Steno vs Otter.ai
Everything Otter does, without the bot or the cloud.
Otter is the incumbent cloud transcription service: an OtterPilot bot joins your call as a participant, recordings live on Otter's servers, and every plan below Business has minute caps. Steno takes the opposite approach — it captures system audio on your own machine, transcribes and summarizes locally, and never uploads anything.
| Steno | Otter.ai | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free — everything included | Free: 300 min/month (30 min per conversation); Pro from $8.33/user/month billed annually; Business from $19.99 |
| Open source | Yes — MIT license | No — proprietary |
| Transcription | 100% on your device (Parakeet, Whisper) | In the cloud |
| AI summaries | On your device — bundled local models, no setup | In the cloud |
| Audio leaves your device | Never | Yes — recordings are stored on Otter's servers |
| Bot joins your meetings | No bot — captures system audio directly | Yes — OtterPilot appears as a participant in your calls |
| Works with | Any meeting app, plus in-person | Zoom, Meet, Teams via the bot; mobile recording |
| Usage limits | None — unlimited meetings and minutes | Minute caps on every plan below Business |
| Account required | No account, no sign-up | Yes |
| Platforms | macOS (Apple Silicon) · Windows (alpha) | Web browser, iOS, Android |
Otter.ai details taken from its public website and documentation, verified July 2026. Pricing and features change — check their site for current terms.
Otter charges a subscription to run your audio through its servers, with a bot sitting visibly in your meetings. Steno removes the bot, the server, the account, and the bill — the whole pipeline runs on hardware you already own.
Choose Steno if
- You don't want a bot appearing in client or internal calls
- Your recordings shouldn't live on a third party's servers
- You keep hitting minute caps — Steno has no limits at any length
- You record in-person conversations and don't want them uploaded
Choose Otter.ai if
- You need to record from a phone, or work entirely in a browser
- Your team collaborates inside a shared cloud workspace of transcripts
- You want Otter's live shared highlights during large webinars
Questions
No. Steno captures system audio and microphone on your machine, so both sides of any call are transcribed without a participant joining. Nothing announces itself in your meeting, because nothing enters the meeting.
Yes. Transcription and summarization run on your own hardware, so there's no metering — no monthly minutes, no per-conversation cap, no file-import quota. Otter's free plan allows 300 minutes a month with a 30-minute cap per conversation.
With Otter, recordings and transcripts are stored in Otter's cloud, under Otter's terms. With Steno, they're ordinary files in local app storage on your device — your meeting content is never uploaded. (Steno does make some network calls unrelated to your content: update checks, first-run model downloads, and anonymous usage telemetry that's on by default and can be switched off in Settings.)
Steno uses Parakeet TDT v3 for live transcription and Whisper for the long tail of 99 languages — current open models that benchmark competitively with commercial cloud ASR. As with any transcription, quiet rooms and decent microphones matter more than the engine.
There's no hosted infrastructure to pay for: your machine does the work. Steno is an open-source project (MIT), so you can read the code, build it yourself, and verify exactly what it does and doesn't send.
More comparisons: Steno vs Granola · Steno vs Fireflies.ai
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Free. Open source. No account needed.
macOS 14.4+ (Apple Silicon) · Windows 10/11 (x64, alpha — unsigned) · ~4 GB for the default model