Comparison
Lunar vs Otter.ai
Otter is the most established name in meeting transcription and the best tool on this list for live, collaborative note-taking. It also joins your call as a visible participant and processes your audio in its cloud. Whether that matters depends entirely on who is on the call.
Free during beta — macOS today, Windows soon
The short answer
Pick Otter if live shared notes during the call are the point, and if a visible notetaker in the participant list is not a problem for the meetings you run. Pick Lunar if your calls involve clients or sensitive work, or if what you actually need afterwards is tickets in Jira rather than a searchable transcript.
The three differences that matter
One joins the meeting. One does not.
A bot in the call
Otter joins as a participant that everyone can see. Lunar is a desktop app capturing mic and system audio, so nothing appears in the participant list on Zoom, Meet, or Teams.
Where the audio is processed
Otter processes and stores your audio in its cloud. Lunar keeps sessions on your machine until you sign in, and transcription can run fully on-device if you want it to.
What you hold at the end
Otter gives you an excellent searchable transcript and shared notes. Lunar gives you a summary plus action items that become Jira issues in the right project.
Where Otter is genuinely strong
Otter has been doing this longer than almost anyone and it shows. The live transcript that everyone on the call can watch and annotate together is genuinely useful in interviews, lectures, and workshops, and no bot-free tool replicates it — because watching a shared transcript in real time is exactly the thing a participant in the call can do and a background app cannot. Its search across years of meetings is excellent, and the integrations are mature.
Where it stops
The bot is the whole trade. An assistant appearing in the participant list changes the room: people are more careful, clients ask what it is, and some organisations will not let it into the call at all. Your audio also leaves your machine by design, because the transcript and the archive live in Otter cloud. And the output is a record of what was said rather than a list of what will now be done, so someone still translates the transcript into backlog items.
What Lunar does differently
Lunar never joins the call. It is a desktop app that captures your microphone and your computer system audio directly, so it works with Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, or any other call and nothing shows up as a participant. You still get live answers during the meeting — ask what was just said and it answers from the transcript as it is being written — but you ask it privately rather than in a shared document. Afterwards the action items become Jira issues in the right project, and sessions stay on your machine until you sign in.
So which should you pick?
If your meetings are internal, collaborative, and everyone is comfortable with a notetaker in the room, Otter is a strong and well-supported choice. If you run client calls where a visible bot is awkward, if your security review asks where audio is processed, or if your real problem is that decisions never reach the backlog, Lunar is built for that shape of work.
No bot. No cloud by default. Tickets, not transcripts.
Free during beta. macOS today, Windows soon. No bot will ever join your call.
Lunar
Give every update a place.
Keep work moving.
Replace meeting-driven updates with async conversations that stay accessible, structured, and aligned with how your team works.