Three AI notetakers, two ways of getting into your call

On 20 August 2026 I had three pricing pages open in three tabs, and the thing that separated Fireflies vs Otter vs Granola wasn’t summary quality. It was whether a bot walks into your meeting wearing a name and an avatar. That sounds cosmetic. It isn’t. How a tool gets the audio decides who finds out you’re recording, which calls you can use it on at all, and what you do when a client asks you to turn it off.

So this comparison is built around capture method first, price second, features a distant third. Every price below came from the vendor’s own pricing page on 20 August 2026, and I’ve said which page. Prices move. Check the date stamp on any number you read about these three, including mine.

Who joins the call, and who doesn’t

Fireflies is bot-first and completely open about it. Its pricing page tells you how to start: you invite fred@fireflies.ai to a live meeting, or let it autojoin your calendar meetings. The bot has a name, and one of the FAQ entries on that same page is “Can I customize the Fireflies Notetaker bot name?”, which tells you something about how often people want it to look like less of an intruder. The bot isn’t the whole story, though. The free plan’s feature list on that page also includes a desktop app, mobile apps for Android and iOS, and a Chrome extension, so there are other routes into audio if you go looking for them.

Otter runs both models at once, and the pricing page’s own feature grid says so. One row reads “Joins Zoom, MS Teams, and Google Meet to automatically write and share notes”. A few rows up, the free Basic column carries buttons to download for Mac and for Windows, plus iOS and Android apps and “300 monthly transcription minutes”. You can send the bot, or you can hit record on your own machine and never add a participant. That flexibility is real, and it’s also why people get confused about what Otter is doing on any given call.

Granola picked one side. A section on its homepage is titled “Humans in the room, not bots”. It captures your computer’s audio while the app runs in the background, so the participant list stays exactly as long as the number of humans on the call. There’s no invite step, no calendar connection required to get a bot in, and nothing for the host to admit from a waiting room.

That last bit matters more than it sounds. A bot has to get past whatever the host has configured, and hosts configure a lot: waiting rooms, restrictions on who can join, admin policies that block third-party apps on the corporate account. When the bot gets stuck outside, you find out afterwards, usually when you go looking for a transcript that was never made. Local capture doesn’t have that failure mode, because it never asks anyone’s permission to be in the room. It has different failure modes, which I’ll get to.

The three capture models in one line each

• Bot joins as a participant. Everyone sees it. It attends whether or not you do.
• Local audio capture. Nobody sees it. It only works while you’re there with the app running.
• Both, switchable. More options, more chances to pick the wrong one under time pressure.

Fireflies vs Otter vs Granola pricing, as listed on 20 August 2026

A few things about that table that are easy to misread. Fireflies quotes its annual figure by default with a save-up-to-44% badge on the toggle, so the $10 and $19 numbers are the discounted ones and the $18 and $29 are what you pay month to month. Otter does the same thing, with its own annual discount on both paid tiers. Granola shows one number per plan and I didn’t see a monthly-versus-annual toggle on its pricing page at all, which makes it the easiest of the three to budget for and the hardest to squeeze. It also publishes only three plans, which is why Enterprise fills both the team row and the top row of that table at the same $35.

Cheapest paid seat goes to Granola at $14, if you’re paying monthly. Cheapest annual seat goes to Otter at $8.49. That gap closes or reverses depending on how many people you’re buying for, because these are per-seat prices and a seven-person team pays seven times whatever you picked.

What the bot actually costs you

The bot has one enormous advantage and people rarely credit it: consent is automatic. A named participant appears in the list, and everyone on the call can see it. No one has to remember to say the sentence. If your legal team cares about two-party consent, or you sell into regulated industries, that visibility is doing real work for you and you’d have to build it by hand otherwise.

Then there’s the cost side. The bot attends meetings you’re late to and meetings you skip, which is either the feature or the problem depending on the week. It shows up in a customer’s Zoom before you do. On an early sales call, that extra row in the participant list is a thing the buyer has to process before you’ve said hello, and I’ve never found a good way to make it invisible in that moment other than mentioning it first and moving on quickly.

