Notta vs Otter: Check the Fine Print on Both Free Tiers

Notta vs Otter: the short answer

Notta and Otter promise the same thing, an AI notetaker that transcribes your meetings, and their paid annual pricing sits within pennies of each other. The free tiers are where they actually diverge, and in opposite directions. Otter's free plan caps you at 300 minutes a month, in chunks up to 30 minutes per conversation. Notta's free plan allows more total minutes to look generous, 120 a month, but cuts every single recording off at 3 minutes, no matter how much of that monthly budget is left.

A free notetaker that hangs up on you 3 minutes into a standup is a different tool than one that lets a 30-minute call run its course, even when both quote a monthly-minutes number in the same rough neighborhood. That fine print, not the marketing pages, is what decides which one actually works for you.

Both companies' own marketing pages make this harder to see than it should be. Notta's homepage advertises a bigger free-minutes number than its own pricing page delivers, and the top-ranking third-party comparisons either flatten the differences into a single "similar tools" verdict or crown a winner using a number nobody independently tested. The rest of this post sticks to what each company's own pricing page actually states, checked live, with the free-tier caps that decide most real usage left in.

Notta, verified

Notta.ai is an AI meeting notetaker with bot-based recording for Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, and Webex, plus a Chrome extension, mobile apps, and a bot-free desktop app, per Notta's pricing page.

Plan	Price	Minutes	Per-recording cap	File uploads
Free	$0	120/month, no carryover	3 minutes	50/month
Pro	$8.17/mo, billed annually at $97.99/yr	1,800/month	5 hours	100/month
Business	$16.67/mo, billed annually at $199.99/yr	Unlimited	5 hours	200/month
Enterprise	Custom, starting from 51 seats	Custom	Custom	Custom

Notta does not publish its month-to-month (non-annual) prices in the page's underlying code, only the annual numbers above render. Two third-party review sites list Notta's monthly toggle at $13.49 for Pro and $27.99 for Business. We could not verify those directly, so treat them as secondhand until you check the toggle yourself at checkout.

Notta's own pages do not agree with each other on the free plan's real size. The pricing page says 120 free minutes a month. Notta's own comparison page against Otter leads with 200 free minutes, labeling 120 as the allowance for non-US accounts, yet the pricing page itself, loaded from the US, still says 120. And that comparison page never mentions the 3-minute-per-recording cap at all. Take the pricing page's 120 minutes as the real number: it is the page built to sell the plan, so it has no reason to round the free tier down.

AI summaries are metered separately from transcription minutes: 10 a month on the free plan, 100 on Pro, and 200 on Business, per the same pricing page. Notta also offers a 7-day trial of the Business tier and a 50% discount for education accounts, and Enterprise pricing starts from 51 seats.

Where Notta genuinely differs from Otter beyond the numbers: it records meeting video on the Business tier, supports Webex on top of Zoom, Teams, and Meet, and offers bilingual transcription with up to 4 free uses a month on every tier, including free, per its pricing page. One user comparing several transcription tools described Notta's results as inconsistent and said its mobile app can be buggy, a caveat worth weighing alongside the numbers above.

Otter, verified

Otter.ai is the more established name in this comparison, joining calls through a bot, transcribing them live, and turning the result into a summary with action items, per otter.ai. It claims more than 40 million users on its own homepage.

Plan	Price	Minutes	Per-conversation cap	Imports
Basic (free)	$0	300/month	30 minutes	3 lifetime
Pro	$16.99/mo, or $8.33/mo billed annually	1,200/month	90 minutes	10/month
Business	$30/mo, or $19.99/mo billed annually	Unlimited meetings	4 hours	Unlimited
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	Custom	Custom

All figures per otter.ai/pricing. Business also allows joining 3 meetings at once and gets prioritized support; Otter's pricing page does not advertise a free trial for any paid tier, so the free Basic plan is the only way to test it before you pay.

On Google Play, Otter's Android app carries a 4.7 star rating from roughly 40K reviews and more than 5 million downloads, per the Play Store listing. We are not printing an accuracy percentage or a language count for Otter here: every number in circulation for both traces back to unsourced marketing or a third party's own untested guess, not an independent measurement.

The sponsored review problem on this SERP

One of the top-ranking "Notta vs Otter" comparisons is not independent editorial. Its byline belongs to a company that describes itself, in its own author bio, as affiliate marketing software for SaaS companies, and the page's underlying code carries markers identifying it as paid placement through the publishing site's business blogging program. It reads like a first-person tested review, and it concludes that Notta wins.

That piece is also the traceable origin of the "98.86% accuracy" figure that keeps showing up around this comparison. It is Notta's own marketing number, restated in the sponsored piece as though it had been independently tested. We do not print it as fact here, for exactly that reason: nobody but Notta has published how it was measured.

The same piece also gets a fact wrong in a way that would mislead anyone shopping by mobile use. It describes Otter's mobile app as a "limited mobile web interface." Otter ships native iOS and Android apps, and its Android app alone carries a 4.7 star rating from roughly 40K reviews and 5 million-plus downloads, verified above.

The pattern is easy to spot once you know to look for it. A comparison that opens by crowning a clear winner, cites an accuracy percentage with no methodology attached, and never discloses who paid for the placement is marketing wearing an editorial byline. Check whether the page discloses payment, check whether its numbers match the vendor's own pricing page, and treat any unsourced accuracy percentage as a claim, not a measurement.

Which fine print actually bites you

The right pick depends on how you record, not on which brand sounds bigger.

If you mostly...	What happens on the free plan	Verdict
Record real meetings or calls in one sitting	Notta cuts the recording off at 3 minutes no matter what; Otter lets it run to 30 minutes	Otter's free tier can actually cover a meeting; Notta's cannot
Record many short check-ins, each under 3 minutes	Neither per-recording cap trips; the total monthly budget decides it, and Otter's 300 minutes is more than double Notta's 120	Otter's free tier lasts longer either way
Import recordings you already have, like old voicemails or interviews	Otter allows only 3 file imports for the plan's entire lifetime; Notta allows 50 uploads a month, though its pricing page lists the 3-minute cap as a general limit on the free plan, not one scoped only to live recording	Notta accepts more files; Otter's per-conversation cap is more forgiving for anything under 30 minutes, it just runs out of import slots fast

Once you pay, the picture flips in one place worth knowing: Notta's Pro and Business tiers allow up to 5 hours per recording, longer than Otter Pro's 90-minute cap and Otter Business's 4-hour cap. The free-tier fine print and the paid-tier fine print do not favor the same company.

Where InstantOwl fits

Full disclosure first: InstantOwl is our product, and this blog belongs to it. Neither Notta nor Otter is built for what InstantOwl does. Both are meeting notetakers, built around a bot that joins a scheduled call and a transcript shaped like a meeting recap. InstantOwl is built for the voice note you record about your own thoughts, walking to your car or at your desk mid-idea, not for transcribing other people's conversations. One recording turns into organized notes and tasks instead of a wall of transcript text. InstantOwl is currently free to use.

If meetings are genuinely your job, our full Otter review covers its pricing, company history, and how to turn off its auto-join behavior in more depth than fits here. If you are choosing between a meeting notetaker and a personal capture app for the same "voice notes" search, our Otter vs Voicenotes comparison covers that different fork in the decision. And if your real question is simpler than either of these tools, just turning a recording into text, our guide to transcribing audio to text covers that path on its own.

Related reading

• Otter review: full pricing, company history, and how to turn off auto-join.
• Otter vs Voicenotes: meetings versus personal capture, compared head to head.
• Transcribing audio to text: the simpler path if you just need one recording turned into text.