Meeting AI compared — Fireflies vs Otter vs Fathom vs Notta, and which actually works for Korean-language meetings

The short answer

If you want meeting records to accumulate into a searchable asset the whole team can use, Fireflies.ai has the widest reach. If the goal is for individuals and small teams to get summaries at no cost, Fathom’s free tier is overwhelmingly the practical choice. If live transcription and collaborating during the meeting matter most, Otter.ai. And if you are mainly transcribing Asian languages including Korean, or processing existing recordings, Notta fits. All four will summarise a meeting. Where that summary ends up is the real difference.

At a glance

Fireflies.ai — when meetings should become a searchable asset

Fireflies is designed less around “give me a summary” and more around “make the organisation’s conversations searchable”. It joins meetings and leaves records, and as those records pile up you can go back and find what was decided last quarter and why. It supports multilingual transcription including Korean, and its integrations push results out into CRMs and work tools, so the work after the meeting stays connected.

The value compounds when several departments use it together. For one person who only wants summaries it is overkill, but ten teams using it for six months end up with an accumulated record that does the job of a separate documentation system.

The weaknesses are the ones specific to organisational rollout. Per-user billing means seat and budget management follow it as it spreads, and having a bot join meetings requires a consent step whenever external attendees are present. Above all, recording data accumulates outside your walls — so if departments start adopting it individually and skip contract and legal review, the clean-up cost later is substantial.

Otter.ai — when you want it organised before the meeting ends

Otter leans towards live transcription rather than after-the-fact summarising. Text streams while the meeting runs, and attendees can mark important moments and attach notes on that same screen. The experiential strength is that by the time the meeting finishes, the write-up is already half done. It suits teams comfortable with several people working off the same record at once.

The free tier has a set monthly allowance, which keeps the validation stage cheap, and the paid individual tier is inexpensive. Starting as a personal productivity tool and widening to the team is a natural path.

There are two weaknesses. First, that monthly cap on the free tier arrives quickly in an organisation with a lot of meetings. Second, transcription quality on Korean-language meetings is hard to judge from the marketing alone. Live transcription varies most in exactly the conditions Korean meetings tend to have — overlapping speakers and technical terms mixed in. Run a sample test on one or two real recordings before adopting, and confirm the scope of Korean support during the sales conversation.

Fathom — when you need to start free and show results first

Fathom’s reason for existing is clear. The free tier is effectively unlimited, so you can start today without budget approval. Summaries arrive quickly once a meeting ends, and the flow of call content into a CRM is smooth, so the benefit is most tangible in roles built on one-to-one conversations — sales, consulting. If your task is proving to the organisation that AI meeting notes actually work, this is the fastest card to play.

Its lightness is also an advantage. There is almost nothing to learn, and it spreads by one person trying it and recommending it onward.

The weaknesses show up at organisational scale. The free tier is closer to personal use, and team-level admin moves to per-seat billing. As a company-wide knowledge store it is shallower than the Fireflies tier on search, permissions and retention policy. And because it is free, departments tend to sign up individually — which scatters your company’s meeting records across uncontrolled accounts. It is the best possible starting tool, but set the management policy before you let it harden into the standard one.

Notta — when Korean transcription accuracy comes first

Notta is weighted towards Asian-language transcription, focused on capturing multilingual speech including Korean. For teams whose meetings are mostly domestic, and whose first requirement is simply whether the transcribed sentences are accurate, that focus translates directly into value. As well as joining meetings, it handles uploaded recordings naturally, so it also gets used for in-person meetings and field interviews.

Pricing tiers are low and there is a free entry point, which practically speaking makes it easy for a small team to validate without commitment.

The weakness is breadth. The integration and automation ecosystem is not as wide as Fireflies, so any setup that automatically pushes meeting output into a CRM or project tool takes more hands-on work. Search and permissions as a team knowledge base are correspondingly simpler. Notta is strong as a tool for producing accurate meeting records and narrower as a platform for automating what happens after the meeting. Decide first whether your requirement sits in transcription or in search.

How to choose

Adopting this in a Korean company

Meeting AI is an easy category for a department lead to put on a personal credit card first. So the problem starts not with contracts but with control. Company meeting content ends up spread across several personal accounts, and when someone leaves, those records either disappear with them or, worse, stay. If you are evaluating a company-wide rollout, the right first step is not a feature comparison but establishing who is currently recording what, with which tool.

On the contract side, the data clauses in the standard English agreement are what matter. Check where recording data is stored and for how long, how deletion requests are handled, and whether it is used for model training. If external attendees are involved, set the consent procedure as internal policy. Payment and documentation usually default to a foreign card and foreign-currency billing, which leaves your won-denominated cost exposed to exchange rates and your tax invoicing as a separate matter.

Support hours and Korean-language onboarding are also on the checklist. When you need an administrator — transferring a seat, deleting data — a support desk in another time zone adds a day or more to every request. And if the interface and documentation are English-first, adoption among staff slows down.

SurfingBear Tools absorbs this part as an adoption service. We provide domestic contracting, won-denominated billing, tax invoice issuance, Korean-language onboarding and a Korean-language support channel, including consolidating scattered individual subscriptions into a single domestic contract. We do not claim official partner or distributor status for any particular product.

Frequently asked questions

How do we verify Korean transcription quality before adopting?

The most reliable method is to pick two real meeting recordings as samples and run the identical files through every candidate product. Deliberately include a passage with overlapping speakers, one with English technical terms mixed in, and one heavy with numbers — the differences become obvious. We will design that sample comparison with you during the adoption consultation.

We are uncomfortable with a bot joining meetings. Is there an alternative?

Uploading the recording afterwards is the alternative. Organisations that cannot realistically obtain bot-participation consent every time external attendees join often make file upload the default, and run a two-track setup where the bot is used for internal meetings only.

Can we just stay on the free plan?

For personal work it may well be enough. But accumulating company meeting records in a personal account creates a problem the moment there is a staffing change — the asset either vanishes or sits outside your control. Once meeting notes start being used as a basis for decisions, treat that as the point to move onto an organisational contract.

What actually changes once meeting records accumulate?

Search creates more change than the records themselves. Once people can find out when and why a decision was made without asking a colleague, the number of meetings falls. So it is more practical to set your success metric as fewer re-confirmation meetings, or fewer dropped follow-ups, rather than summary accuracy.