Comparison
Heliotype vs Otter.ai
Otter is the mature generalist: a bot joins, transcribes live, and the result lives in its cloud. Heliotype is the opposite trade — nothing joins, nothing is live, and the result lives on your disk.
What Otter is good at
Otter has been doing this longer than almost anyone, and it shows in the places that need scale: live captions during the call, a searchable archive of everything you've ever recorded, sharing and team plans, and apps on platforms other than macOS. If you want to search across two years of meetings from a phone, that is a real product and Heliotype is not it.
Where Heliotype is different
Otter's assistant joins the meeting as a participant. That is what makes the live transcript possible — and it is also the thing that announces itself to your client, and increasingly the thing your IT department blocks. Microsoft's Teams bot detection reached general availability in June 2026, holding third-party recording bots in the lobby until an organizer admits them. That story is here.
Heliotype records the audio your Mac is already playing and hearing. Nothing joins, so there is nothing to admit or block — and the recording never enters anyone's cloud. Transcription happens after the call, under your own AssemblyAI key, and the transcript lands beside the recording as a plain text file.
| Otter.ai | Heliotype | |
|---|---|---|
| Bot in the call | Yes — joins as a participant | No — records your Mac |
| If IT blocks bots | Affected | Unaffected |
| Live transcription | Yes | No — transcribes after you stop |
| Where recordings live | Otter's cloud | A folder on your Mac |
| Search across meetings | Yes, in their app | Spotlight and grep, on your own files |
| Team features | Yes | None — single user |
| Platforms | Web, iOS, Android, Chrome | macOS, Apple Silicon only |
| Summaries | Yes | No, deliberately — you use your own AI |
| Pricing | Subscription per user, per month | $29 once |
| Transcription cost | Included, with plan limits | Your own key, ~$0.17–0.23/hour, no limits from us |
Pick Otter if…
- You need live captions while the meeting is happening.
- You want a searchable cloud archive, shared with a team.
- You work across Windows, phones, or the web — not only a Mac.
- You need meetings recorded that you don't personally attend.
Pick Heliotype if…
- A bot in the participant list is a problem — for your clients, or for your IT policy.
- You want the recording and transcript to stay on your own disk.
- You'd rather pay once than per seat, per month.
- You'll do the thinking in Claude or ChatGPT and just need clean text.
Competitor details checked 28 July 2026 and stated from public information; plans change — verify before deciding. What Heliotype can't do is published in full.