How to Switch from Otter.ai to Fireflies AI (Without Losing Your Meeting History)

The Real Worry Behind Switching Tools

You've been using Otter for a while, but something's not working — maybe it's transcript-first summaries that need too much manual cleanup, maybe your team keeps losing track of action items after a call ends. Switching notetakers feels riskier than it should, mostly because of one worry: what happens to months of meeting history sitting in Otter once you stop paying for it.

This walks through an actual migration plan — what to export before you cancel anything, how to set Fireflies up on your existing call platforms, and how to avoid the two mistakes that make a tool switch fail. Everything here is based on what's confirmed on each vendor's own site, not a rough guess at how migration "should" work.

Why Teams Switch From Otter to Fireflies

The short version: Otter is generally the stronger pure transcription tool, but Fireflies is built more directly around removing the work that happens after a call ends. If your team's actual complaint isn't "the transcript isn't accurate enough" but "nobody follows up on what we agreed to," that's the specific gap Fireflies is built to close.

Three reasons come up most often in a switch decision. First, action items — Fireflies pulls them out of the conversation automatically and assigns them to whoever committed to them, instead of depending on someone reading back through a transcript. Second, integrations — Fireflies adds unlimited CRM and Slack connections on its Business plan and up, so a summary can land where your team already tracks work. Third, pricing predictability — Fireflies publishes exact per-seat pricing across four tiers, while Otter's model is more usage-based with per-minute overage, which some teams find harder to budget against as call volume grows.

None of that makes Otter the wrong tool broadly — it still has a stronger track record for raw transcription accuracy. But if those three reasons match your actual complaint, the switch is worth planning properly rather than doing it in a rush the week your Otter renewal comes up.

Which Fireflies Plan Should You Start On

Don't default to matching whatever tier you had on Otter — the two vendors' plans aren't structured the same way, so a like-for-like comparison doesn't really exist. As a starting point, Free is enough to run the parallel-testing period covered below, since it includes unlimited transcription and summaries even though team storage is capped at 400 minutes.

If your team relies on CRM or Slack integrations — which is common for teams migrating specifically for that reason — you'll need Business or above, since unlimited integrations aren't included on the entry-level Pro tier. Confirm that requirement before committing to an annual plan, since downgrading later to fix a missing integration is more disruptive than picking the right tier up front.

Before You Switch: What to Export From Otter

Don't cancel Otter the same day you set up Fireflies. Go through your Otter meeting history first and pull out anything you'd actually need to reference later — specific decisions, action items tied to ongoing projects, or transcripts from meetings with legal or compliance relevance.

Otter's current export formats and any plan-tier restrictions on exporting are worth confirming directly on Otter's own account settings or support pages before you rely on a specific format, since export options and limits can change. As a general rule, treat any transcription tool's export feature as something to test on a handful of real meetings before assuming it captures everything you need — formatting, speaker labels and timestamps don't always survive an export cleanly.

Once you've exported what matters, keep that archive somewhere your team can still search it — a shared drive folder is enough. You're not trying to recreate Otter inside Fireflies; you're making sure old context isn't lost the moment you stop paying for the old tool.

Be specific about who's responsible for this step. "Someone should export the important stuff before we cancel" is exactly the kind of task that quietly doesn't happen when it's not assigned to a person with a deadline. Treat it the same way you'd treat offboarding an employee's accounts — a checklist item with an owner, not a vague intention.

Step 1: Set Up Fireflies on Your Call Platforms

Fireflies connects directly to Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, joining as a bot the same way a human notetaker would. Connect your calendar first — that's what lets Fireflies automatically join scheduled meetings without anyone manually starting it call by call.

This step doesn't require changing how your team schedules meetings. If Otter was already joining your calls as a bot on the same platforms, Fireflies slots into that exact workflow.

Step 2: Reconnect Your Team's Integrations

If your team had Otter connected to Slack, a CRM, or another tool, those connections don't carry over automatically — you'll need to set them up fresh on Fireflies. Fireflies' integration depth (5+ CRMs, 9+ project management tools, Slack, dialers like Aircall and RingCentral) is available starting on paid tiers, with unlimited integrations specifically on Business and up.

Do this before you fully cut over, not after. A team that switches tools and then discovers CRM sync isn't reconnected yet tends to quietly revert to manual note-copying for a few weeks, which defeats the point of switching in the first place.

Step 3: Run Both Tools in Parallel First

For one to two weeks, keep Otter running alongside Fireflies on the same meetings. This is the only real way to verify Fireflies' summaries and action items hold up on your team's specific meetings, vocabulary and speaking style before you're depending on it exclusively.

Compare specifically: did action items get captured correctly, did the summary miss anything Otter's transcript caught, and did your team actually read the Fireflies summary or default back to old habits. That last point matters more than accuracy — a technically accurate tool nobody actually uses hasn't fixed anything.

A realistic timeline looks like this: week one, both tools record every meeting, but you keep making decisions based on Otter as usual — Fireflies is there to compare against, not to rely on yet. Week two, flip the default: use Fireflies' summary and action items as the real record, and only check Otter's transcript if something seems off or incomplete. By the end of week two, you should have a clear answer on whether Fireflies' output is trustworthy enough for your team's specific meetings, not just a general sense that "it seemed fine."

Step 4: Migrate Your Team's Habits, Not Just the Tool

The most common reason a tool switch fails isn't the new tool — it's that half the team keeps using the old one out of habit while the other half switches. Make it explicit: after the parallel-run period, Fireflies is the single source of truth for meeting notes and action items, and Otter is no longer the default.

If some people preferred Otter's live transcript view during the actual call, that's a real preference worth acknowledging — but the team-wide record (the one people search later, the one that gets shared with someone who missed the call) should live in one tool, not split across two.

Step 5: Cancel Otter (Once You're Confident)

Only cancel once you've confirmed your exported archive is complete and your team has run at least one full cycle of meetings on Fireflies without falling back to Otter. Otter's current cancellation process, notice period and any data-retention window after cancellation are worth confirming directly on Otter's own account settings before you assume immediate or delayed data loss.

Check your billing cycle before canceling — if you're on an annual plan, canceling mid-cycle doesn't always mean an immediate refund, so timing the cancellation near your renewal date is usually the more cost-effective move.

What You'll Lose (and What You Won't)

You won't lose access to Fireflies' own summaries and action items going forward — those live in Fireflies from day one. What you will lose, unless you export it first, is easy searchability across your old Otter history once that subscription ends. A transcript you didn't export isn't retrievable later just because you remember it existed.

You also won't be able to search across both tools' histories at once inside Fireflies — AskFred only queries meetings Fireflies actually recorded. If a team member asks about a decision from six months ago that only exists in old Otter transcripts, that search still means going back to your exported archive, not asking AskFred.

If your team relies heavily on Otter's live captions during the call itself — reading along in real time rather than reviewing a summary afterward — that's a genuine workflow difference worth testing during the parallel-run period, not something to assume will feel identical on Fireflies. Fireflies' transcript exists, but it's positioned as an input to the summary rather than the primary thing you'd read live during a meeting.

For teams making this switch specifically to fix follow-up and accountability, the practical value case is worth reading in more depth on its own. And for distributed teams, a meeting assistant is only one piece of a broader remote-work stack — Fireflies is also featured on CurataHub's remote-teams tool hub for exactly this reason.