Fathom vs Fireflies vs Otter: what each bot-free mode gives up

On August 13, 2026, a federal judge in California let most of the claims in In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation past a motion to dismiss. That is not a finding that Otter broke any law. It means the plaintiffs pleaded well enough to keep going.

A Fathom vs Fireflies vs Otter comparison written a year ago would have turned on summary quality and CRM sync. What separates the three products today is what happens when you switch the bot off. All three now ship a bot-free capture mode, and each one gives up something different to do it.

So what follows is a loss matrix built cell by cell from the three vendors’ documentation, with every price re-checked against the vendor’s own pricing page on August 20, 2026.

The bot used to be the whole product

Two years ago these tools all worked the same way. You connected a calendar and a named participant showed up in the call: Fireflies.ai Notetaker, OtterPilot, Fathom Notetaker, sitting in the roster where the client could see them. Some clients asked for it to be removed. A few asked about it before agreeing to the call at all.

Most Fathom vs Fireflies vs Otter write-ups still describe that world. Granola’s pricing post says “Two of the four tools here (Otter and Fathom) capture meetings by joining as a visible participant”, and it carries a March 20 byline with no year attached to it. Index.dev’s comparison, bylined November 26, 2025, never mentions capture mode at all and still prints Otter Pro at “$10/mo”, nearly seven dollars under the live monthly price. Granola is a competitor selling against all three, so its framing has a job to do. Index.dev is not, and its page is simply old.

What shipped since is more interesting. Fireflies released a desktop app that records through your computer’s system audio with no Notetaker in the call, “Available on Windows 10+ and MacOS 12+”. Otter shipped a Mac and Windows desktop app, and its own desktop page says: “Now you can record any conversation without a bot across Slack Huddles, Zoom, Google Meet, and in-person.” Fathom’s changelog lists bot-free transcript only and bot-free audio plus transcript as live on Mac, with bot-free video held back as a limited beta for Zoom.

What each tool gives up when the bot leaves

Switching the bot off costs something in every one of these implementations, and the costs differ enough that they should probably decide which tool you buy. Every cell below comes from vendor documentation read on August 20, 2026.

Fireflies is the blunt one. Its help article states that “System audio mode does not save separate audio or video files”, that speakers “appear as Speaker 1 / Speaker 2 instead of named participants”, and that Sales Assist, which needs the bot in the call, is unavailable. Nowhere does Fireflies document a way to retrieve call audio captured in this mode. Record a renewal call bot-free, and three weeks later, when you want the forty seconds where the buyer described their budget cycle in their own voice, there is no documented path back to it. You also cannot flip from system audio to bot recording once the call has started, so that decision gets made before anyone joins. Set against that, the platform list in the row above is by a distance the widest here, and Perplexity Comet and ChatGPT Atlas are on it and on nobody else’s.

Fathom trades the other way. Its bot-free page describes “a bot-free beta that drops the bot but keeps speaker attribution and mute acknowledgment, two details most bot-free tools don’t preserve”. The mechanics live in a separate desktop help article: Transcript Only, Audio Only or Audio + Video as capture types, a Capture Now control in the app tray and in-meeting panel, and a Consent Chat Message setting under Compliance that “Sends/shows a consent message in the meeting chat (when enabled).” If that survives contact with a real call it is the strongest bot-free implementation of the three. The limits are ones Fathom prints itself: bot-free is Mac only, and bot-free video is a limited beta for Zoom, with Fathom “granting additional Fathom users access to this functionality every day”.

Otter gets the shortest paragraph because Otter documents the least. The botless desktop app runs on Mac and Windows, which neither competitor manages today, and then the trail goes cold: the pricing page still sells the product as joining “Zoom, MS Teams, and Google Meet” and never surfaces the botless option, and the help centre article that would answer the speaker-names question returns a 403 to anything that is not a browser. For a calendar-connected account the Notetaker bot is still the default path. I went through the same pattern in more depth in my roundup of Otter alternatives that skip the bot.

If the reason you want bot-free is that an extra attendee in the participant list makes client calls awkward, Craqly runs as a desktop app rather than as a meeting guest, and stealth is on every tier including the free one, which is not true of anything in the table above. Starter is $0 with 20 credits a month. The paid tiers run $38 for 180 credits, $59 for 420 and $99 for 780, or $19, $39 and $69 respectively if you pay for a year up front, which takes 20% off. Hold one thing in mind before you line those numbers up against the price table below: a credit is one minute of live session and credits reset every month, which is a different unit from the per-seat monthly pricing all three of these run on.

