversation intelligence | | Live transcription and captions | Otter Pro — $8.33/month billed annually | Live transcript, speaker identification, cheapest annual entry price | | Testing for free | Granola Basic — $0 | Unlimited meetings free; only the last 30 days of history stays visible |

The comparison at a glance

| Tool | How it joins | Free tier | Entry paid plan | Main limit to watch | |---|---|---|---|---| | Otter | Visible bot, or in-person recording | 300 minutes/month, 30 minutes per conversation | Pro $8.33/month billed annually, $16.99 monthly | Monthly minute cap — 1,200 minutes on Pro | | Fireflies | Visible bot, plus a bot-free Chrome option | Limited summaries, 400 minutes of team storage | Pro $10/seat/month billed annually, $18 monthly | Storage on Pro, and a separate AI-credit meter | | Granola | No bot — captures your device audio | Unlimited meetings, 30 days of history | Business $14/user/month, billed monthly | History, not minutes — free notes age out of view after 30 days |

Otter: the best AI note taker for live transcription

What it does best

Otter is the oldest name here, and it still does the live part best. Its notetaker joins Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams calls, produces a live transcript with speaker identification, and lets people follow along — useful for interviews, lectures, and anyone who wants captions while the conversation is still happening. It also records in-person conversations from its mobile apps.

Pricing and the minute cap that matters

| Plan | Price | Transcription | Per-meeting cap | |---|---|---|---| | Basic | $0 | 300 minutes/month | 30 minutes | | Pro | $8.33/month billed annually, $16.99 monthly | 1,200 minutes/month | 90 minutes | | Business | $19.99/month billed annually, $30 monthly | Unlimited meetings | 4 hours |

The free plan is a trial in all but name: 300 minutes a month, only the first 30 minutes of each conversation, your 25 most recent conversations, and 3 file imports for the life of the account. Pro lifts the cap to 1,200 minutes — roughly twenty one-hour meetings — and 10 imports a month. Minutes do not roll over, so a heavy meeting week cannot borrow from a quiet one. If your calls regularly run past 90 minutes, you need Business, not Pro.

Best for: individuals, interviewers, students, and small teams who want a live transcript and the lowest annual entry price.

Skip it if: a visible bot in client calls is a problem, or your meeting load regularly exceeds 1,200 minutes a month on a solo plan.

Fireflies: the best AI note taker for teams

What it does best

Fireflies is built for the archive, not the moment. Its notetaker bot records, transcribes, and summarizes calls, and afterwards you can search across your whole team's meeting history, filter by speaker, and review conversation intelligence — talk time, topics, and sentiment patterns — on the Business plan. Transcription covers 100+ languages, which matters for teams that do not all work in English. Paid plans also push notes into the tools teams already live in, including CRM workflows for sales calls.

Pricing, storage, and the second meter

| Plan | Price | Storage | Notes | |---|---|---|---| | Free | $0 | 400 minutes per team | Limited AI summaries | | Pro | $10/seat/month billed annually, $18 monthly | 8,000 minutes per seat | Unlimited transcription and summaries | | Business | $19/seat/month billed annually, $29 monthly | Unlimited | Conversation intelligence, team analytics | | Enterprise | $39/seat/month, annual only | Unlimited | SSO, HIPAA options, admin controls |

Two catches deserve plain language. First, the free plan changed: accounts created on or after September 1, 2026 get only a few transcribed meetings unless they turn on Auto-join, which sends the bot to calendar meetings — so read the free tier as a test, not an archive. Second, Fireflies runs a separate AI-credit meter for features such as AskFred and AI Skills: plans include a small team allotment — 20 credits on Free and Pro, 30 on Business — and extra packs cost more, starting at $5 for 50 credits. The headline seat price is not always the whole bill.

Best for: sales teams, agencies, and managers who need to search and coach from many calls, not just their own.

Skip it if: you are a solo user who will never search a team archive — you are paying for collaboration you will not use. Our guide to Prompt Engineering Guide: 5 Patterns That Fix Bad AI Output helps whichever tool you pick, because the quality of the questions you ask your transcripts decides how useful the archive becomes.

Granola: the best AI note taker if you hate bots

What it does best

Granola takes the opposite approach to the other two: no bot joins the call. Its desktop app captures your computer's audio directly, so nobody on the call sees an extra participant named as a notetaker. You jot rough notes in its notepad during the meeting, and the AI uses the transcript to turn those jottings into structured notes afterward. It works across Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams because it listens on your device, not inside any one platform.

Pricing: no minutes, a history limit instead

| Plan | Price | Meetings | History | |---|---|---|---| | Basic | $0 | Unlimited | Last 30 days in the app | | Business | $14/user/month | Unlimited | Unlimited | | Enterprise | $35/user/month | Unlimited | Unlimited, plus SSO and admin controls |

Granola does not meter minutes at all, which makes it the simplest pricing here. The trade is history: on free Basic, you can capture as many meetings as you like, but the app only shows the last 30 days of notes. Business at $14/user/month, billed monthly, removes that limit and adds integrations such as Notion, HubSpot, and Zapier, plus API access. There is no annual discount to chase on Business — annual billing is an Enterprise-contract feature.

Best for: founders, consultants, and anyone in sensitive or client-facing calls where a recording bot changes the room, plus heavy meeting schedules that would burn a minute cap.

Skip it if: you need a shared, searchable archive across a large team's calls, or a bot that can join a meeting you are not personally attending.

The bot question, in plain English

Three practical points sit behind the marketing for all three tools:

1. Consent is your job, not the tool's. Recording and transcription laws vary by place, and some require every participant's consent. A visible bot announces itself; a bot-free tool like Granola does not — which makes telling people yourself more important there, not less. Announce it, whatever you use.
2. A bot can attend without you; device capture cannot. Otter and Fireflies can be sent to a call on your calendar even if you skip it. Granola captures from the device of the person running it, so someone present has to be the recorder.
3. "Unlimited" always has a second line. For Otter it is the per-meeting cap. For Fireflies it is storage on Pro and the AI-credit meter. For Granola it is the 30-day history window on the free plan. Read the second line before you pay.

How to choose: by who you are

If you work solo and your calls are long

Start on Granola Basic for $0 if bots bother you or your clients, and upgrade to Business at $14/month when you need notes older than 30 days. If you prefer a live transcript while you talk, Otter Pro at $8.33/month billed annually is cheaper — count your monthly meeting minutes first.

If you run a team that lives on calls

Buy Fireflies Business at $19/seat/month billed annually. Unlimited storage, conversation intelligence, and a searchable shared archive are the features a team actually feels. Budget for AI-credit packs if your team leans on AskFred and automated skills.

If you record interviews, lectures, or in-person conversations

Otter is the natural pick: live transcription, speaker identification, and mobile recording for conversations that never happen on Zoom at all. Pair it with the workflow in AI for Content Creation: How to Repurpose One Idea Into a Week of Content if those transcripts become articles, posts, or briefings afterward.

Bottom line

The best AI note taker in 2026 is not one tool — it is a match. Granola at $14/month wins for bot-free notes with no minute anxiety. Fireflies at $19/seat/month on Business wins for teams that search and learn from their calls. Otter Pro at $8.33/month billed annually wins on live transcription and price, as long as your minutes fit its cap.

Trial all three on the same real meeting before you pay for any of them: same call, same speakers, then compare the summary, the action items, and whether every name came out right. The tool that gets your meetings right — not the one with the longest feature list — is the one worth keeping. If meeting notes feed a wider follow-up system, our tutorial on 10 ChatGPT Workflows That Actually Save You Time shows how to turn them into drafts, tasks, and briefs without extra manual work.