Otter and Horato both send a bot into meetings and both hand back a transcript, and the resemblance stops there. Otter is an app your team uses, tuned for live transcription and priced per seat. Horato is an API your product calls, built for shipping recording as a feature under your own name. If you already know which of those sentences describes you, you have your answer. What follows is the supporting detail, checked against Otter's public pages.
What Otter is and who it is for
Otter is an app-first transcription service with a large user base and a long-standing focus on live transcription. Its bot, OtterPilot, joins Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams meetings, and the transcript appears while the meeting is still running. At $8.33 per user per month on the annual Pro plan, it is the cheapest paid entry among the mainstream notetakers.
The compliance story is solid: SOC 2 Type II, with HIPAA available at the enterprise tier. For an individual or a team that wants live captions and a searchable meeting history, Otter is a reasonable default.
What the API can and cannot do
Otter's public API is gated to the Enterprise tier, and it is read-mostly. You can pull transcripts, conversations, and action items, and you can receive webhooks when a conversation completes. What you cannot do is send the bot to an arbitrary meeting programmatically. The API reports on what OtterPilot did. It does not let your product decide what OtterPilot does next.
There is also no published white-label option, so the bot joins as OtterPilot even in calls your product arranged. For an internal tool that costs nothing. For an embedded feature, it means a third party's name appears in front of your customers every time your feature runs.
Horato is built for that second case. Your product starts the bot through the API, the bot carries your brand by default at no surcharge, and the post-call transcript and summary come back through API calls and signed webhooks with delivery logs. One honest caveat in the other direction: Horato's live transcript is in beta, and if real-time captions are the feature you are selling, Otter's live focus is ahead today.
The training question
Read both vendors' AI terms, because they differ in kind. Otter's own pages state that it trains its proprietary models on de-identified customer recordings and transcripts. It bars its third-party AI providers from training on your data and excludes imported documents, but the first-party training is stated policy. Horato's position: customer content is never used to train AI models, and recording retention defaults to 30 days, configurable from 1 to 365 days. If you embed recording into a product, your customers will eventually ask you this exact question, so decide what your answer is before they do.
Pricing in plain prose
Otter's free Basic plan includes 300 monthly transcription minutes. Pro is $8.33 per user per month billed annually, with 1,200 monthly minutes and a 90-minute cap per meeting. Business is $19.99 per user per month annually, with unlimited minutes and a 4-hour meeting cap. Enterprise is custom, and it is the only tier with API access.
Horato prices by usage. The free tier includes 3 development accounts with no card. Pro is $10 per month with 10 active end-user accounts and 10 shared recording hours; additional accounts cost $1 each, $0.75 above 1,000, and recording past the pool runs $0.70 per hour managed or $0.30 per hour with your own transcription key. Provider connections do not raise the billable count. The caps are the practical difference: an Otter Pro seat stops at 1,200 minutes a month and 90 minutes a meeting, while Horato's recording hours are a pool you can top up.
When to choose which
- Choose Otter if your team wants live transcription during meetings at the lowest paid entry price in the category.
- Choose Otter if you are an Enterprise customer whose main need is pulling completed transcripts and action items into internal systems.
- Choose Otter if the notetaker is a tool for your staff, where OtterPilot's name in the participant list costs you nothing.
- Choose Horato if recording is a feature of your product and the bot must carry your brand.
- Choose Horato if you need programmatic bot control without an Enterprise contract, with results delivered over signed webhooks.
- Choose Horato if your customers will ask whether their meetings train anyone's models and you want the answer to be no.
- Choose Horato if you also need calendar, email, contacts, tasks, or white-label scheduling under one account model.
A note on these facts
The Otter numbers and terms above, including the API scope and the training policy, were checked against its public pages in August 2026. Vendors revise these pages without announcements. Confirm current details with Otter before you decide, and apply the same scrutiny to Horato's pricing page.