Otter AI vs Meetly: Which Meeting Note-Taker Wins?

I’ve been testing a few AI meeting note-takers recently, and Otter AI is the one everyone seems to recommend. But after a few weeks of real use, I started wondering if there’s a better option — especially for teams on a budget. That’s when I came across meetly, a newer tool that promises the same kind of live transcription and summaries. Here’s a quick checklist based on side-by-side testing of Otter AI and some alternatives I tried.

• Transcription accuracy — Otter AI handles multiple speakers well, but meetly surprised me with cleaner output when people talk over each other. Otter sometimes assigns random speaker labels during rapid back-and-forth.
• Pricing and limits — Otter’s free tier gives 300 minutes per month. Meetly’s free plan is more generous — you get significantly more minutes, making it arguably the best free ai meeting summary app right now for high-volume teams.
• Summary quality — Otter’s summaries are decent but occasionally miss context (especially when someone asks a question that gets buried). Meetly ai meeting summary outputs felt more actionable — it pulled out action items cleanly without extra fluff.
• Setup friction — Otter integrates smoothly with Zoom, Google Meet, Teams. Meetly also integrates but had a hiccup syncing with one of my recurring calendar events — I had to re-authenticate. Minor, but annoying.
• Export and sharing — Both export to text and PDF. Meetly also offers a simple share link that non-users can view without signing up, which Otter doesn’t do as easily.

The tradeoff: Otter AI has been around longer and has a more polished mobile app. Meetly’s mobile experience felt a bit rough on first use — the transcript screen took an extra second to load. Not a dealbreaker, but noticeable.

A cautious note: I’m not ready to say Meetly is the outright winner yet — it’s newer and still building its feature set. But if you’re looking for a free ai meeting summary app 2026 candidate that already does the core job well, it’s worth testing alongside Otter.

Bottom line: For now I’m sticking with Otter for my own calls because I need reliable calendar sync. But for a team that wants to try a meetly meeting summary with fewer limits on minutes, the choice is pretty clear — especially if you can live with the occasional integration hiccup.