Otter vs Notta vs Fireflies vs tl;dv: 2026 Pricing & Plans

The quick answer

If your meetings are consistently scheduled video calls and you want a shared, searchable record, look at Fireflies.ai and tl;dv — both send a bot into the call and both are built around a team library rather than one person's recordings. If you also record in person, on phone calls, or on platforms nobody's bot supports, Otter.ai and Notta are the more flexible pair. And if the recording's job is to be rewatched and clipped rather than read, tl;dv is designed around that habit — though it is also the most expensive entry tier of the four, at $29 per seat per month billed monthly.

One thing to settle before you compare prices: these four are not interchangeable, and the free tiers in particular meter four completely different things. Confirm the plan that matters to you on the vendor's own page before you enter a card.

The four side by side

The most misleading thing in this category is a table that gives you a number without saying a number of what. Otter and Notta meter transcription minutes. Fireflies leaves transcription unlimited and meters storage instead. tl;dv leaves both unlimited and meters AI features. Those are four different products wearing similar-looking numbers, so every row below names its unit.

Prices checked 2026-08-18. All figures USD, taken from each vendor's own pricing page.

Reading across a row does not give you an equivalence. The clearest example is in the first two rows: Notta's free plan advertises 120 monthly minutes, which sounds merely smaller than Otter's 300 — but its 3-minute cap per conversation means it cannot record a real meeting at all, at any point in the month. The monthly pool is not the constraint; the per-conversation cap is.

Pricing: what a seat actually costs

Prices checked on 2026-08-18, read from each vendor's published pricing page. This is the fastest-decaying section of the article. Tiers get renamed, allowances get trimmed and annual discounts get restructured, often without an announcement. A quarter after that date, treat these as a starting point for your own check rather than a quote.

Three things distort per-seat comparisons, and all three are live in this group.

The annual discount is not uniform, and it reorders the ranking. Billed monthly, Otter Pro is the cheapest entry tier at $16.99 and tl;dv Pro the dearest at $29 — a 71% spread. Billed annually, Otter Pro falls to $8.33 and Notta Pro to $8.17, while tl;dv Pro falls only to $18. The gap widens rather than closes, so "which is cheapest" has a different answer depending on how you pay.

One vendor doesn't publish a monthly price at all. Notta's pricing page shows annual billing only: $8.17/seat/month for Pro and $16.67/seat/month for Business, presented as $97.99 and $199.99 billed annually with a 40% discount already applied. There is no monthly figure to compare against Fireflies' $18 or tl;dv's $29. Putting Notta's $8.17 in a monthly column next to those is a false comparison, which is why the table above keeps the two billing cycles in separate rows.

Otter shows two different prices for the same plan. Its page displays $16.99/user/month for Pro alongside a promotional $8.49, and $30 for Business alongside a discounted $24. The list prices are used throughout this article. A promotional price is accurate only until the promotion ends, and an article quoting one is wrong from that day forward without anyone noticing.

Free plans, compared honestly

The four free tiers are not smaller versions of each other. They restrict along entirely different axes:

• Otter Basic — 300 transcription minutes a month, capped at 30 minutes per conversation. Workable for a few short meetings a week. Imported files draw on a separate 300-minute monthly allowance rather than the same pool.
• Notta Free — 120 transcription minutes a month and 50 file uploads, but capped at 3 minutes per conversation. Treat this as a demo of the interface, not a usable free tier for meetings.
• Fireflies Free — unlimited transcription and unlimited AI summaries, limited instead to 400 minutes of stored audio per team. You can transcribe everything; you cannot keep much of it.
• tl;dv Free — unlimited video recordings and unlimited transcription in 30+ languages, with the ceiling on AI instead: 10 meetings with AI notes and 10 Ask AI queries included. Of the four, this is the free tier that most resembles the paid product, because the recording itself is not rationed.

The pattern worth noticing: a free plan that caps recording tells you honestly what it is. A free plan that caps storage or history lets you record freely and then quietly withholds what you recorded. Both are legitimate; they just fail differently, and they fail at different points in your month.

