Transcription is not the job. Filing it is.
Otter turns an hour of audio into text extremely well, for anybody who needs an hour of audio turned into text. Recruiters need something else: the client’s requirements on the job, the candidate’s notice period on the candidate, and the promise you made turned into a task before you forget it.
A licence and a meter
Their published Business plan is per user per month with a five-seat minimum and a monthly transcription-minutes cap, with cheaper Pro and free tiers below it. Checked 22 August 2026.
Structured for recruitment, not for everyone
A briefing, a screen and a debrief produce different output.
Built for everybody means shaped for nobody
A general transcription tool gives every meeting the same treatment. An intake call, a screening and a client debrief are three different jobs with three different outputs, and only one product on this page knows the difference.
A client briefing
A transcript and a summary
Otter
A drafted vacancy, matched today
Recruitly
A screening call
A transcript and a summary
Otter
Notes, a scorecard prefill, a stage move
Recruitly
A team of 5
Five seats and a minute cap
Otter
The hours you actually attended
Recruitly
Based on Otter’s published plans, minimums and usage caps, checked 22 August 2026. Their pricing changes — check their site, and hold ours to the same standard.
What happens when the notetaker owns the records
Written onto the record
Notes land on the client, the candidate and the job in the CRM your agency already runs on. Nothing to copy, nothing to file, nothing to reconcile.
The call becomes the job
A client briefing drafts the vacancy: requirements, band, process and fee, ready to publish and match against the same afternoon.
Commitments become tasks
Every promise made in the room becomes a task with an owner and a date, or a callback in the queue. Not a bullet in a document.
The rest of the desk
Jobs, candidates, shortlists, placements, billings, campaigns, WhatsApp and an AI phone system — in the same subscription.
General purpose, specific desk
Otter has to be equally useful to a student in a lecture, a journalist in an interview and a recruiter on a client call. That is a ceiling, not an insult.
It cannot separate a must-have from a nice-to-have in a briefing, because it does not know what a vacancy is. It cannot log a notice period against a candidate, because it has no candidates. It cannot queue the callback you promised, because it has no queue and no phone.
Recruitly only serves recruitment agencies. Every meeting is filed by what it was, onto the records it concerned, with the one action that meeting type earns — draft the job, prefill the scorecard, move the stage, chase the promise.
Recruitly vs Otter
One gives you the words. One gives you the afternoon back.
| What you licence | Hours attended | Seats, five minimum on Business |
| Usage caps | None — you pay for what you attend | Monthly minutes, per plan |
| Where the notes live | On the candidate, client and job | Its own workspace |
| Output shaped by meeting type | Included | — |
| Built for recruitment | Included | — |
| Drafts a vacancy from a client briefing | Included | — |
| Action items become owned CRM tasks | Included | — |
| Applicant tracking system | Included | — |
| Recruitment CRM | Included | — |
| AI phone system in the same product | Included | — |
| Cost of a quiet month | Nothing | The full seat |
Capability comparison against Otter’s published plans, checked 22 August 2026.
Questions before you move
We only wanted transcripts. Is this overkill?
If a searchable transcript really is all you want, Otter does that and does it cheaply. The question worth asking is what happens to the transcript afterwards — because on most desks the honest answer is nothing, and the reason to have a notetaker at all was the follow-up nobody has time for.
How is the speaker naming different?
Otter identifies speakers by voice, which is guesswork that degrades with accents, crosstalk and bad microphones. Meeting platforms already know who each participant is, and hand that identity over with every line — so the transcript reads Priya Nair and Gary Williams from the first word, and every action item knows who owes it.
What about the minute caps?
There are none here. You pay $1.50 for each hour she actually attended, charged by the second, with the first hour free for every user. A twenty-minute screen costs fifty pence and nothing accrues against a monthly allowance.
Does it work on all the meeting platforms?
Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Webex, from one email address, with nothing to install. Add her to the invite or add her mid-meeting from the platform’s own participant box.