Otter.ai vs Tana: pricing, features and which to choose

Otter.ai is a cloud meeting assistant for recording, live transcription, searchable conversation history, summaries, action items, and meeting chat. It can join Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet, while web and mobile apps record directly. Current plans are Basic, Pro, Business, and Enterprise. The free tier includes 300 monthly minutes, but limits conversations to 30 minutes and imported files to three lifetime items. Otter is an active product for professionals, students, sales teams, researchers, and organizations that want automatic notes and a searchable memory of spoken conversations. For a buyer, the central value is reducing manual note taking and making past discussions easier to revisit. The main fit question is whether meeting volume, conversation length, and import needs remain within the selected plan’s boundaries.

A typical workflow connects a calendar or meeting service, lets Otter join, or records through the app, then reviews the transcript, speaker labels, summary, and action items. AI Chat answers questions across meetings and can work with connected context. Pro raises monthly transcription to 1,200 minutes, extends meetings to 90 minutes, and adds advanced search, exports, templates, vocabulary, Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zapier integrations. Business adds unlimited in-app meetings, custom workflows, unlimited imports, four-hour meetings, analytics, activity logs, and stronger workspace administration. Buyers should match these differences to operating habits: occasional users may need only review tools, while sales or service teams may value integrations, repeatable workflows, and centralized administration enough to justify a higher tier.

Otter works well for clear business meetings, lectures, interviews, and recurring team discussions, but it is not legal-grade transcription. Noise, overlapping speakers, accents, and poor microphones can require cleanup. Fireflies.ai and Fathom compete on meeting capture and summaries, while Rev and Sonix are stronger transcript-focused comparisons. Basic is useful for testing, but frequent users can hit monthly or per-meeting caps. Choose Otter for searchable meeting memory across major video platforms, or another service for broader language coverage or strict human-accuracy requirements. Compared with Fireflies.ai, Otter emphasizes a broad meeting-memory workflow; compared with Fathom, it offers a different balance of capture and plan limits; compared with Rev, it is less suited to accuracy-led transcript purchasing. Buyers should choose Otter for searchable cross-platform meeting history, Fireflies.ai or Fathom for alternative meeting workflows, and Rev for transcript-focused needs.

Tana Labs, Inc. presents Tana as an agentic meeting platform separate from Tana Outliner. Native video calls bring team members, AI agents, and shared context into one workspace, while decisions, tasks, drafted pull requests, customer journeys, and project plans enter a persistent context graph. The graph can propose merging recurring people, companies, decisions, or topics. Integrations, an API, an MCP server, export, and access controls are included. Spaces can limit content to everyone in a location, the owner, or selected people. The Free plan includes five hosted meetings monthly, one calendar connection, AI transcripts and summaries, editing, and 50 AI queries. Pro adds unlimited hosted meetings, integrations, and full MCP. Business adds SAML SSO, audit logs, compliance options, and data controls.

Tana supports meetings in its native video environment or through a meeting agent for Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet. Its AI agents can use participant tools such as screen sharing, document editing, and canvas creation. During or after a discussion, Tana can create decisions, tasks, project updates, customer journeys, storyboards, proposals, and other artifacts. Calendar connections import events, while integrations support GitHub, Linear, Jira, Slack, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Claude, Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot, and Lovable. External agents can read and write workspace content through MCP, with proposal review for changes. The Free plan includes five hosted meetings monthly, one calendar connection, transcripts, summaries, editing, and 50 AI queries. Pro adds unlimited meetings, integrations, and full MCP for $20 early bird or $30 per user monthly.

Tana’s main limitation is its meeting-centered design. It is not an IDE, production-code host, room-system integration, or replacement for tools such as Lovable or Bolt, though it can pass context to coding tools. Teams must manage access settings, connected services, model-provider policies, proposals, and plan-dependent AI usage. The Free plan includes five hosted meetings monthly, one calendar connection, AI transcripts and summaries, editing, and 50 AI queries. Pro adds unlimited hosted meetings, integrations, full MCP, and a meeting agent for Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet. Business adds SAML SSO, audit logs, security controls, and data-residency options. Tana says it does not sell data, advertise with it, or train models on customer content without notice and an opt-out opportunity.