7 Best Otter.ai Alternatives (2026), by What You Need

Otter.ai is built for live meetings: it joins Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, transcribes as people talk and writes up notes. People usually start looking for an alternative when they hit one of three walls: the free plan's limits, uploaded recordings rather than live calls, or the need to work on a transcript with other people.

Every price and limit below comes from each company's own website, checked in October 2026. Plans change often, so confirm before you buy.

Where Otter.ai stands today

• Free (Basic): 300 transcription minutes a month, up to 30 minutes per conversation, and 3 audio or video file imports in total.
• Pro: $8.33 per user per month billed annually, or $16.99 billed monthly. Business is $19.99 annually or $30 monthly.
• Languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese.

Those 3 lifetime imports are the limit most people hit first if they work with recorded interviews or podcasts instead of live meetings.

Quick picks

• Best for recorded interviews and podcasts your team reviews: Notetracks
• Best when accuracy has to be near perfect: Rev (human transcription)
• Best pay-as-you-go: Sonix
• Best for newsrooms and media teams: Trint
• Best cheap meeting notetakers: Notta, Fireflies.ai
• Best for editing audio and video by transcript: Descript

1. Notetracks: best for recorded interviews and podcasts your team reviews

Notetracks isn't a meeting bot. It's built for recordings you've already made: interviews, podcast episodes, video and voice memos that someone needs to check, quote from or approve. Upload audio or video (MP4 included), or import it from Google Drive or Dropbox, and click Transcribe.

• A timestamp on every line: click a line and playback jumps to that moment, so checking a quote takes seconds.
• Speaker labels and search: set the language and number of speakers before it runs, then search the transcript for any word.
• Team review built in: collaborators comment on the transcript or the waveform, on a single moment or a whole range, reply in threads and mark notes resolved. They comment for free.
• Notes back in your editor: export comments as markers into Pro Tools, Adobe Audition, Audacity or Hindenburg.
• Price: transcription is included in the Pro and Team plans, and you can try any plan free for 7 days.

Best for: podcast producers, journalists and agencies who transcribe recordings and need other people to review them.

2. Rev: best when accuracy has to be near perfect

Rev offers both AI transcription and transcription by people.

• Human transcription: $1.99 a minute, which Rev describes as 99%+ accurate and delivered in 12 hours or less, with rush and timestamp options.
• Free AI plan: 45 AI minutes a month for one user, English only.
• Essentials: $25.49 per seat per month billed annually, or $29.99 monthly, with 5,000 AI minutes per user per month in English and Spanish.

Best for: legal, research and publishing work where every word has to be right.

3. Sonix: best pay-as-you-go transcription

Sonix is an AI transcription, translation and subtitle tool with an editor in the browser.

• Pay as you go: $10 an hour, billed to the second. Subscriptions start at $25 a month for 5 hours.
• 54+ languages, speaker labels and timestamps, a custom dictionary and version history on every plan.
• A 30-minute free trial with no credit card.

Best for: occasional transcription without a monthly commitment.

4. Trint: best for newsrooms and media teams

Trint focuses on journalists and media teams who edit transcripts together.

• Unlimited transcription (fair use) in 50+ languages and translation into 70+.
• A caption editor for subtitles, and real-time collaborative transcript editing on the Team plan.
• Price: Pro from $79 per seat per month billed annually ($100 monthly). Team, for 2 to 5 people, is $69 per seat per month billed annually ($90 monthly).

Best for: editorial teams with a steady volume of interviews.

5. Notta: best low-cost meeting notetaker

Notta records and transcribes Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Webex meetings, with or without a bot.

• Free: 120 minutes a month, up to 3 minutes per conversation, and 50 file uploads a month.
• Pro: $8.17 a month billed annually, or $13.59 monthly, with 1,800 minutes a month.
• 58 languages, real-time transcription, speaker identification and bilingual transcription.

Best for: meeting notes on a budget.

6. Fireflies.ai: best for teams who live in meetings

Fireflies.ai records, transcribes and summarizes meetings, and lets you search across them.

• Free: unlimited transcription for meetings recorded by the shared bot, the Chrome extension and the mobile app, with limited AI summaries and 400 minutes of storage per team.
• Pro: $10 per seat per month billed annually, or $18 monthly.
• English is its main language, with 100+ other languages in beta.

Best for: sales and customer teams who want every call searchable.

7. Descript: best for editing audio and video by transcript

Descript transcribes your recording and lets you edit the audio or video by editing the text.

• Remote recording, filler-word removal and Studio Sound cleanup.
• Transcript export as DOCX, TXT, RTF, Markdown or HTML, plus SRT and VTT captions.
• Price: free plan; paid plans from $16 a month billed annually ($24 monthly).

Best for: creators who want to cut the episode, not just read it. See our Descript vs Riverside comparison.

How to choose

• You mostly transcribe live meetings: stay with Otter, or try Notta or Fireflies.ai.
• You transcribe recordings that others review: Notetracks, so the transcript, the comments and the approvals live in one place.
• You need near-perfect accuracy: Rev's human transcription.
• You transcribe now and then: Sonix, pay as you go.
• You want to edit the recording itself: Descript.

Read more about transcription with timecodes, or how to transcribe voice memos.

Try any Notetracks plan free for 7 days →