Fathom vs Fireflies vs Otter: 2026 Pricing Compared

The problem is choosing one. Three names dominate the category: Fathom, Fireflies.ai, and Otter.ai. All three join Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams calls as a visible bot, and all three have free plans. Under the surface, their pricing models and limits are very different, and the wrong pick can quietly cost your team hundreds of dollars a year or cut off mid-meeting when you hit a cap.

Here is how the three actually compare in 2026, based on their current published pricing.

What does each free plan actually include?

The free tiers are where the differences show up fastest.

Fathom has the most generous free plan of the three. You get unlimited meeting recordings, transcription, and storage across Zoom, Meet, and Teams. The catch, added in a recent pricing change, is that advanced AI summaries are now capped at 5 calls per month. After that, you still get a transcript and a basic chronological summary, just not the polished version with templates and action items.

Fireflies takes the opposite approach. Every plan, including Free, comes with unlimited transcription and unlimited AI summaries in over 100 languages. Instead, Fireflies limits storage, exports, and extras. On the free plan, storage is a small shared pool for your whole team, you cannot download or export transcripts, and there is no video recording. Regular users fill the storage cap within weeks.

Otter is the most restrictive. The free Basic plan gives you 300 transcription minutes per month with a hard 30 minute cap per conversation, which means a standard one hour meeting gets cut off halfway. You also get just 3 file imports for the lifetime of the account, not per month. It is enough to evaluate the product, not enough to rely on.

If you only take one thing from this section: for a solo user who wants a genuinely free notetaker for a few important calls a month, Fathom's free plan is the strongest deal in the category.

What do the paid plans cost in 2026?

Here are the current per-user prices, using annual billing first since that is what every vendor advertises. Monthly billing is meaningfully more expensive across the board.

Plan level	Fathom	Fireflies	Otter
Free	$0, 5 advanced summaries/mo	$0, unlimited summaries, small storage cap	$0, 300 min/mo
Entry paid	Premium: $16/mo annual ($20 monthly)	Pro: $10/mo annual ($18 monthly)	Pro: $8.33/mo annual ($16.99 monthly)
Team tier	Team: $15/user annual ($19 monthly), 2 seat minimum	Business: $19/user annual ($29 monthly)	Business: $19.99/user annual ($30 monthly)
Top tier	Business: $25/user annual ($34 monthly)	Enterprise: $39/user annual	Enterprise: custom pricing

A few details that matter more than the sticker prices:

• Otter Pro still has caps. Even paying, you get 1,200 transcription minutes per month and a 90 minute limit per meeting, plus 10 file imports per month. When you hit the monthly cap, transcription stops until the cycle resets. Otter Business removes the minute cap and extends meetings to 4 hours, but it carries a 5 seat minimum.
• Fireflies uses AI credits. Some advanced features, like its AskFred assistant, draw from a limited credit pool on top of your subscription. Storage is also tiered: only Business and above are truly unlimited.
• Fathom offers a 90 day money-back guarantee on paid plans, which is unusually generous for this category. Its Business tier adds CRM field sync for Salesforce and HubSpot, which is the main reason sales teams upgrade.

Which tool fits which job?

Choose Fathom if you are a solo professional or a small sales team. The free plan covers light use on its own, Premium at $16 per month unlocks unlimited AI summaries, and the Business tier's automatic CRM logging can save a sales rep hours of manual data entry every month. The 90 day refund window also makes it the lowest risk trial.

Choose Fireflies if your team is multilingual or meeting-heavy. Unlimited transcription and summaries on every tier, support for 100+ languages, and deeper conversation analytics on the Business plan make it the best fit for teams that live in calls all day and want to search across them later. Pair it with Zapier or a similar automation tool and you can push meeting outcomes straight into your task manager or CRM.