The free tier in this category used to be easy to describe. Otter gave you a few hundred minutes a month, everyone else gave you a trial and a countdown. That changed in the last week of August 2026, when Circleback replaced its trial-only pricing with a genuine free plan and cut its entry paid tier by almost six dollars a seat.
That makes the comparison worth redoing from scratch rather than patching a number in an old table.
Circleback now offers unlimited meetings for nothing. Otter offers 300 minutes a month and a privacy policy that lists model training as a use of your recordings. AmyNote offers no free plan at all, and keeps transcripts on your phone rather than in anyone’s cloud. Three genuinely different bargains, and the free tier is where they stop resembling each other.
The Quick Verdict
Choose Circleback if you want the most product for zero dollars. The new free plan covers unlimited meetings, online or in person, with or without a bot, and does not train on your content. The catch is that free keeps only 30 days of history.
Choose Otter if you need the cheapest paid seat and your meetings are in English. At 8.33 dollars a month billed annually it is the least expensive real subscription here. Accept six supported languages and a policy that names model training as a use of your de-identified recordings.
Choose AmyNote if the recording should never leave your device. It costs 99 dollars a year for the whole account rather than per seat, handles 140 languages, and stores transcripts locally. There is no free plan, and it is iPhone only.
What We Compared
Every number below was read from the vendor’s own pricing page on 31 August 2026, with the monthly and yearly toggles clicked in both directions. That is not pedantry. Circleback and Otter each ship both price sets to the browser at once, so a careless read returns the discounted annual figure quoted as though it were the month-to-month price — which is exactly the error most published comparisons in this category contain.
Training claims come from each vendor’s published policy text, not from review sites or marketing pages. Where a policy uses a qualifier such as “de-identified,” the qualifier is quoted rather than smoothed over, because for some buyers it is the whole answer and for others it changes nothing.
All three price in US dollars, so the figures are directly comparable without a currency conversion in the middle. The billing unit is not comparable, though: Circleback and Otter charge per seat, AmyNote charges once for the account. Those two numbers only become comparable after you decide how many people are involved.
We did not score transcription accuracy head to head. In real use it depends far more on microphone quality and room acoustics than on the vendor, and a benchmark recorded in a quiet office tells you nothing useful about a six-person conference room.
Circleback: Strengths and Weaknesses
Circleback is the most automated of the three. It joins from your calendar or captures through its desktop app, then writes structured notes, extracts action items and assigns them to specific people rather than handing you a bulleted list to triage.
Strengths. The free plan is the news. It includes unlimited meetings, a bot or the bot-free desktop app for online calls, mobile and Apple Watch apps for in-person conversations, speaker-labeled transcripts, and Slack and Linear integrations. Paid tiers start at 15 dollars per user per month billed yearly, down from 20.83 a week earlier, or 18 month to month.
It supports over 100 languages, runs on macOS, Windows, iOS, Android and the web — the widest platform coverage in this comparison — and its FAQ answers the training question in four words: no, it does not train AI models on customer data. No de-identification caveat, no toggle to find in settings.
Weaknesses. The free plan keeps 30 days of meeting and recording history, so it is a rolling window rather than an archive. If your reason for recording meetings is to be able to search them a year later, free is a trial with better manners.
Storage is in fact the whole upgrade ladder: one year on Pro, two years on Business at 25 dollars, unlimited only on Enterprise at 35. HIPAA is gated to that top tier and a sales call. And because it is per seat, a five-person team pays five times the headline — 75 dollars a month on Pro, billed annually.
Otter: Strengths and Weaknesses
Otter is the incumbent. It sends a notetaker into Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, and it has the largest install base of anything in this comparison, which matters more than it sounds: your colleagues have probably already seen its bot join a call and nobody will ask what it is.
Strengths. It is the cheapest paid seat here by a wide margin: 8.33 dollars per user per month billed annually, or 16.99 month to month. Business is 19.99 annually and 30 monthly. The free Basic plan is genuinely useful for light users rather than being a disguised demo, and Otter runs everywhere — Mac and Windows desktop apps, iOS, Android and a Chrome extension. Students and teachers get 20 percent off.
Weaknesses. Two limits matter, and both are structural rather than fixable with a bigger plan.
The first is language: six in total — English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese — with one language per conversation. If your meetings are not in that list, or if they switch languages halfway through the way real multilingual meetings do, the accuracy conversation is over before it starts. No paid tier changes this.
The second is the free plan’s shape. It caps conversations at 30 minutes each and keeps only your 25 most recent, alongside three lifetime file imports. Paid tiers loosen this to 90 minutes per meeting on Pro and four hours on Business, but a 30-minute ceiling on free means the plan cannot cover an ordinary hour-long meeting at all.
