Otter vs Zoom AI Companion

What Otter.ai does

Otter is one of the biggest independent names in meeting transcription, with more than 35 million users and roughly $100M in annual revenue as of 2026. OtterPilot, its bot, joins your Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams calls through calendar sync, transcribes live with speaker labels, and produces a summary with action items minutes after the call ends.

Around that core, Otter has built a deep product: AI Chat that answers questions across your whole meeting history, integrations with Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, and Notion, a suite of sales and recruiting agents launched in 2025, and a desktop app added in December 2025 that can record without the bot. Its mobile apps also record in-person conversations, something AI Companion has no answer to.

The free Basic plan includes 300 transcription minutes a month with a 30-minute cap per conversation. Paid plans start at $8.33 per user per month billed annually.

What Zoom AI Companion does

AI Companion is Zoom's native assistant, included at no extra cost with every paid Zoom Workplace plan (Pro starts around $13 to $16 per user per month). It is not available on the free Basic tier. Because it is built into the platform, there is no bot in the participant list: when the host turns it on, everyone sees a pop-up banner and a persistent sparkle icon instead.

The output is genuinely useful for a bundled feature: meeting summaries with action items that draw on audio, screen shares, and chat, in-meeting questions like "what did I miss?", and drafting help across Team Chat, email, and Whiteboard. The 3.0 release, generally available since November 2025, added agentic tasks and cross-app search, still at no extra charge. Transcription covers 36 languages in meetings.

Outside Zoom, the story changes. Covering a Google Meet or Teams meeting requires the Custom AI Companion add-on at $12 per user per month, and it does that job by sending a visible bot into the call, exactly the thing native AI Companion avoids.

At a glance

Details checked in July 2026. Both companies change plans and limits periodically, so confirm on the Otter pricing page and the Zoom pricing page before deciding.

The cost question

"Free" is doing subtle work in Zoom's pitch. AI Companion costs nothing extra, but it rides on a paid Zoom plan, and the person who needs that plan is the host. If you attend meetings other people run, whether a summary exists depends entirely on their plan and their settings. On a company account, an admin who disables AI Companion disables it for everyone, and there is nothing an individual can do about it.

Otter's economics run the other way. You pay for it (or use the free 300 minutes a month), and in exchange it works from your account in any meeting you attend, whoever hosts. Pro at $8.33 per month billed annually ($16.99 monthly) raises the ceiling to 1,200 minutes, and Business at $19.99 removes the monthly cap.

So the cost comparison is really a control comparison. Zoom is cheapest when the host side is sorted. Otter is the option you can carry with you.

Where each one works

AI Companion is native to Zoom and nothing else. The $12 per month Custom AI Companion add-on extends it to Google Meet and Teams, announced in 2025 and still rolling out into 2026, and it works there through a visible bot. There is no in-person or mobile recording mode.

Otter covers Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams out of the box, adds a Chrome extension, and its iOS and Android apps record in-person conversations, useful for interviews, lectures, and conversations that never touch a meeting link. If your week scatters across platforms and formats, this is Otter's clearest win.

Who controls the recording

Control is the difference people underestimate until it bites.

Zoom's model is host-first and admin-first. The host starts AI Companion, and participants see the notice and can consent or leave (admins can require a consent prompt, where declining keeps you in the meeting with mic and camera off). Summaries default to being visible to the host alone. As a participant, you have no button to press.

Otter's model is individual-first, sometimes aggressively so. Your bot goes where your calendar goes, which is also the most common complaint about it: OtterPilot joining meetings nobody asked it to join, and notes auto-emailed to attendees afterward. Hosts can eject the bot, and the December 2025 desktop app records without one, but the default posture is that you, not the host, decide a record exists.

Retention and AI training

Two policy differences matter more than any feature.

Retention first. Zoom's meeting summaries auto-delete after 30 days by default. Admins can change that, but plenty of users discover the deletion only after the summary they needed is gone. Otter is built as an archive: conversations stay in your account, searchable, until you delete them.

