Comparison
An Otter.ai alternative with no monthly bill and no minute cap
Last updated
Otter.ai is the biggest name in meeting notes, and it is priced the way big services are: by the seat, and by the minute. Its pricing page gives the free plan 300 minutes a month and the $8.33-a-seat Pro plan 1,200, with any single meeting cut off at 30 and 90 minutes respectively. Three file imports ever on the free plan, ten a month on Pro. Drop back to free and only your 25 most recent conversations stay open.
Otter transcribes in its own cloud and pays for every minute it processes, so of course it counts them. That is not a scandal, it is just what a meter feels like from the paying side.
Silkwave Voice has no meter, because there is nothing to meter. Transcription runs on your Mac with Apple's built-in speech models, so a four-hour recording costs exactly what a four-minute one does, and the hundredth costs what the first did. No cap on the month, no cap on the meeting, no account, no renewal. $24.99, once.
There are things Otter does that this app cannot do at all, listed further down.
Quick verdict
Choose Silkwave Voice if
You record for yourself rather than for a team, you are on a Mac, and you would rather pay once than watch a monthly minute balance. Or your audio simply cannot go to someone else's server.
Choose Otter.ai if
Your notes have to be shared, searched and administered across a team, you need Windows, iPhone or the web, you want meetings captured without anyone remembering to press record, or you need a CRM to receive the summary.
Side-by-side
| Feature | Silkwave Voice | Otter.ai |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | $24.99 one-time | $8.33 per user per month on Pro, billed annually, or $16.99 month to month |
| Minutes you can transcribe a month | No limit | 300 free, 1,200 on Pro, unlimited on Business |
| Longest single recording | No limit | 30 minutes free, 90 on Pro, 4 hours on Business |
| Files you can import | No limit, several at a time | 3 ever on free, 10 a month on Pro |
| Past recordings you can open | All of them | 25 most recent on free, older ones archived |
| Free option | 7-day full trial | Free tier you can keep, within the limits above |
| Where transcription happens | On your Mac, offline | Otter's cloud |
| Does your audio leave the device? | No | Yes, uploaded and stored |
| Works offline | Yes, apart from the optional AI features | No |
| Account required | No | Yes |
| Languages | 10 | 6 |
| Bot joins your call | No | Yes, or botless from the desktop app |
| Speaker identification | On-device and optional, after the recording | Yes, live during the call |
| Export formats | .zip with audio, transcript, and summary | TXT and MP3 free, plus PDF, DOCX and SRT on Pro |
| Team sharing and admin controls | No | Yes |
| Zoom, Teams, Meet, Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot | No | Yes |
| Platforms | macOS 26 or later | Web, macOS 12.3 or later, Windows, iOS, Android |
| Compliance certifications | None, and no Silkwave server to audit. Optional AI features send transcript text to ChatGPT | SOC 2 Type II, and HIPAA on Enterprise |
Otter details reflect otter.ai's published pricing, help center, and privacy and security pages as checked on September 1, 2026. Otter's plans and limits have changed before and will change again, so check the current figures before you decide on them.
What the meter costs
Pro is $8.33 per user per month billed annually, about $100 a year, or $16.99 month to month, about $204. Business is $19.99 per seat per month billed annually, about $240. Silkwave Voice is $24.99 and then nothing, so three years works out at roughly $300 against Otter Pro annual, or $610 against monthly.
It can be priced that way because your Mac does the transcribing: there is no processing bill to pass on, and nothing to re-price after you have paid. The comparison stops being fair at the second seat, though. Silkwave Voice has no seats to sell because it has no team features behind them.
Where your audio goes
Otter records your meeting and sends the audio to its own cloud to be transcribed and stored. That is how the product works, and Otter documents the handling in some detail: SOC 2 Type II attestation, HIPAA compliance for Enterprise customers under a signed agreement since July 2025, AES-256 encryption at rest on its privacy and security page, and a stated policy of de-identifying user data before training its own models and not passing customer data to its AI providers for training.
None of which changes the fact underneath it. Otter is a cloud service and there is no setting that makes it anything else. Turn off the Wi-Fi and it stops transcribing, on the Mac app as much as in the browser. For a journalist with a source, a clinician, a lawyer, or anyone recording under an NDA, the question is not how well the audio is protected in transit. It is whether the audio makes the trip.
Silkwave Voice never makes it. Recording, transcription, speaker identification and search all run on your Mac with Apple's on-device speech models. There is no Silkwave server for anything to be stored on, which is why our privacy policy is so short.
With one caveat. The optional AI summary and chat features send your transcript text, never your audio, through Apple Intelligence to ChatGPT. They are off until you set them up, and you are told before anything is sent. Skip them and nothing leaves the machine at all. The longer version of this trade-off, independent of either product, is in on-device vs cloud transcription.
A note on the bot
Otter can send a notetaker into a scheduled call as a participant, which is how it captures meetings nobody remembered to record. That convenience is also the subject of a pending privacy case in the Northern District of California, In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation, which consolidates several proposed class actions filed in 2025. The plaintiffs allege that the notetaker recorded people who were not Otter users and had not consented. Those are allegations, Otter disputes them, and no ruling had been issued when we last checked this page.