So which of the three should you run bot-free?

Run Fathom bot-free if you are on a Mac and you need to know who said what, since it is the only one of the three whose vendor claims speaker attribution survives, and take Otter’s botless desktop app instead if your team is split across Mac and Windows and you can live with not knowing in advance what it keeps. Fireflies is the harder call. Its bot-free mode makes sense only where the transcript is the whole deliverable and nobody is going to want the recording, which covers a narrower set of meetings than it sounds like. Internal standups qualify. Anything a colleague who missed the call might later need to hear does not, and by the time you find that out the media file was never created.

There is also a pure volume answer. Otter meters minutes, and Otter Pro’s allowance reads “1200 in-app recording minutes” a month, so a heavy recorder runs out of road at roughly twenty hours of calls. Fathom and Fireflies do not meter recording that way, which for a full-time seller is the difference between a plan that works and a plan that stops working in the third week. My note-taking app roundup works through the usage maths in more detail.

Fathom vs Fireflies vs Otter: 2026 pricing, checked August 20

Every number below came off the vendor’s own pricing page on August 20, 2026. Two of the pages I checked while writing this are wrong by enough to change a purchase.

Two things on the live pages get restated wrong everywhere else. Otter Business is “Unlimited meetings + in-app recordings”, which is a narrower unit than unlimited transcription minutes, and it still carries a four-hour cap per conversation and a three-meeting concurrency limit. Fathom Premium is $20 monthly or $16 on annual billing, where Granola’s post still has it at “~$15/user/month (annual) or $19/user/month (monthly)”. Fathom’s Free tier is the genuine outlier here: unlimited recordings and transcriptions at $0, with bot-free capture named on the tier itself. I compared that free tier against paid alternatives in my Craqly versus Fathom breakdown.

The part none of the pricing pages mention

Back to August 13. In In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation, No. 25-cv-06911-EKL, the Northern District of California granted Otter’s motion to dismiss in part and denied it in part. Claims under CIPA, ECPA, BIPA, unjust enrichment and the UCL survived. CFAA, CDAFA, the Washington Privacy Act and, for all but one plaintiff, common-law privacy claims were dismissed. The line that travelled is the holding that Otter can be treated as a third-party eavesdropper rather than an invited participant, because it “independently collects, retains, and uses communications for its own commercial purposes”. These are allegations that cleared a pleading test. Nobody has been found liable of anything and the merits have not been heard.

What it has to do with bot-free capture is simple enough. The visible bot in the participant list was, in practice, the clearest recording notice in the room. Take it out and the notice has to come from a human, which means you. Fireflies puts that in writing on its own desktop page: “You’re responsible for complying with local recording laws and notifying participants”, alongside a promise that “A Fireflies indicator will be present to let participants know when the notetaker is on.” Fathom’s desktop app can post a consent message into the meeting chat once you switch the setting on. Fireflies’ automatic chat notice is narrower than it looks, covering Microsoft Teams Business accounts and nothing else.

I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice. The practical version: California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Florida and Washington are all-party consent states, participants in GDPR jurisdictions add another layer on top, and “the bot was not visible” has never been a defence anywhere. Say out loud that you are recording. Dropping the bot removes one awkward attendee from the call and nothing else.

What I could not check

Gaps I would rather print than paper over.

• Otter’s help centre returns a 403 to anything that is not a browser, so everything above about Otter’s botless mode comes from otter.ai/desktop and the pricing page. I do not know whether Otter keeps speaker labels or retains a media file with the bot off. If that decides your purchase, open the help article yourself before you buy.
• Neither Fireflies’ pricing page nor its help article says which paid plans include bot-free desktop recording. The pricing page lists “Desktop app (Download)” on every tier, which is suggestive and is not the same thing as a statement. Fathom is the only one of the three that states the gating on the pricing page itself.
• Fathom’s Mac-only limit has a short shelf life. The changelog says the full Fathom experience is coming to PC. If you are reading this well after August 2026, check it before you trust that row of the matrix.

An opinion I will defend while accepting it might be wrong: Fireflies’ bot-free mode is the weakest of the three despite being the most finished. Losing speaker names hurts more than losing the video, losing both at once turns a sales call into something you cannot coach from, and Fireflies’ own Sales Assist stops working in the mode. On Fireflies specifically I would keep the visible bot and take the awkwardness.

Pick the capture mode before you pick the tool. Most people run it the other way round and end up on a $19 seat that drops speaker names on the one call that actually mattered.