Training is the mirror image. Zoom has explicitly committed, since August 2023 after its terms-of-service controversy, not to use customer audio, video, chat, or screen-share content to train its own or third-party AI models. Otter trains its models on de-identified customer conversations by default, opt-out rather than opt-in, and a class action filed in August 2025 (Brewer v. Otter.ai) challenges that practice along with how the bot handles recording consent. The case was still working through motions in 2026.

If a lasting archive is your priority, Otter wins. If training policy is, Zoom does.

What about coaching?

Neither product coaches you on how you communicated, and the versions of "coaching" both companies sell are aimed at someone else.

Zoom's coaching features live in Zoom Revenue Accelerator, a separate sales product relaunched in July 2026 with Essentials at $66 and Premium at $99.99 per user per month. It tracks talk-listen ratio, filler words, talking speed, and sentiment, and the results are visible to reps and their managers, because it exists so managers can review reps.

Otter's equivalent is its Sales Agent, gated to Enterprise contracts and likewise built for sales teams. On ordinary paid plans, Otter shows a talk-time percentage and nothing more; it quietly removes filler words from transcripts rather than telling you about them.

A different option if the meetings are about you

Both tools above answer "what was said?" Work Coach answers a different question: how did you come across, and what should you work on?

It is a desktop app for Mac (macOS 15+) and Windows 11 that records your meetings locally, with no bot and nothing visible to other participants, then coaches only you. After each meeting you get a transcript and summary like any tool, plus the layer no note-taker has: role-aware coaching scores (an interviewee gets scored on answer quality, a manager in a 1:1 on psychological safety), a deterministic count of your filler words per minute with playback of every instance, voice delivery analysis of your pitch, pace, pauses, projection, and tone in the moments that mattered, and a practice mode that turns your real meetings into live voice roleplays.

Privacy runs in the opposite direction from both products above. There is no workspace, no admin console, and no host dependency. Your recordings and feedback are visible only to you, never your employer, and your data never trains shared models. Work Coach costs $50 a month after a two-week free trial with no credit card, priced as coaching (a traditional executive coach runs $5,000 a month) rather than as note-taking. It also runs happily alongside either tool on this page, since it captures audio locally no matter what else is in the meeting.

Which one should you pick?

Frequently asked questions

Which is better, Otter or Zoom AI Companion?

It depends on where your meetings live and who controls them. Zoom AI Companion is better when your meetings happen in Zoom, hosted on paid plans, and you want summaries at no extra cost with a strict no-training policy. Otter is better when meetings scatter across Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, when you attend more than you host, when you record in person, or when you need an archive that lasts longer than Zoom's 30-day default.

Is Zoom AI Companion really free?

There is no separate charge, but it requires a paid Zoom Workplace plan, and the person who needs that plan is the meeting host. Free Basic accounts do not get it, and on company accounts admins can disable it entirely. The cross-platform Custom AI Companion add-on costs $12 per user per month.

Does Zoom AI Companion work on Google Meet or Microsoft Teams?

Not natively. Zoom's Custom AI Companion add-on, at $12 per user per month, can join Google Meet and Teams meetings, but it does so with a visible bot rather than the built-in experience Zoom users get. Otter covers all three platforms from one account by default.

Does Otter or Zoom train AI on my meetings?

Otter trains its models on de-identified customer conversations by default, a practice challenged in a class action filed in 2025. Zoom has committed since August 2023 not to use customer audio, video, chat, or screen-share content to train its own or third-party AI models. This is one of the sharpest policy differences between the two.

Do either of these tools coach you on how you speak?

Not for individuals. Zoom's coaching metrics live in Zoom Revenue Accelerator, a separate manager-facing sales product starting at $66 per user per month. Otter's coaching lives in its Enterprise-only Sales Agent. If you want private feedback on your own communication, Work Coach records meetings locally with no bot and gives only you role-aware coaching scores, filler words per minute with playback, voice delivery analysis, and practice roleplay, for $50 a month after a two-week free trial. Your employer never sees any of it.