On training. Otter’s privacy policy lists among its stated uses improving and monitoring the services “including training our proprietary AI technology on de-identified audio recordings and on transcriptions.” The recordings are de-identified, though transcripts may still contain personal information by the policy’s own wording. That is a fair trade for many teams and an absolute dealbreaker for others, which is why it belongs in the comparison rather than in a footnote. HIPAA is an Enterprise add-on, and single sign-on requires a 100-user minimum.
AmyNote: Strengths and Weaknesses
AmyNote is the only one of the three built phone first. It records the room you are sitting in rather than the tab you have open, which makes it a different kind of product wearing similar packaging.
Strengths. Transcription runs through OpenAI’s Speech API and analysis through Anthropic’s Claude Opus, and both providers contractually guarantee that user data is never used for model training. Audio is encrypted in transit and not retained after processing, and transcripts are stored locally with end-to-end encryption.
It covers 140 languages for transcription and translates into over 100, the widest coverage here by a factor of more than twenty against Otter, and it is tuned for East Asian and Arabic. Speaker identification persists across sessions rather than resetting each meeting, so naming someone once carries forward.
Pricing is one flat account fee: 19.99 a month, or 99 a year, which works out to 8.25 a month. That number does not move when a second person joins, which is the opposite of how the other two behave.
Weaknesses. Three, stated plainly. There is no free plan, only a three-day trial, so it is the hardest of the three to evaluate slowly. It is iPhone only — no Android app, no desktop client, no web version — which rules it out for mixed-device teams before any other consideration. And it has no team or admin features and no CRM integrations, so it is a tool for an individual professional rather than a department.
Side by Side
- Free plan. Circleback unlimited meetings with 30-day history. Otter 300 minutes a month, 30 minutes per conversation, 25 most recent kept. AmyNote none, three-day trial only.
- Cheapest paid tier per month. AmyNote 8.25 flat for the account, Otter 8.33 per seat billed yearly, Circleback 15.00 per seat.
- Month to month. Otter 16.99, Circleback 18.00, AmyNote 19.99. The order flips completely.
- A five-person team, billed yearly. AmyNote 8.25 total, Otter 41.65, Circleback 75.00.
- Languages. AmyNote 140 plus, Circleback over 100, Otter six.
- Where it runs. Circleback and Otter on Mac, Windows, iOS, Android and browser. AmyNote on iPhone only.
- Where the transcript lives. Circleback and Otter in the vendor cloud. AmyNote on your device.
- Training on your content. Circleback no. AmyNote no, by contract with both providers. Otter yes, on de-identified recordings and transcriptions.
Three Buyers, Three Different Answers
A five-person English-speaking sales team on Zoom. Otter, and the cheap seat is only half the reason. Everyone already recognises the bot, the desktop and mobile apps mean nobody is locked to one device, and 41.65 a month for five seats billed annually is the lowest real team cost here. Read the training clause first and decide as a team whether you are comfortable with it, because retrofitting that decision after a year of recorded customer calls is not really possible.
A product team that wants meetings to generate work automatically. Circleback, and start on free. Unlimited meetings with assigned action items pushed into Slack and Linear at zero dollars is a genuinely strong offer, and the 30-day window is survivable while you find out whether the habit sticks. When it does, Pro at 15 a seat opens a year of storage. The upgrade is buying an archive, not features.
A therapist, lawyer or clinician recording one-to-one conversations. Neither cloud tool is a comfortable fit, and the deciding factor is not price. Otter’s de-identified training clause and Circleback’s Enterprise-gated HIPAA both push a sensitive practice toward a sales call or a compromise. AmyNote keeps the audio and transcript on the phone, runs through two providers that contractually do not train on it, and charges 99 dollars a year regardless of volume. The constraint is the iPhone requirement, and it is absolute.
The Bottom Line
Circleback’s new free plan is the best zero-dollar offer in this category right now. If your team can live inside a 30-day window, it is hard to argue with unlimited meetings, in person or online, that nobody trains on.
If you need the cheapest paid seat and you meet in English, Otter remains the value leader — provided the training clause and the six-language ceiling are things you have actually read rather than assumed away.
If the recording itself is the sensitive part, the calculation is different. AmyNote at amynote.app keeps the audio and the transcript on the phone in your pocket, in more languages than either rival, for one flat fee rather than a per-seat subscription. Just be sure everyone who needs it is on an iPhone, because today that is the only door in.
Originally published as an X Article by @AmyNoteApp.
