Otter.ai Review 2026: Plans, Limits and Who It Fits

Our Otter.ai review for 2026, in short: Otter.ai is an AI notetaker that transcribes Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet calls, summarizes them and lets you search or chat across your meetings. On its pricing page, Basic is free (300 transcription minutes a month, 30 minutes per conversation), Pro is $16.99 per user a month on monthly billing or $8.33 on annual billing, and Business is $30 list ($24 on the monthly toggle during a promotion) or $19.99 on annual billing. It suits people who sit in many meetings and want searchable notes; the free caps are tight, and a 2025 consent lawsuit means you should tell participants you are recording. Ratings are 4.4 on G2, 4.4 on Capterra and 4.1 on Trustpilot.

What Otter.ai does

Otter is a transcription and meeting-notes service. Based on its pricing page and homepage, here is what it includes:

• Meeting capture: a notetaker that joins Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet. The homepage says it can be scheduled through Google Calendar, and that the desktop app records Mac or Windows audio "without bots joining the call". iOS and Android apps and a Chrome extension are also listed.
• Transcripts and summaries: live transcription, speaker identification, and automated summaries with action items and outlines. The comparison table names English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese for transcription; the homepage says only "multiple languages".
• Otter AI Chat: questions across one meeting or many, capped by plan at 20, 50 or 200 queries a month per user.
• Templates and workflows: standard templates on Basic, advanced ones on paid plans, custom AI workflows from Business.
• Integrations: Zapier, Salesforce and HubSpot from Pro (the page footnotes user limits on the CRM syncs), Dropbox file sync, Zoom cloud-recording sync, and an Otter MCP server so other AI tools can reach your meeting notes.

We have not tested any of it, so what follows describes plans and limits, not transcription quality.

Otter.ai pricing in 2026

Source: otter.ai/pricing, captured October 13, 2026 with the Monthly and Annual toggles; the page says prices are in USD. Prices checked 2026-10-13. Quoted wording is from the page.

Reading the numbers: the annual figures are monthly equivalents. The page labels Pro annual "save 51%" and Business annual "save 33%", which matches $8.33 against $16.99 and $19.99 against $30. The $24 Business figure on the monthly toggle is a promotion marked "20% off for 3 months+"; the page does not say what the price becomes afterwards, and a footnote reads "Offer valid for first-time subscribers only" without saying which item it covers. As an illustration of our own arithmetic, a five-person Business team pays about $100 a month at $19.99 per user on annual billing, or $150 a month at the $30 list price on monthly billing.

Discounts and trials: the FAQ offers students and teachers with a .edu email 20% off Pro: $6.67 a month billed at $79.99 a year, or $13.59 a month on monthly billing. The pricing page mentions no free trial; the homepage says Business is "from $19.99/month per user" with a 7-day free trial, a vendor claim.

Limits that matter: Basic counts live meetings and file imports against one 300-minute pool, and a conversation stops at 30 minutes. By our arithmetic, four one-hour meetings a month use 240 of those 300 minutes. Pro raises the pool to 1,200 minutes and the cap to 90 minutes per conversation.

What we could not confirm: any published transcription accuracy figure (none appears on the pages we read); what Business costs after the promotion; and whether the 7-day trial applies to Pro.

What users say: ratings on review sites

Source: the three review-site pages linked above, read on October 13, 2026. G2 blocks scripted fetches, so its figures came through a page-reading tool that reads the page's structured data; spot-check them in a browser. Counts change daily.

The three sites sit between 4.1 and 4.4. Trustpilot's distribution is split: 58% five-star and 29% one-star. Trustpilot also notes that Otter has not invited reviews recently. Trustpilot's own summary of 199 recent reviews says reviewers often praise the support team and time savings, while some say automated transcripts are hard to follow and need heavy editing, and a smaller number mention strict subscription limits and unexpected charges. That is Trustpilot's summary, not our finding.

Consent and privacy: read before you record

In August 2025 a class-action suit was filed against Otter in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. As NPR reported, the plaintiff alleges that Otter's notetaker can join meetings without participant consent and records conversations to train its transcription service, and that its de-identification process does not guarantee anonymity. These are allegations; we did not verify the case status or outcome. NPR notes that Otter's privacy policy says it gets "explicit permission" for training use and de-identifies audio. Whatever the result, tell everyone on a call that you are recording and check the recording laws where your participants are. This is general information, not legal advice.

Pros and cons

Who should buy it, and who shouldn't

Good fit: consultants, managers, students and sales teams who spend hours in video calls and want searchable transcripts. Start on Basic, see whether the 300-minute pool covers a normal month, then move to Pro on annual billing if it does not.

Skip it if: your calls are sensitive and participants have not agreed to be recorded; you need long recordings on a free plan; you mainly want to edit audio or video from a transcript (see Descript below); or you need a published accuracy guarantee. Check first whether any single call exceeds 90 minutes and whether your clients allow third-party notetakers.

Alternatives

If you want to edit the recording as well as read it, see our Descript review. For wider options, our best AI transcription tools roundup covers dedicated transcription services. Teams already in Notion can compare the meeting notes bundled into Business in our Notion AI review. Two other reviews in this series fit alongside Otter: our Synthesia review for turning scripts into avatar videos, and our Rytr review for drafting follow-up emails and posts.

Verdict

Otter.ai in 2026 is a meeting notetaker with a usable free tier and two paid personal-to-team plans: Pro at $16.99 per user a month ($8.33 on annual billing) and Business at $30 list ($19.99 on annual billing). Its strengths are broad meeting-platform support and searchable summaries; its weak points are the small free pool, the unexplained promotion and the open consent questions. Ratings of 4.4 on G2 and Capterra and 4.1 on Trustpilot are solid. Try Basic on your own calls, check how much editing the transcripts need, then pay.

How this page was made: AI tools drafted the structure and wording from the vendor and review-site pages linked above, all captured on October 13, 2026. Figures should be re-checked against those pages before you rely on them.

Frequently asked questions