Otter's agent joins the meeting. This one never does.

Buy Otter if the notes have to exist without you. Its meeting agent can be scheduled to attend Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet on its own, its archive is searchable from a browser on any machine you happen to be near, and it runs on the web, on Mac and Windows desktops, on iOS and Android, and as a Chrome extension. There is a free tier with 300 transcription minutes a month, so you can find out whether you like it without paying anything.

Buy Coii AudioNotes if you would rather no third machine were listening. It is $19 once, macOS 13 or later, and every stage happens on your own laptop — the capture, the transcript, the speaker separation and the minutes, including with the Wi-Fi off. Nothing is uploaded, so nothing has to be trusted with. The cost of that is everything in the paragraph above: one platform, no scheduling, no web archive, no account to log into from somebody else's computer.

Those are the two products in full. The rest of this page is the evidence, the arithmetic and the parts of Otter that are genuinely better.

Prices, checked today

Everything below was read from Otter's own site on 3 September 2026. Prices in this category move, so check the pricing page before you take a number from a comparison — including this one.

Basic includes 300 transcription minutes a month and three lifetime file imports. Pro adds 1,200 in-app recording minutes, ten imports a month and meetings up to ninety minutes. Business is unlimited meetings and imports, four-hour meetings, and the ability to sit in three calls at once. Enterprise adds SSO, SCIM, domain capture, API and webhooks, and lists HIPAA compliance as an add-on.

Coii AudioNotes is $19 USD, paid once, covering three of your own Macs, with updates included and nothing that renews. Thirty days of everything first, no card and no account.

The participant nobody invited

This is the difference that shows up in the room rather than in a settings screen, and unlike most claims in this category it is not a stylistic one.

Otter's home page describes it plainly: schedule your AI Meeting Agent to automatically join all your Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet meetings. That is the design, and for a lot of work it is exactly the right one — the notes get taken whether or not you remembered, whether or not you were free, whether or not you were there.

It also means a participant appears. Everyone on the call sees it in the attendee list, and somebody usually asks. In an internal stand-up that is nothing. In a first conversation with a client, a candidate explaining why they are leaving their job, or a call where the other side has their own recording policy, it is a moment you have to spend, and occasionally a moment you lose.

Coii AudioNotes has no bot, because it has nothing to send anywhere. It records what the Mac is already playing and what your microphone is already hearing. The call has the same number of people in it after you press record as it had before.

Worth saying clearly, because the category is loud about this: not having a bot is not unique to us. Granola works the same way and says so on its home page, Fathom has shipped bot-free capture on the Mac, and Wispr Flow's notetaker captures locally too. Against Otter it is a real difference. Against several other tools it is not, and a page claiming otherwise is one click from being disproved.

The table

Rows where Otter is ahead are marked as such, because you will find out on your own within about a minute.

Where Otter is the better product

It works when you are not there. A scheduled agent covers the meeting you double-booked, the one you joined nine minutes late, and the one a colleague attended on your behalf. Coii AudioNotes has no answer to any of those. It records the Mac it is installed on, while you are using it, and that is the whole of its scope.

It is everywhere. Web, two desktop platforms, two phone platforms and a browser extension. If you want to reread this morning's call on a train with your phone, Otter does that today and this app will never do it. macOS 13 or later is the entire supported list here, and it is not a roadmap.

It is a real team product. Business adds administration, and Enterprise adds SSO, SCIM, domain capture, an API and webhooks. Coii AudioNotes is one person on up to three of their own Macs — there is no console, no seat count, nobody to provision and nothing to revoke when somebody leaves.

The free tier is a genuinely low-friction way in. Basic is $0 with 300 transcription minutes a month, and 300 minutes is five hours, which for many people is a normal week's meetings. You can run that for a year and never open a credit card. Our answer is a thirty-day trial of the complete app — better if you want to test everything, worse if you want to decide slowly.

Imports. Otter takes existing audio and video files, three of them ever on Basic, ten a month on Pro, unlimited on Business. If you are holding a folder of old recordings that need transcribing, that is a job Otter is built for and this app is not.

Where Coii AudioNotes is the better product

Nothing leaves the Mac. Not the audio, not the transcript, not the summary, not a copy for indexing. There is no server of ours for it to reach. The only network traffic the app makes at all is activating your licence and a clock check when it launches — no analytics, no crash reporting, not even an update check.

That is not a setting either product could flip to match the other. Otter is a hosted service by construction; that is how the web archive, the scheduled agent and the cross-device access work at all. Ours is a Mac application that happens to include everything it needs.

The minutes are written offline, not owed to you later. The language model that turns the transcript and your typed notes into a summary is bundled with the app, so it runs on the machine. On a train with no signal, in a basement meeting room, on a plane: the recording finishes and the minutes are there.

$19 once, against a per-seat month that never ends. Otter Pro at $16.99 a month is about $204 a year, or $99.96 on annual billing. Business is $360 a year monthly, $239.88 annually. Those are reasonable prices for a hosted service with real running costs — a subscription is the honest shape for that business. It is simply a different deal from ours, which has a first year and no second one.

