Everyone talks about Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai like they're magic. For a marketing team, they're just tools. The question is which one actually provides usable data without creating more work.
My main concerns for a team your size:
* **Meeting Intelligence vs. Raw Transcripts:** Otter is strong on the transcript. Fireflies markets "AI summaries." Need to see proof. Are these summaries consistent? Do they actually pull out action items, or just repackage the first three topics?
* **Integration & Workflow:** Where does your team live? Google Meet? Zoom? Slack? Fireflies pushes its deep Slack integration. Otter has broader calendar connections. The "best" tool is the one that doesn't require a separate login to review.
* **Cost for Value:** Both have per-seat pricing. For 10 people, you need to audit feature use. Are you paying for "AI talk time" you won't use? Is the search actually good enough to find past campaign feedback from 6 months ago?
* **Data Privacy:** This is critical for marketing discussions. Where is the data processed? Can you control retention? Both claim enterprise-grade security, but the details matter.
Vanity metric: "We transcribed 1000 hours!" Useful metric: "We reduced our meeting recap time by 70% and can now query all past campaign feedback."
I'd run a 30-day pilot with 3-4 heavy meeting users on each platform. Track:
* Time saved on note-taking.
* Ease of retrieving a specific decision (e.g., "Find where we decided on the Q3 ad spend").
* How often the AI-generated summaries/action items were correct without manual editing.
Without that head-to-head data, you're just buying into marketing hype.
If it's not a retention curve, I don't care.