Paid tiers in full

• Otter.ai — Pro at $16.99/user/month or $8.33 billed annually, with 1,200 transcription minutes per user per month and a 90-minute ceiling per meeting. Business at $30/user/month or $19.99 annually, with unlimited transcription and up to 4 hours per meeting. Enterprise is quote-only. Imported-file transcription is metered separately: 300 minutes a month on Basic and Pro, 6,000 on Business and Enterprise.
• Notta — Pro at $8.17/seat/month billed annually, with 1,800 transcription minutes a month, up to 5 hours per recording and 100 file uploads. Business at $16.67/seat/month billed annually, with unlimited transcription and 200 uploads. Enterprise is custom and starts at 51 seats — the only advertised seat floor in the group.
• Fireflies.ai — Pro at $18/seat/month or $10 annually, with 8,000 minutes of storage per seat and 20 AI credits. Business at $29/seat/month or $19 annually, with unlimited storage and 30 AI credits. Enterprise at $39/seat/month, annual billing only, with 50 AI credits. Transcription is unlimited on every tier including free; storage and AI credits are what you are buying.
• tl;dv — Pro at $29/seat/month or $18 annually. Business at $39/seat/month or $29 annually, carrying a "no usage-based AI fees" commitment. Enterprise is custom. tl;dv is the most-searched pricing of the four and also the highest: its entry tier costs more billed annually ($18) than Fireflies' Pro costs billed monthly ($18), and more than double Notta's annual Pro.

That last comparison is the one to sit with if budget is the deciding factor. It is not a reason to rule tl;dv out — you are buying unlimited video and a free tier that is genuinely usable — but the premium is real and it is not small.

Fireflies.ai vs tl;dv

The closest match-up in the group, and the one readers search for most. The real choice is between a searchable knowledge base and a video library.

Fireflies leans knowledge base. Its centre of gravity is the transcript: workspace-wide search, topic tracking, automatic push of summaries into a CRM or a Slack channel. Transcription is unlimited on every tier, and what you pay for is how much you keep and how much AI you run over it. If your reason for recording is that someone three weeks from now needs to find what a customer said about pricing, that is the retrieval job Fireflies is built for.

tl;dv leans video. Its centre of gravity is the recording: scrub the call, mark a moment, cut a clip, share it with the transcript attached. That matters where the artefact gets forwarded — a sales call sent to a product manager, a user interview sent to a designer. A transcript quote loses tone; a thirty-second clip does not.

On cost the two diverge sharply. Annually, Fireflies Pro is $10/seat/month against tl;dv Pro at $18; at the business tier it is $19 against $29. Fireflies is meaningfully cheaper at every published tier. What tl;dv gives back is a free plan you can actually run a team on for a while, and no usage-based AI fees at the Business tier — a real consideration if AI usage is the thing that would otherwise creep.

Practically: Fireflies if the output is notes and CRM hygiene, tl;dv if the output is evidence someone else needs to watch. Both send a bot, and both struggle when meetings happen somewhere unusual.

tl;dv vs Otter.ai

This pairing is a question about how you record, not what you get afterwards.

Otter is the most flexible capture tool of the four. It can join a call, but it can also run on a phone or laptop and record the room — a one-to-one at a desk, a workshop, a lecture, a call on a platform with no integration. That makes it the safer choice when your meetings are not uniform. Its constraint is the meter: even on Pro you have 1,200 minutes a month and a 90-minute ceiling per meeting, so a day of back-to-back long sessions runs into a wall that tl;dv users never see.

tl;dv is narrower and deeper. It assumes a scheduled video call on a supported platform and, in exchange, does not ration the recording at all — unlimited video and unlimited transcription from the free tier upward. It is a worse fit the moment your meeting is in a room rather than on a screen.

