Otter.ai alternatives: pick by what you are replacing

Otter.ai bundles three things that people treat as one product:

1. A live, word-for-word transcript and captions while the call happens.
2. A searchable archive of every meeting, queryable after the fact.
3. Post-call summaries and action items.

Most people who want to leave only use one of the three. Work out which, and the replacement is obvious. Pick by "best overall" and you will end up with something that drops the part you relied on.

If you use Otter for live captions

Keep it, or look at accessibility tooling rather than the meeting-assistant category. Otter is unusual in typing the conversation out in real time; Granola, Fireflies and Fathom are not built for that, and neither is Savvy. Savvy shows short guidance cards, not a running transcript.

If you use Otter for the team archive

You want another bot-based product, because the archive comes from a participant joining every scheduled call and the vendor storing it. Fireflies is the usual move for CRM automation and broad language coverage; Fathom is the usual move for cost. Both keep the shape of what Otter does: something joins, the vendor holds the record, the team searches it.

Bot-free tools cannot replace this, and any list that tells you otherwise is selling you something. Savvy included: it is a single-person Mac app with no shared archive.

If you use Otter for post-call summaries

This is the crowded part of the market and almost everything competes here. The real decision is whether you still want a bot in the call. Granola captures desktop audio with nothing joining, which also covers in-person meetings and phone calls, and produces notes afterwards.

If what you actually wanted was help during the call

Otter's own answer to this is a real-time meeting agent, and at time of writing it sits on the higher tiers. If that is the feature you are paying the subscription for, it is worth naming what you want from it, because "real time" covers two very different products:

• Real-time transcript. Text of what was just said. Useful, and Otter is strong at it.
• Real-time guidance. A suggestion about what to say next, grounded in something other than the conversation itself.

Savvy is the second kind, and only the second kind. Before the call it reads documents you point it at, read-only, and builds a brief. During the call it surfaces a card when the other side asks a question, when someone touches a red line from your brief, or when you press Advice, and every card cites the file behind it. There is more on the triggers in How Savvy decides when to speak, and on the wider distinction in What "real-time meeting assistant" actually means.

The cost and data comparison people skip

Otter prices a bundle: transcription, storage, and its own model, per seat per month, with a free tier that caps minutes and per-meeting length.

Savvy unbundles all three, which is better on some axes and worse on others.

• The app is free and MIT-licensed. No tier, no seats.
• Transcription is your own Deepgram or AssemblyAI key, billed per audio minute by them. See Deepgram or AssemblyAI.
• The model is whatever Claude Code or Codex CLI is signed in to on your Mac, billed on your existing plan. See Bring your own model.

So there are two accounts to set up before the first recommendation, and nothing to cancel later. Whether that is an upgrade depends entirely on whether you would rather manage providers or pay a seat.

On data: with Otter, the vendor holds the recording, the transcript, and the summary under its terms. With Savvy, your transcription provider receives the audio under your key, your model provider sees excerpts and recent turns under your plan, and the files stay on your Mac with local audio and transcripts deleted after 30 days. Neither is "private" in the absolute sense. They put the trust in different places, and the privacy section shows exactly where ours goes.

One thing to settle before you switch away from a bot

A bot in the participant list tells everyone a recording exists. Bot-free capture does not, so the disclosure becomes your job. It is a two-sentence habit, and Recording a meeting: consent and etiquette has the wording, along with the reason it matters more in all-party consent jurisdictions.