Earmark vs Otter.ai: AI Meeting Notes vs “Meeting → Shippable Work”

If you’re searching for the best AI meeting assistant, you’ll notice most tools fall into one of two categories: tools that help you remember meetings (transcription, meeting notes, meeting summaries) and tools that help you ship outcomes (tickets, decisions, follow-ups, stakeholder updates). Otter.ai is one of the strongest options in the first category: it’s a well-known AI meeting transcription and meeting notes product designed to create a reliable, searchable record of what happened.

Earmark is built for the second category. It isn’t trying to be “better meeting notes.” It’s built to collapse the time between a live conversation and real execution—so you end the call with structured outputs that are ready to move through your workflow, not a document someone has to interpret later.

What Otter.ai is best at

Otter.ai is excellent when your primary goal is capturing the meeting. It’s designed around high-quality live transcription, searchable transcripts, and AI-generated summaries that make it easier to revisit discussions later. Otter’s “meeting agent” can automatically join Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet meetings to transcribe in real time and produce a live summary experience for participants.

That makes Otter a great fit for teams who need dependable meeting transcription software, want an archive of conversations, and value a straightforward workflow: meet, record, summarize, search, and share.

What Earmark is best at

Earmark is built for teams whose real pain isn’t remembering what was said—it’s what happens after the call. Most modern teams don’t struggle with “taking notes.” They struggle with the second shift of work created by meetings: turning discussion into crisp decisions, assigned action items, requirements, and updates that actually drive execution.

So instead of optimizing for a perfect transcript, Earmark optimizes for structured deliverables. The goal is that by the time the meeting ends, you have outcomes that look like how teams already operate: decision logs, action items with owners, drafted tickets, clean follow-up tasks, and stakeholder-ready recaps that don’t require a human to rewrite everything from scratch.

The core difference: documentation vs execution

Otter.ai is fundamentally a meeting documentation system. It captures the conversation and makes it accessible. That’s incredibly valuable, and for many teams it’s the most important job. Earmark is fundamentally an execution system. It treats the meeting as an input stream that should produce ready-to-run work—because the real bottleneck in modern organizations isn’t conversation, it’s conversion.

If your workflow usually looks like “meeting happens → summary arrives → someone edits → someone turns it into tickets → someone posts updates,” that’s where the drag lives. Summary-first tools can accidentally create a new workflow that still depends on human cleanup. Earmark is designed to remove that cleanup step by generating the outputs in the formats your team already ships.

Bot-friendly capture vs bot-less control

A common decision point for companies evaluating AI meeting tools is how capture happens. Otter.ai commonly uses an AI meeting agent that joins calls to record and transcribe automatically, which is exactly what many teams want for convenience and completeness.

Earmark’s approach is built for teams who want more control over capture and distribution, especially in environments where “a bot joined the meeting” becomes an immediate adoption blocker. If your organization has strong norms around privacy, call participants, or data handling, this difference matters just as much as summary quality.

Pricing (what you should actually know)

Otter.ai pricing is straightforward and publicly listed: there’s a free plan, and paid plans that start at $8.33/user/month for Pro and $19.99/user/month for Business (as shown on Otter’s pricing page).

Earmark’s ROI case typically isn’t based on the price of “notes,” but the cost of the meeting itself: the hours spent transforming conversation into work artifacts. If you feel the pain of meeting cleanup in engineering throughput, product delivery, and stakeholder alignment, that’s the budget Earmark is designed to reclaim.

Who should choose Otter.ai?

Otter.ai is the right choice if your biggest need is a reliable, searchable AI meeting transcription system that produces summaries and action items you can refer back to. It’s especially strong for teams that want automatic capture across Zoom/Meet/Teams and value an easily shareable meeting record.

Who should choose Earmark?

Earmark is the right choice if your meetings are already full of decisions, tradeoffs, and commitments—and your real issue is that those outcomes don’t reliably make it into execution systems. If the gap between “we aligned on the call” and “the work is actually moving” is costing you days, Earmark is built to close that gap by producing structured, work-ready outputs as the meeting is happening.

The simplest way to decide

Ask one question after your next important meeting: are you trying to remember what was discussed, or are you trying to ship what was decided?

If you primarily need a meeting record, Otter.ai is a great AI meeting notes tool. If you primarily need meetings to turn into tickets, decisions, and deliverables that drive execution, Earmark is designed for that exact moment.

If you want, I can also rewrite this into a version that’s even more SEO-forward for “Earmark vs Otter,” including a short FAQ section targeting AEO queries like “Is Otter.ai good for action items?” and “What’s the best AI meeting assistant for Jira tickets and decision logs?”