So: Otter if your recording situations vary, tl;dv if they are consistently on video and the recording gets rewatched. On price, Otter is the cheaper seat at every comparable tier — $8.33 against $18 annually at the entry tier. On headroom, tl;dv does not meter what Otter meters. Which of those matters depends entirely on how many hours a week you actually record.

Transcription accuracy, and what actually drives it

Be careful with accuracy numbers in this category. Of the four pricing pages checked for this article, none published an accuracy figure attached to a stated test condition — tl;dv's Business tier lists "premium transcript quality" as a feature, which is a plan name, not a measurement. Where you do find a percentage in vendor marketing, treat it as a claim: a figure without a stated corpus, audio condition, accent mix and speaker count cannot be compared against another vendor's figure.

What actually separates these tools in real meetings is mostly not the underlying model.

Audio path. A tool receiving a clean per-participant stream from the meeting platform has a structural advantage over one recording a room through a laptop microphone. This is the largest single factor, and it favours the bot-based tools on video calls and Otter or Notta everywhere else.

Speaker separation. Knowing who said something is where these products visibly differ. When two people talk over each other, all four degrade, but differently — some merge the overlap into one speaker, some split it into fragments. There is no clean number for this, and anyone quoting one is guessing.

Custom vocabulary. Product names, internal acronyms and unusual surnames are what make a transcript unusable. Each tool offers some form of custom dictionary, but availability is tiered — tl;dv, for instance, places custom vocabulary on its Business plan rather than Pro. If your meetings are jargon-heavy, check which tier unlocks it before you compare entry prices, because that can move the real cost by a tier.

Accent and language. All four handle clear North American English best. Performance on other accents and on non-English audio varies more than the marketing implies, and a language being supported does not mean it is supported equally well. tl;dv states 30+ languages on its free tier; the other three publish language coverage outside their pricing pages, so compare those claims at the source rather than trusting a round number in a comparison table.

The honest summary: on a clean video call with two or three people taking turns, all four produce a transcript you can work with. On a six-person crosstalk-heavy call in a room, all four produce something you will need to edit. Choose on workflow, not on a decimal point.

How recording works, and why the bot matters

Fireflies and tl;dv are bot-first: a named participant joins the call, appears in the participant list, and records. Otter and Notta can work that way too, but both also capture audio directly from the device, and Notta additionally handles uploaded files — 50 a month on Free, 100 on Pro, 200 on Business. That distinction has three practical consequences.

Consent. A visible bot in the participant list is itself a disclosure. Direct device recording is silent by default, which puts the whole notification burden on you. Depending on where you and your participants sit, recording without clear notice may not be lawful, and some jurisdictions require every party to consent. Check your own obligations; this is not a product question.

Guests and external calls. Some organisations block unknown participants, or the host has to admit the bot from the waiting room every time. If you routinely dial into other companies' meetings, a bot-based tool will occasionally just fail to get in. Device-side recording sidesteps that.

Unsupported platforms. If your calls happen somewhere the vendor has not integrated — a phone call, a dial-in bridge, a niche conferencing tool, an in-person meeting — a bot has nothing to join. This is the clearest reason to pick Otter or Notta over Fireflies or tl;dv.

There is a cultural cost too. A bot in the participant list changes how candid people are. Sales teams recording their own calls usually accept that trade. Teams running sensitive internal discussions often do not.

When a dedicated recorder makes more sense

Everything above assumes the meeting happens on a screen, on a platform one of these vendors integrates with. A lot of recording does not. Site visits, workshops, one-to-ones at a desk, interviews in a noisy room, phone calls on a handset — a meeting bot has nothing to join, and a laptop running transcription software is an awkward object to put on a table between two people.

That is a different product category rather than a cheaper version of the same one. A dedicated hardware recorder captures audio independently of any platform, keeps working when the wifi does not, and does not appear in anyone's participant list. What it does not give you is the thing this article is mostly about: automatic joining, a shared team library, CRM push, and search across every call the company has had.

