Earkeep vs Otter.ai

Otter is a reasonable choice if you live in scheduled video calls, want a mobile app for lecture or interview capture, and don't mind your audio leaving your device. Earkeep is for people who want everything captured, not just the calls they remembered to schedule a bot into, and who'd rather own plain files on their own machine for one €39 payment than pay a subscription forever. If your meetings are mostly external video calls where a visible notetaker is expected, Otter's model fits. If your meetings are internal, in person, or across too many platforms for a bot to keep up with, Earkeep fits better.

Earkeep never asks you to press record. It runs continuously in the background, capturing mic and system audio, and you decide afterward which stretch of the day counts as a meeting, by selecting a span on the timeline or by connecting a calendar so spans are marked automatically.

Otter works the opposite way: someone has to start a session, or invite OtterPilot into a scheduled video call, before anything is captured. Any conversation that wasn't explicitly recorded, an in-person hallway decision, a call on a platform Otter doesn't auto-join, an ad-hoc huddle, simply isn't there afterward. Earkeep's model is built for the person who doesn't want to think about whether to hit record; Otter's assumes meetings are scheduled video calls you remember to invite it to.

OtterPilot shows up as a named participant in Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet calls. Otter's own reviewers and Reddit users describe this as a real source of 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's listening to the device it runs on, the same way for a Zoom call, a Teams call, or someone talking in the room.

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 on Reddit and G2 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. See private by design for the mechanism.

Otter's transcripts live in Otter's proprietary cloud, accessible through their app and export options (TXT, PDF, DOCX, SRT). Earkeep's transcripts 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. There's no platform to be locked into.

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 takes a different approach: it 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.

Otter's Pro plan is $16.99/month ($8.33/month billed annually) for 1,200 transcription minutes; Business is $30/month per user ($20/month annually) for 6,000 minutes; the free tier caps out at 300 minutes a month and 30 minutes per session. Whichever tier you land on, it's a subscription that renews indefinitely.

Earkeep is €39, once, for one device: no tiers, no recurring charge. You keep every update to Earkeep 1.x, and if a paid major upgrade ever ships, your version keeps working.

• 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.

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, are exactly the audience a bot-per-call model struggles to keep up with. Nobody remembers to invite OtterPilot into the hallway conversation where a stakeholder verbally committed to something, or the in-person 1:1 where a report's actual concern came out. Earkeep just keeps listening, so that decision is still there afterward, whichever platform or room it happened in. See Earkeep for product managers and Earkeep for people managers.