FreeFlow vs Otter.ai
A meeting transcription service, not a dictation app. Different job, frequently confused.
Otter.ai and FreeFlow get compared because both turn speech into text, which is roughly where the similarity ends. Otter is a meeting product: it joins your Zoom, Teams and Meet calls, transcribes everyone, identifies speakers, and produces summaries and action items afterwards.
FreeFlow types for you. There is no meeting, no recording, no shared workspace — you hold a key, you talk, and the words go into whatever app your cursor is in.
If you are choosing between them, you are probably solving one of two very different problems.
Meetings versus cursors
Otter's job is a conversation with other people in it. Multiple speakers, a shared transcript, a searchable archive your team can read, summaries you send round afterwards. FreeFlow does none of that and should not be considered for it.
FreeFlow's job is the writing you would otherwise type — the Slack reply, the email, the commit message, the prompt to Claude. Otter is not built to put text into the frontmost app, and using it that way fights the product.
The privacy gap is much wider here
Otter uploads and stores meeting recordings and transcripts in your account by design — that persistence is the product. For internal team meetings that is usually fine, and it is the reason people are wary of Otter joining client calls, legal discussions or anything under NDA.
FreeFlow stores everything in plain files under ~/Library/Application Support/FreeFlow/ on your own disk, and Incognito writes nothing at all. There is no account, so there is nothing to leave in one.
You may well want both
This is not a page trying to talk you out of Otter. Plenty of people run a meeting transcription service and a dictation app, because they are unrelated tools.
The mistake worth avoiding is buying Otter to solve dictation. Its free tier gives 300 minutes a month, which is a meeting budget, not a typing one.
Pick Otter.ai instead if…
- You need meeting transcription — Zoom, Teams or Meet, with speaker identification and summaries.
- You want a searchable archive of conversations your team can read.
- You need transcripts on the web, iPhone and Android rather than typing on one Mac.
- You are transcribing conversations rather than writing your own text.
The verdict
Not competitors. Otter is for meetings; FreeFlow is for typing. If you were comparing them because both say 'speech to text', the question that sorts it is whether anyone else is talking. If yes, Otter. If it is just you writing something, that is what FreeFlow does.
Questions people actually ask
Can Otter.ai be used for dictation?
Not really. It is built around recording and transcribing conversations, not typing into the app you are using. Its 300-minute free tier is also sized for meetings, not daily writing.
Can FreeFlow transcribe a meeting?
No. It has no recording, no speaker identification and no file import. For meetings, Otter is the right tool.
Should I run both?
Plenty of people do — they solve different problems and do not conflict.