Worth saying plainly, since this article is published by a company that sells one: a hardware recorder is not a competitor to Fireflies or tl;dv on their own ground. If all your meetings are scheduled video calls, buy the software. The hardware question only arises for the meetings that fall outside that — and for most teams, that is a real fraction of the total rather than none of it.

Who should choose which

Otter.ai — mixed recording situations and the cheapest paid seat of the four at $8.33 annually. Watch the 1,200-minute monthly allowance and the 90-minute per-meeting ceiling on Pro. Not for you if the priority is a shareable video artefact.

Notta — heavy file-upload workflows, or teams that can commit to annual billing, where Pro at $8.17/seat/month is the lowest published price in the group. Ignore the free tier for meetings; the 3-minute cap makes it a demo. Not for you if you need a monthly billing option, since none is published.

Fireflies.ai — a searchable team-wide record wired into the tools you already run, with unlimited transcription on every tier including free. Budget for storage rather than minutes. Not for you if a substantial share of meetings happen off the supported platforms.

tl;dv — recordings that get rewatched and reshared, and the only free tier here that does not ration recording. You pay for it: $18/seat/month annually is roughly double Fireflies and Notta at the same tier. Not for you if meetings are frequently in a room rather than on a screen.

None of them yet — if you have not checked whether your organisation already licenses a notetaker inside its existing meeting platform. Several do, and it is a cheaper first stop.

FAQ

How much is tl;dv per seat per month? Pro is $29 per seat per month billed monthly, or $18 per seat per month billed annually. Business is $39 monthly or $29 annually and includes a no-usage-based-AI-fees commitment. Enterprise is custom, quote only. The free tier is $0 with no card required. Checked 2026-08-18; confirm on tl;dv's own pricing page before purchase.

Which free plan is actually usable? tl;dv's, for most people — unlimited recording and transcription, with the limit falling on AI features instead (10 meetings with AI notes, 10 Ask AI queries). Fireflies' free tier is next, with unlimited transcription but only 400 minutes of stored audio per team. Otter's 300 monthly minutes at 30 minutes per conversation covers a light week. Notta's 3-minute per-conversation cap rules it out for meetings entirely.

Which is cheapest? Billed annually, Notta Pro at $8.17 and Otter Pro at $8.33 per seat per month, effectively tied. Billed monthly, Otter Pro at $16.99, because Notta publishes no monthly price. tl;dv is the most expensive on either cycle.

Which is the most accurate? There is no credible answer. No independent head-to-head benchmark under identical conditions is known to exist, and none of the four pricing pages publishes an accuracy figure with a stated test condition. Audio quality, speaker overlap and custom vocabulary matter more than the choice between these four.

Can I move my transcripts from one to another? Not as a one-click migration. Each supports some set of export formats, and what survives an export — speaker labels, timestamps, highlights, summaries — differs. Verify portability in the vendor's own documentation before committing years of history to a platform.

Do I have to let a bot join the call? With Fireflies and tl;dv, for live meetings, effectively yes. Otter and Notta let you record device audio instead. If bots are blocked in your organisation, that narrows the field immediately.

Monthly or annual? Annual is cheaper on all four, but by very different margins — Otter roughly halves, tl;dv drops about a third. It also locks you into a product whose pricing and allowances change frequently. If you are still evaluating, pay monthly for the first cycle.

Sources

Every price and plan limit above was read from the vendor's own published pricing page on 2026-08-18. Comparison articles and aggregator listings are not acceptable sources for a plan or a price, and none were used.

• Otter.ai pricing — https://otter.ai/pricing
• Notta pricing — https://www.notta.ai/en/pricing
• Fireflies.ai pricing — https://fireflies.ai/pricing
• tl;dv pricing — https://tldv.io/app/pricing/

Language coverage, export formats and retention policies are documented outside these pricing pages and are not quoted here as figures, except where a vendor states them on the pricing page itself. No independent comparative accuracy benchmark of these four under identical audio conditions is cited, because none is known to exist; if one is identified later, this section should be revised.