Otter AI vs Claras: meeting notes or video transcripts

The main differences, explained

What each one is really for

Otter does its work while people are talking. You schedule its notetaker to join your Zoom, Teams or Google Meet calls, or you record from its desktop app, Chrome extension or phone with no bot in the call. Words appear live. Afterwards you get a summary and action items, and Otter AI Chat can search across your meetings and connected apps. Its education page makes the same offer for lectures: live captions and notes, in a room or online.

Claras does its work after something has been published or recorded. You give it a link or a file, and it gives you a transcript, a summary, chapters and a chat. It can't attend or capture anything. If nobody has recorded it yet, Claras can't help.

The same job in each: a one-hour YouTube video

In Otter, its guide gives two routes, and neither starts from the link.

• Play it aloud. Start recording in Otter and play the video so your microphone picks it up. Words appear as the video plays, so plan on sitting through the hour in a quiet room. On the free plan one conversation is capped at 30 minutes.
• Upload the file. Get an MP4 first, which the guide says you can do with a YouTube converter or another download. Otter says this route is the most accurate. Each file uses one of your imports.

Once it's in, you can click a word to jump to that moment, fix mistakes, tag speakers and export.

In Claras, you sign in with a free account and paste the link. If the video has captions, Claras reads them, and you don't wait for it to play. If it has none, Claras transcribes the audio with AI, up to 30 minutes on the free plan and 3 hours on a paid one. You then get chapters that jump to their moment, a summary and Ask AI. You can't edit the transcript or see who is speaking, and YouTube Shorts and live links don't work in the app or extension yet.

What each costs in practice

Otter's prices are in the table above, charged per user. Minutes are a shared pool and don't roll over. Its pricing page also shows limited offers, an India-only Pro discount and 20% off Business for 3 months for first-time subscribers, which we left out. Students and teachers with a .edu email get 20% off Pro. Claras prices are on the pricing page. Three example months:

• Five hours of meetings a week. That is about 1,300 minutes a month, more than the 1,200 Otter Pro includes, so most months run over. Otter Business has no monthly cap on meetings, and allows 4 hours per meeting against Pro's 90 minutes. Claras can't do this job at any price.
• Thirty one-hour YouTube lectures with captions. That is 1,800 minutes, more than Otter Pro includes, and Pro allows only 10 file imports a month. Otter Business allows 6,000 imported minutes a month. In Claras, YouTube videos with captions use no transcription hours, and Pro allows 50 videos a day.
• Eight hours of your own recordings, in two-hour files. Otter Pro's minutes cover the total, but its 90-minute limit doesn't cover one file, so you would need Business. Claras Pro includes 10 hours a month and takes files up to 6 hours. You give up speaker labels and editing.

Who should choose which

Choose Otter if

• You spend your week in Zoom, Teams or Google Meet and want notes without taking them.
• You need to capture conversations in a room, on your phone.
• Your team shares notes, assigns action items or syncs calls to Salesforce or HubSpot.
• It matters who said what, or you need to correct the transcript before using it.
• You need company controls. Otter lists SSO for Enterprise, with a minimum of 100 users, and HIPAA compliance as an add-on.

For all of these, Otter is the better choice, and Claras isn't really an alternative.

Choose Claras if

• What you learn from is already on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok.
• You want to compare many videos at once, not transcribe them one by one.
• You want answers about a video, or want to take its transcript to another AI, and don't need meeting features.

If you only have a recording

If you just have a recording and want the text, either works, so start with the free plan of each. Here is how Claras handles your own recordings and sales calls. If a person needs to check the transcript, neither product does that, so compare Claras and Rev.