Earkeep
The Otter.ai alternative with no bot in your call
Last updated: · Reviewed quarterly
Otter.ai is the market-leading meeting bot: it joins your call as a visible participant, transcribes in the cloud, and bills $17-30 per user per month. Earkeep never joins anything. It listens on your device all day, transcribes locally, and lets you mark any stretch of the day as a meeting afterwards.
14-day full trial, no account required.
- No bot joins your call
- Transcribed on your device, not in a cloud
- €39 once, not $17-30 per user per month
The short answer
If your meetings are mostly scheduled external video calls where a visible notetaker is expected, and you want a mobile app and a shared workspace for the team, Otter is the more complete product and its model fits. If your meetings are internal, in person, or spread across too many platforms for a bot to keep up with, and you'd rather own plain files on your own machine for one €39 payment than send your audio to a cloud on a subscription that renews forever, that is the gap Earkeep was built to fill.
Why people look for an Otter.ai alternative
Nothing to start, and no bot to invite
Otter needs someone to start a session, or to invite OtterPilot into a scheduled video call, before anything is captured. A decision made across a desk, a call on a platform Otter doesn't auto-join, an ad-hoc huddle: none of it is there afterwards. And when the bot does show up, it shows up as a named participant in Zoom, Teams and Google Meet, which its own users describe as real friction.
Threads in r/sysadmin describe IT departments blocking Otter outright ("we blocked it specifically… to stop this from re-infecting our workspace"), and a widely shared r/projectmanagement thread, later picked up by NPR, warns "do not join Otter.Ai unless you want your whole company spammed."
Earkeep has no bot, ever, because it isn't watching a specific call: it listens to the device it runs on, the same way for a Zoom call, a Teams call, or someone talking in the room. You drag the span across the timeline afterwards, or let a connected calendar mark it for you.
Transcribed on your device, and yours afterwards
Otter is, in its own reviewers' words, "fully cloud-dependent": audio is sent to Otter's servers to be transcribed, and reviews confirm there's no offline mode. Users go further than inconvenience: sysadmins call it a "data exfiltration nightmare," and Otter is the subject of a 2025 class-action lawsuit, covered by NPR, over its data practices.
Earkeep processes audio only in memory, on your device, and never writes it to disk or uploads it anywhere. There's no account, no API key, and no server in the loop for core functionality.
What's left afterwards differs too. Otter's transcripts live in Otter's proprietary cloud, reachable through their app and its export options (TXT, PDF, DOCX, SRT). Earkeep's are plain files on your disk that you own outright: open them, grep them, back them up, or feed them to any tool you choose.
Read by the agents you already use, not a chat box in someone else's app
Otter's roadmap includes "Meeting Agents," AI avatars that can attend meetings on your behalf, plus Otter AI Chat for querying past meetings inside Otter's own interface.
Earkeep runs your own agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor Agent, Gemini CLI, Hermes, Kimi CLI, OpenClaw, opencode, Pi, Qwen Code, or any ACP-compatible agent) directly against your local meeting history, and ships a built-in MCP server so external tools like Claude Desktop or Cursor can read your meetings too. Your meeting data feeds the AI tooling you already use, instead of a closed chat interface inside someone else's product.
Side by side
| Capability | Earkeep | Otter.ai |
|---|---|---|
| Always-on capture | Continuous, in the background | Started per session |
| Bot-free | No bot ever joins | OtterPilot joins as a participant |
| Records a meeting you can't attend | Only what your device hears | The bot goes without you |
| Audio processed on your device | Nothing uploaded | Fully cloud-dependent |
| Captures in-person meetings | Any audio on the device | Only inside a joined call |
| Retroactive spans | Or marked by your calendar | Defined at record time |
| AI summary when it ends | No, but an agent you connect writes them from the transcript | Auto-generated after every meeting |
| Labels who said what | Not yet | Learns voices over time |
| Your own agents can read it | ACP agents plus an MCP server | No local API for agents |
| Share with people who weren't there | No, but your agent files the notes where your team already reads | Shared workspaces, comments, highlights |
| Mobile app | Desktop only | iOS and Android, with recording |
| Free tier that doesn't expire | 14 days free, then €39 once | 300 minutes a month |
| One-time purchase | €39, one device | Per user, per month |
| Pricing | €39 once, one device, no subscription | $16.99-30/user/month; free tier capped at 300 min/month |
| Platform | macOS 13+ | Web, iOS, Android |
Built inNo, but an agent you connect canPartlyNot available
What each one costs by year five
Switching takes an afternoon
- Install it, then forget about it for a day. Earkeep starts listening as soon as it is running, so a first day of real meetings is captured before you have configured anything. There is no import tool and nothing is migrated: your Otter transcripts stay in Otter, where you can export them (TXT, PDF, DOCX, SRT) if you want the history.