There are no minutes to run out of. Every Otter tier below Business meters something: transcription minutes, recording minutes, imports, meeting length. Coii AudioNotes has no counter anywhere in it, because the only resource being consumed is your own disk and your own processor. A four-hour workshop is not a plan question.

The training clause, quoted rather than characterised

This is the row people care most about and the one most often written from inference rather than from the document, so here is the document.

Otter's privacy policy lists, among the uses of what it calls meeting and uploaded information, "training our proprietary AI technology on de-identified audio recordings and on transcriptions (which may contain Personal Information)". That is their wording, it is on their site, and it is worth reading in full and in context rather than through anybody's comparison table — including this one.

What we will not do is tell you what that means for your obligations. If you are recording clinical conversations, privileged legal discussions or anything under an NDA with a named counterparty, the person who answers that question is your own compliance officer or your own counsel, and they will want the policy, not a summary of it.

What is checkable on our side is narrower and easier: nothing is uploaded, so there is no clause about what happens to it afterwards. Coii AudioNotes claims no certification — not HIPAA, not SOC 2, not ISO 27001 — and it would be a different kind of dishonest to imply that "it never leaves the Mac" is the same thing as an audit. It is not. It is a fact about where the bytes go, which is usually the first thing the audit asks about.

Speaker separation, honestly

Both apps label speakers. Both do it well in the case everybody demos: two people, taking turns, each on their own device with a decent microphone. That is also, in fairness, most calls.

Both get harder in the same places. Three or more voices sharing one channel. Two people finishing each other's sentences. Somebody dialling in from a car. Four colleagues around one laptop at the end of a boardroom table. No product in this category has solved that, and a comparison implying one of them has is selling you something.

What two-track capture buys is narrower than it sounds and more useful than it looks: your own microphone is a separate file from everything the call carried, so the app never has to work out whether the person speaking was you. That is one voice removed from the guessing permanently. It does nothing for the four people sharing a microphone at the far end.

Practical advice regardless of which you buy: names attach to voices far more reliably when somebody says a name in the first minute. "Thanks for joining, Yuki" is worth more than any setting either app offers.

What switching actually costs

Leaving Otter is mostly not a technical problem.

Your archive stays with Otter. There is no importer here and it would be dishonest to hint that one is coming. What you can do is export what matters while your subscription is still live — that is worth doing before you cancel anything, wherever you end up going. A cancelled account is the wrong moment to discover how the export works.

The habit is the real cost. Otter's agent attends without being asked. This app expects you to start it, which is a small friction several times a day for a week and the most common reason somebody drifts back. If you have any meeting that genuinely must be captured whether or not you remembered, that is not a habit problem, it is a requirement, and Otter has it.

What you gain on day one is that the archive is a folder. Recordings, transcripts and minutes are files in a directory you chose, which whatever backup you already run already covers, and which no pricing change can move behind a tier. Nothing reads them but the filesystem, so an expired licence would not make them unreadable.

What neither of them does

Worth knowing before an evening of trials, because the disappointments are symmetric. Neither is a video product: these are audio, transcripts and notes, not a searchable library of faces. Neither does live captioning for a room. Neither does real-time translation for a live audience. And neither answers the consent question — the rules for recording a conversation differ by country and by state, one-party and all-party consent are genuinely different regimes, and nothing on this page should be read as advice about your particular call. Ask somebody qualified. What the two tools change is the narrower question of who else ends up holding the audio, and on that they differ completely.

On an older Mac

A comparison table hides this and it matters. Otter does the heavy work on its own servers, so a 2019 Intel MacBook and a current Apple Silicon machine give much the same experience; the network is the bottleneck, not the laptop.

Coii AudioNotes does the transcription and the summary on your machine, so the machine matters. On Apple Silicon the transcript keeps pace with the conversation. On an older Intel Mac it works and the summary takes longer once the call ends. If your Mac predates Apple Silicon, spend the thirty days on a real meeting rather than a two-minute test — that is precisely the case where trying beats reading.

Local processing is a trade, not a free win. You get the audio never leaving and the offline capability, and you pay in your own CPU time and battery.

Which one to buy

Buy Otter if meetings have to be captured without you in them; if you read notes on a phone or a browser as often as on a Mac; if a team needs administration, SSO or an API; if you have a folder of old recordings to transcribe; or if starting at $0 and deciding slowly suits you better than a month with everything unlocked.

Buy Coii AudioNotes if you work on a Mac and only a Mac; if the recordings are the kind that should not be uploaded at all; if a visible participant in a client call is a cost rather than a convenience; if you need finished minutes offline rather than queued; and if $19 once fits better than a seat that renews.

There is a third answer worth stating: for one meeting a week, Voice Memos and five minutes of typing is free and sufficient. These tools start earning their price around the fourth or fifth call a day, or the first time nobody could remember what was agreed and it mattered.

Two other comparisons worth reading if Otter is not the only tool on your list: Fireflies, which is built around a shared team archive, and tl;dv, which now offers both a bot and a desktop recorder. The library has the rest. Or download it — thirty days, every feature, no card and no account, and the price only comes up afterwards.