There’s a second cost that shows up later. Bot-based tools tend to be built around a shared library, because the bot is a company asset and the recordings pile up somewhere central. That’s the point of them. It also means a decision you make in week one about who can see what turns into hundreds of transcripts by month six, and untangling that is nobody’s favorite Tuesday. Set the sharing defaults before you roll it out, not after.

Some meetings simply won’t take it. Interviews, one-to-ones, calls on someone else’s locked-down conferencing setup, anything where a stranger’s bot in the room changes the temperature. That’s the gap bot-free tools fill, and it’s the same gap that Craqly works in: it runs on your desktop rather than joining as a participant, stealth mode is on every plan including the free Starter tier at 20 credits a month, and one credit buys one minute of live session, resetting monthly. Those numbers are from the Craqly pricing page on 20 August 2026. If you want a longer list of bot-free options, we keep one at Otter alternatives with no bot.

Where bot-free capture breaks

I don’t want to oversell the no-bot model, because it fails in ways that are boring and predictable.

You have to be present. Granola captures your computer’s audio, so if you’re not on the call with the app running, there is no recording and no notes. A bot doesn’t need you at all. For teams that use notetakers as attendance insurance for overlapping meetings, that difference is the whole decision, and no amount of note quality fixes it.

It’s also machine-bound. Local capture happens on the laptop the app is installed on, which means a call taken from a phone in a car, or a conference room system, or a colleague’s machine, produces nothing. Otter hedges this by shipping mobile apps and a bot and a desktop build. Fireflies hedges it too. Granola runs on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android according to its homepage, which covers more ground than the Mac-only reputation it still carries around.

And bot-free tools are quieter about themselves in a way that cuts both directions. Nobody in the meeting knows you’re taking AI notes unless you say so. That’s exactly what some people want and exactly what makes others uncomfortable, and I don’t think there’s a technical answer to it. It’s a policy question your team should settle out loud once rather than per call.

The most common failure I’d expect from local capture is duller than any of that. You forget to open the app. There’s no calendar invite doing the remembering for you, no bot sitting in the meeting as a reminder that notes are being taken, just a habit you either have or don’t. Bot-based tools solve this by attending everything, which is why people who’ve tried both often describe the bot as annoying and keep paying for it anyway.

Which one fits which team

Pick Fireflies if the meeting record belongs to the company rather than to you. It’s built around a shared archive, its free tier gives unlimited transcription while capping storage at 400 minutes for the whole team, and at $10 per seat annually you get a bot attending everything with a searchable pile at the end. Sales teams and anyone with a CRM to feed will get on with it.

Pick Otter if you genuinely need both modes and you’ll actually use both. The free tier’s 300 minutes a month is a fair starting point for solo users who just want transcripts, and Pro adds up to 90 minutes a meeting with 1,200 in-app recording minutes. The catch is that you’re managing two capture paths, and two-path tools have a habit of recording the wrong thing.

Pick Granola if your calendar is back-to-back and you’d rather the call stayed just people. Notes stay private until you share them. $14 a seat is competitive if you’re paying monthly, and the free tier is a fine way to test whether local capture holds up on your hardware before anyone pays. Our roundup of Granola alternatives covers what to do if it doesn’t.

What I couldn’t verify

Plenty. I read pricing pages and product pages, not the products, so I have no opinion here on which one writes better summaries, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who claims a clean winner on that without showing you transcripts side by side. I didn’t test how Granola handles a meeting where you join by phone. I didn’t check whether Otter’s bot behaves differently on Teams than on Meet. Fireflies lists AI credits on every tier, 20 on Free and Pro, 30 on Business, 50 on Enterprise, and I can’t tell you from the pricing page alone how fast a normal week burns through them. If you need those answers, the free tiers exist for exactly this, and a fortnight of real calls will tell you more than any comparison table will. There’s a wider list of tools in our 2026 note-taking app roundup if none of these three fit.

The question I’d actually ask before picking is not which tool takes the best notes. It’s whether you want the people on your calls to know. Answer that, and two of these three fall away on their own.