- Mark yesterday, or connect a calendar. Drag a span across the timeline where a meeting was, or point Earkeep at Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook or any ICS URL and let every event title its own span. Nobody has to be invited to anything.
- Cancel the subscription once you trust it. Otter's Pro plan renews at $16.99/month ($8.33/month billed annually) for 1,200 transcription minutes, and Business at $30/month per user ($20/month annually) for 6,000. Earkeep is €39 once, for one device, with every Earkeep 1.x update included, and if a paid major upgrade ever ships your version keeps working. The 14-day trial runs with no account and no card, long enough to compare two weeks of real meetings.
Which one fits you
Choose Earkeep if
You want everything captured, and the record to be yours.
- Plenty of what matters is said in huddles and in-person syncs no bot was invited to
- Confidential conversations mean the audio must not leave your device
- You'd rather own plain files you can grep than a proprietary cloud you export from
- You'd rather pay €39 once than carry a per-seat bill forever
- Your own agents should be able to read your meetings directly
Choose Otter.ai if
Otter does several things Earkeep does not, and it's worth saying so plainly.
- You need a mobile app. Otter has iOS and Android apps for recording lectures and interviews on your phone; Earkeep is desktop-only, with no mobile app at all
- You want the bot to be visible. Some sales and client-facing teams prefer an explicit named notetaker joining the call over a silent background app, for disclosure reasons
- You want Otter's collaboration layer. Shared workspaces, comments, and highlights across a team, plus CRM integrations with Salesforce and HubSpot, are built into Otter today and aren't what Earkeep is built around
- You need calls recorded that you can't attend, which OtterPilot does by joining without you
- You need to know who said what: Otter learns voices over time, and Earkeep doesn't label speakers yet
Otter's positioning targets teams living in scheduled video calls, where a named notetaker and a shared workspace are the point. Earkeep's audience is product managers, product owners, engineering leads and people managers running 8-15 meetings a week across video calls, in-person syncs and everything in between: nobody remembers to invite OtterPilot into the huddle where a stakeholder verbally committed to something, or the in-person 1:1 where a report's actual concern came out.
Other tools people weigh this against
Anyone shopping for an Otter.ai alternative usually has a few other tabs open. Each of these gets the same treatment as this page: Granola, Fireflies.ai, Fathom, tl;dv, Jamie, MacWhisper, Limitless and Plaud, or all nine side by side.
Frequently asked questions
Is Earkeep a good Otter.ai alternative?
It is, if what you want from Otter is the record rather than the bot. Earkeep captures continuously on your device, so the huddles and in-person syncs nobody invited OtterPilot to are kept too, and the audio never leaves your machine. What it doesn't do is join a call you can't attend, label who said what, write the summary for you, or run on a phone.
Does Earkeep replace Otter's AI summaries and chat features?
Earkeep focuses on capturing and keeping the complete verbatim record locally, and on giving your own AI agents access to it through in-app agents and MCP. It doesn't currently include Otter-style built-in AI summaries or a chat interface.
Can Otter capture in-person meetings?
Otter is built around joining scheduled video calls as a bot, or recording explicit sessions in its mobile app. It isn't an always-on background capture tool the way Earkeep is.
Is Otter's free tier a real alternative to Earkeep's trial?
Otter's free Basic tier caps out at 300 transcription minutes a month and 30 minutes per session, and is cloud-based throughout. Earkeep's 14-day trial is full functionality, local, with no email or account required.
Does switching from Otter to Earkeep mean losing my old transcripts?
Otter's transcripts live in Otter's cloud and can be exported (TXT, PDF, DOCX, SRT) if you want to bring history over. Earkeep starts keeping new plain-file transcripts locally from the day you install it.
Try it yourself
14-day full trial, no account required.