The exposure comes from a design rather than from bad intent: a bot in a call is a party to the call, and consent for it has to come from everyone in the room. Silkwave Voice has no bot to send. It captures audio at the system level on your own machine, which is how recording Zoom, Teams, and Meet without a bot works, and Otter's own desktop app can record this way too. That does not settle the consent question for you. Telling the other people on the call that you are recording is your job in either app, and in many places it is the law.
What Silkwave Voice does
- Records for as long as you need, with no monthly minute budget to watch
- Captures mic, system audio, or both, with no loopback driver to install
- Transcribes on-device as the call happens, in 10 languages
- Notices when a call starts and offers to record it in one click
- Labels who said what, on-device, and off until you turn it on
- Summarizes into key topics, action items, and decisions when you pause
- Answers follow-up questions about any recording in a side panel
- Imports as many audio and video files as you like, a language each
- Searches every transcript you have ever recorded, however old
- Stores the transcript without the audio, when you switch Save Audio off
That is the whole list, and it is deliberately shorter than Otter's. Screenshots are on the product page, and every feature above is written up in the documentation.
Where Otter.ai is the better tool
It wins on teams. Shared workspaces, channels, comments, an admin console, usage analytics. Silkwave Voice has none of it.
It wins on capturing meetings you forget. Otter reads your calendar and joins scheduled calls by itself, including ones you never turn up to. Silkwave Voice waits to be told: it notices a call has started and offers to record it, and the prompt clears itself after a minute if nobody clicks.
It wins on which devices it runs on. Web, Windows, iPhone, Android, and macOS 12.3 or later. Silkwave Voice needs macOS 26 and there is no phone app.
It wins on live speaker labels, which appear during the call rather than after it, and on getting the text out: PDF, DOCX and SRT on Pro, against our single .zip of audio, transcript and summary.
It wins on everything downstream. Zoom, Teams, Meet, Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, Zapier. Silkwave Voice sends your notes nowhere; you copy and paste them.
And it wins on paperwork. If your employer needs a SOC 2 report or a signed HIPAA agreement on file, Otter has them and we have nothing to hand you, because there is no service to audit.
If you are weighing other note takers, the other comparisons are Silkwave Voice vs Granola for the cloud side, and Silkwave Voice vs MacWhisper if you would rather stay local.
Frequently asked questions
- Does Otter.ai work offline?
- No. Otter transcribes in its own cloud, so recording and transcription need a connection and your audio is uploaded to be processed. There is no on-device or offline mode on any plan, including the Mac desktop app. Silkwave Voice transcribes on your Mac, so it works with Wi-Fi off.
- Does Otter.ai have a Mac app?
- Yes. Otter has a desktop app for macOS 12.3 or later, and it can record supported meetings without sending a bot into the call. It is still a client for Otter's cloud: the audio is uploaded and transcribed on Otter's servers. The difference with Silkwave Voice is not whether there is a Mac app, it is where the transcription runs.
- How much does Otter.ai cost?
- Otter's Basic plan is free within its limits. Pro is $8.33 per user per month billed annually, about $100 a year, or $16.99 month to month, about $204 a year. Business is $19.99 per user per month billed annually, about $240 a year per seat. Enterprise is quoted on request. Silkwave Voice is $24.99 once.
- What are Otter.ai's minute limits?
- Otter's pricing page sets the free Basic plan at 300 transcription minutes per user per month with a 30-minute cap on any one conversation, and Pro at 1,200 minutes a month with a 90-minute cap per meeting. Business lifts the monthly limit and caps a single meeting at four hours. Silkwave Voice has no monthly budget and no per-recording limit, because your Mac does the work.
- Is Silkwave Voice a subscription?
- No. $24.99 once, after a 7-day free trial. No renewals, no per-minute fees, no seat pricing, and no free tier behind the trial.
- Does Otter.ai train its AI on my meetings?
- Otter's privacy and security page says it de-identifies user data before training its own models, and that customer data is not used to train the models of the AI providers it works with. Silkwave Voice has nothing to train on: there is no Silkwave server, and Apple's App Store privacy label for the app reports no data collected. If you turn on the optional AI summary and chat, transcript text goes to ChatGPT through Apple Intelligence, where it is handled under Apple's and OpenAI's terms rather than ours. Your audio is never sent, and the features are off until you set them up.
- How many languages does Silkwave Voice support?
- Ten: Cantonese, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. Otter's pricing page lists six: English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese.
- Can I share notes with my team in Silkwave Voice?
- No. There are no shared workspaces, no comments, no channels, and no admin console. Silkwave Voice is a single-user app that keeps recordings on one Mac. If your team needs one searchable place for everyone's notes, Otter does that and Silkwave Voice does not.
- Does Silkwave Voice run on Windows, iPhone, or an older Mac?
- No. It is macOS only and needs macOS 26 or later, because it uses Apple's on-device speech models. Otter runs on the web, Windows, iOS, Android, and macOS 12.3 or later. If you are not on macOS 26, this comparison ends there.
Record for as long as you like. Pay once.
Try Silkwave Voice free for 7 days. Keep it and you pay $24.99 once.
$24.99one-time
7-day free trial
Requires macOS 26 or later
US pricing. Apple may adjust prices in other regions.