Otter vs Fireflies vs Fathom
Three AI notetakers that sit in your meetings — which one, and what happens to the recording?
Users rate Otter.ai highest of the 2 we can score
Otter.ai sits at 4.78★ from 73k reviews (#7 of 14 tools we can rank), against Fireflies.ai at 4.82★ from 5k reviews (#8). That is a verdict on the app people use, not on the work it produces — we have not tested either on a task suite.
Ranked on app-store ratings, weighted by review count — the same ranking every tool page on this site uses
What each one looks like
Side by side
Every cell is either a fact with the source and the date we read it, or a sentence saying we hold no verified answer. There is no third option: nothing here is filled in from memory, and a row only appears when at least one of these tools has something real in it.
Swipe the table sideways for the other columns.
| Measure | Otter.ai | Fireflies.ai | Fathom |
|---|---|---|---|
| What users rate itApp-store ratings, ranked by rating weighted by review count — so a 4.88 from three million reviews outranks a 4.9 from four thousand. | 4.78★73k reviews on App Store · #7 of 14 we can rankApple App Store (iTunes Lookup API) · 17 Aug 2026 | 4.82★5k reviews on App Store · #8 of 14 we can rankApple App Store (iTunes Lookup API) · 17 Aug 2026 | No app-store listing we can score |
| What people are sayingFrom our own 90-day sweep of Reddit, X, YouTube, Hacker News and the web. The count always travels with the word. | Positive3 of the 3 posts that took a side (85 scanned) | Too few opinions to call — 1 of 67 posts took a side | Negative2 of the 3 posts that took a side (61 scanned) |
| Trains on what you typeThe vendor's own published answer. No line renders unless we found the sentence word-for-word in a document we fetched. | We could not verify it either way | The company explicitly states that it does not use your personal information or meeting content to train its AI models.fireflies.ai ↗ | They use your meeting data to train their artificial intelligence models, but you can turn this off in your account settings.fathom.video ↗ |
| How long they keep it | They keep your information for as long as they need it to fulfill their purposes or comply with the law.otter.ai ↗ | They keep your content until you delete it, though they may keep backup copies for legal reasons.fireflies.ai ↗ | They keep your personal information for as long as they deem necessary to fulfill their purposes or comply with laws.fathom.video ↗ |
| Last app update we sawThe date on the vendor's own app-store listing when we last read it — a rough read on whether the product is still moving. | 11 Aug 2026Apple App Store (iTunes Lookup API) · 17 Aug 2026 | 22 Jul 2026Apple App Store (iTunes Lookup API) · 17 Aug 2026 | No app-store listing to read |
Each one on its own
It sits in your meetings, writes the notes, and lets you search everything said later.
In their words: “Your AI notetaker is now also your Conversational Knowledge Engine” — otter.ai ↗ · read 10 Aug 2026
It records and transcribes your meetings, then writes summaries and action items automatically.
In their words: “The #1 AI Assistant For Your Meetings” — fireflies.ai ↗ · read 10 Aug 2026
It takes notes during your video calls so you can pay attention, with the summary ready when you hang up.
In their words: “Fathom summarizes your meetings so you can focus on the conversation.” — fathom.ai ↗ · read 10 Aug 2026
“Honest Review of Fathom AI in 2026 - No Fireworks, Just Meh - tl;dv”
a negative post from our 90-day sweep — read it ↗
What we could not compare
- No tested score for Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai and Fathom — we score a tool only when it names the model it runs.
- No verified price for Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai and Fathom — their pricing pages render figures in a browser, so we hold none.
- We could not find a quotable sentence about training data for Otter.ai.
These gaps close by themselves: the scanner re-reads every vendor pricing page and app-store listing on a schedule, and this page rebuilds from whatever it found. How the testing works →
Questions people ask
Otter.ai or Fireflies.ai or Fathom — which should I choose?
Users rate Otter.ai highest of the 2 we can score. That is based on app-store ratings, weighted by review count — the same ranking every tool page on this site uses. Otter.ai sits at 4.78★ from 73k reviews (#7 of 14 tools we can rank), against Fireflies.ai at 4.82★ from 5k reviews (#8). That is a verdict on the app people use, not on the work it produces — we have not tested either on a task suite.
Which of Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, Fathom is cheapest?
We hold no verified price for any of them: each publishes its figures only to a browser, so we link to their pricing pages rather than quote a number we could not read.
Do Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, Fathom train on what you type?
Fireflies.ai: The company explicitly states that it does not use your personal information or meeting content to train its AI models. Fathom: They use your meeting data to train their artificial intelligence models, but you can turn this off in your account settings. Each of those answers is quoted word-for-word from the vendor's own published document, linked on this page with the date we read it. For Otter.ai we could not find a sentence to quote, so we make no claim.
How do you test these?
We have not run a task suite on these. We score a tool only when it names the model it runs, because a coding assistant or notetaker is a wrapper around a model — so this page compares what we can verify instead: prices from vendor pricing pages, app-store ratings, our 90-day sweep of public opinion, and each company's own written data policy.
No vendor pays for placement, position or inclusion, and the code that produces the verdict above cannot see which outbound links earn us anything. How we make money →
More head-to-heads: ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini · Cursor vs GitHub Copilot vs Windsurf · Lovable vs Replit vs v0 · Grammarly vs Jasper vs Copy.ai vs Notion AI · Perplexity vs NotebookLM
Every tool head-to-head → · Every tool we track → · Methodology →