Comparison based on publicly available information as of September 2026. Check each product's site for current pricing.
Xtify and Otter both turn meetings into searchable text, and both offer a bot-free Mac app. Everything else is different. Otter is a cloud service — your notes live on AWS, its agent can sit in calls you never join, and its real product is a multi-seat admin console. Xtify keeps the audio and the memory on your own Mac and answers to one person.
Xtify records system and microphone audio locally on your Mac with no bot in the call. The audio never leaves the machine on any tier — the cloud sees only the transcript, briefly, for speech recognition and extraction, and keeps no copy afterward. The enterprise ASR and language-model agreements contractually exclude that text from model training. From each meeting Xtify pulls the decision, action item, risk and follow-up into a memory index on your disk, reachable only through a read-only local MCP server bound to localhost.
Otter stores transcripts and notes in its cloud on AWS S3. OtterPilot, its AI agent, can join Zoom, Meet and Teams as a bot participant — including calls you never attend — though Otter also ships a bot-free desktop app. Deleted conversations sit in Trash for 30 days, and Otter de-identifies user data before training its own models. With Xtify there is no cloud copy to delete and no training use to de-identify against.
Otter shows real-time live captions during the call, can send its agent to meetings you skip, and offers a full multi-seat admin console with SSO, SCIM and usage analytics for a large rollout. Its free tier includes 300 transcription minutes a month. If you need live collaboration or an org-wide deployment, Otter is built for that and Xtify is not.
For one person who would rather their recordings never sit on someone else's servers, Xtify is the tighter fit. The audio stays on the Mac on every tier — Otter's transcripts and notes live in its cloud. No bot is ever a visible participant, so nothing shows in the attendee list and no host has to admit one. The Ultra plan walls memory off per client or per workspace, so context from one engagement never leaks into another. The read-only local MCP server lets an AI agent on your own machine use the memory with no cloud service holding a copy or a key. And Xtify's paid plans start at $6/month against Otter's $8.49 per user — with no seats to administer.
| Xtify | Otter | |
|---|---|---|
| Recording method | Local system + mic audio on the Mac · no bot in the call | OtterPilot bot joins Zoom, Meet and Teams · bot-free desktop app also offered |
| Where data lives | Audio stays on the Mac on every tier · cloud receives only the transcript and keeps no copy | Cloud storage on AWS S3 · 256-bit AES server-side encryption |
| Transcription | 60 languages · speaker diarization by voice · code-switching on Pro Max and up | Live transcription in multiple languages · speaker recognition |
| Team vs individual | Individual and consultant tool · Ultra adds per-client memory partitioning | Per-user plans · shared Channels · admin console with SSO and SCIM on higher tiers |
| MCP access | Read-only local MCP server on localhost · Pro Max and up | Otter MCP Server connects meetings to ChatGPT, Claude and other tools |
| Price entry point | Free $0 · Pro from $6/mo · Pro Max from $10/mo · Ultra from $22/mo | Free $0 with 300 monthly minutes · Pro from $8.49/user/mo · Business from $19.99/user/mo |
Otter pricing · figures fetched September 2026. Xtify pricing on the pricing page.
Choose Otter if you want live captions, an agent that attends calls for you, or an admin console across many seats. Choose Xtify if you are one person who wants meeting audio and memory to stay on your own Mac.
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