Why this comparison exists

Otter.ai is what most teams default to when someone asks "we should record our meetings, right?" — it's been around since 2016, has a generous free tier, and integrates with everything. If you're evaluating Pavleur, you almost certainly compared us to Otter first. This page is the honest version of that comparison, written by people who use both tools.

Pavleur is not trying to be a better Otter for the entire org. Otter wins that fight, and pretending otherwise wastes your time. Pavleur is built for a narrower job: be useful during a working meeting — the kind where engineers, PMs, and EMs debate architectural choices, scope a feature, or unblock something stuck in review — and produce a recap a working engineer can actually use the next day.

If your team's primary need is "transcribe everything, make it searchable," skip to the verdict — Otter is fine. If you've ever finished a meeting and thought "we just talked about three decisions and now I have to remember which two are mine," keep reading.

Feature comparison

Feature	Pavleur	Otter.ai
Live transcription	Yes, with speaker labels	Yes, with speaker labels (industry standard)
Real-time AI assist in-call	Yes — suggestions, recall, definitions	Otter AI Chat (post-call, primarily)
Meeting recap / summary	Yes — engineer-flavored, action-item focused	Yes — general-purpose, well-polished
Searchable transcript history	Yes	Yes (large free-tier limit)
Zoom / Teams / Meet support	Yes (Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, Webex)	Yes (Zoom, Teams, Meet)
CRM / Salesforce integration	No (not the ICP)	Yes (mature, sales-flavored)
Free tier	Trial / capped tier	300 transcription minutes / month, generous
Pro pricing	$49 / mo (per seat)	$16.99 / mo (Pro), $30 / mo (Business)
Recap style	Optimized for technical syncs	Optimized for general office meetings
Org-scale rollout	Designed for small / focused teams	Designed for whole-org rollout

A note on the matrix: Otter is mature and broad — feature for feature, it covers more surface area. We are not going to pretend otherwise. The interesting questions are where the differences matter, which is what the rest of this page is about.

Where Pavleur wins

Real-time AI assist that is actually in the call

This is the single biggest difference and the reason Pavleur exists. Most meeting AI tools — including Otter — are essentially transcription tools that produce a summary after the meeting ends. The AI is downstream of the conversation.

Pavleur runs the AI alongside the conversation. When someone says "let's revisit that auth decision from last quarter," the assist can surface the relevant prior context while the meeting is happening. When an acronym lands that half the room doesn't know, the assist can quietly define it without anyone having to admit they didn't catch it. The point is not to replace the meeting — it's to remove the moments where the meeting stalls because somebody is hunting through Notion.

Otter has Otter AI Chat, which is a post-meeting Q&A interface over the transcript. It's good. But it's a different product shape: you ask Otter questions about the meeting after it ends. Pavleur tries to make the meeting itself smoother.

Recap that reads like an engineer's notes

Otter's summaries are well-tuned for general-purpose meetings — sales calls, marketing standups, customer interviews. They're polished, they cover the bases, and they read fine.

Pavleur's recaps are tuned for the kind of meetings working engineers actually run: design reviews, incident retros, scope-cuts, code-walkthroughs, roadmap planning. The output skews toward what engineers care about (decisions, owners, open questions, deferred items) and skews away from what they don't (vibes summaries, generic action verbs, motivational closing lines).

This is a tuning choice, not a technology gap. Otter could in principle produce engineer-flavored recaps; in practice, because their ICP is broader, their recaps are general by default.

Less integration sprawl, lower setup cost

Otter integrates with a lot of things — Salesforce, HubSpot, Notion, Slack, Zapier, Microsoft Outlook, dozens more. That breadth is a strength for large orgs that want one tool everywhere. For a focused team it's also overhead: there are integration toggles, retention policies, sharing defaults, and team-roles to configure.

Pavleur has a smaller integration surface intentionally. You point it at your calendar, it shows up in the meetings on your calendar, you get transcripts and recaps. If you don't need Salesforce sync, you don't have to think about whether Salesforce sync is enabled.

Where Otter wins

Free tier and price-per-seat

Otter's free tier (300 minutes / month at time of writing) is genuinely generous, and Otter Pro at $16.99 / mo is meaningfully cheaper than Pavleur Pro at $49 / mo. If price is the deciding factor — and for individual users it often is — Otter is the obvious pick.

The thing to ask yourself: is the recap actually changing your behavior after the meeting? If the answer is "I almost never re-read the recap, I just like having the transcript searchable," Otter's price-to-value is hard to beat. If the answer is "the recap changes what I do next," it's worth paying more for a better recap.

Maturity, integrations, polish

Otter has had years to round off rough edges, and it shows. The mobile app is rock-solid. The web app is fast. Permissions and sharing are well thought through. Folder organization, team management, retention policies — all of it has been iterated on for a long time.

Pavleur is newer. We have fewer features, fewer integrations, and our edges are not as smooth yet. If you're rolling out a tool to a 500-person org tomorrow, that maturity is a real advantage and you should weigh it.

CRM and sales-flavored workflows

Otter has invested heavily in the sales motion — Salesforce integration, deal coaching, call summaries that map to opportunity stages. For revenue teams, that's a meaningful value-add.

Pavleur does not do any of this. We are not aimed at sales orgs. If you need CRM sync, Otter is your tool.

Whole-org rollout

If your goal is "every meeting at our company gets transcribed," Otter's pricing, permissions model, and brand recognition make that easier. Pavleur is built for teams that share a workflow — engineering, product, design — not for the whole company.

Pricing comparison

Tier	Pavleur	Otter.ai
Free	Limited trial	300 min / month, free forever
Individual paid	$49 / mo (Pro)	$16.99 / mo (Pro)
Team / Business	$49 / seat / mo	~$30 / seat / mo (Business)
Annual discount	~$348 / yr (Pro)	Yes (Pro and Business annual options)

Pavleur is priced toward focused professional users who want the in-call assist; Otter is priced toward broad transcription use. Both are legitimate price points for what they are. If you'd find Pavleur's recap quality and live assist worth $2 a workday, the math works. If not, Otter is the better deal.

Who should pick each

Pick Otter.ai if:

You want one tool that transcribes every meeting in your company
You have a sales or customer-success team that needs CRM-integrated call recordings
You're price-sensitive and the recap quality difference is not worth the gap
You already use Otter and the existing transcript archive matters to you
You're rolling out to a 100+ person org and need maturity and predictability

Pick Pavleur if:

You run technical meetings — design reviews, retros, planning, code walks — and want the recap to reflect that
You want the AI to be useful during the meeting, not only after
You're an engineer, PM, or EM and the meetings you care about are the ones where decisions get made
You'd rather pay more for a tool that changes your post-meeting behavior than less for a tool you mostly ignore
You don't need CRM sync or company-wide rollout

Verdict

Otter.ai is the safer, broader, cheaper default. If you're not sure which to pick and your meetings are average meetings, pick Otter — it will not let you down, and you'll save money.

Pavleur is the right pick when the meetings matter — when you'd actually re-read the recap, when the in-call assist removes friction from real conversations, when "this meeting could've been an email" is rarer than "this meeting needs the AI to keep up with us." We are not trying to beat Otter at being Otter. We're trying to be the right tool for a specific kind of working professional, and we charge what that's worth.

If you're on the fence, the cheapest path to certainty is to try Pavleur for a week on your real meetings and see whether the recaps actually change what you do next. That's the test we'd run if we were in your seat.