Kanary vs Otter.ai

Choose Otter.ai if…

• Colleagues need to open meetings they were not in, like a salesperson reading last week's call or a manager catching up on a missed review
• Meetings belong in one shared, searchable system of record for the whole team
• You are fine with recordings living in a cloud account, because that is what makes sharing work

Choose Kanary if…

• The recordings are essentially yours: interviews, customer calls, one-on-ones, lectures
• Meeting audio never needs to leave your Mac
• You would rather not pay per seat, per month, for storage and processing your own Mac can do

01Can someone else find the meeting?

Otter.ai keeps recordings where a team can reach them. Kanary keeps them on the Mac that made them.

This is the fork everything else follows from. Otter.ai puts recordings in an account: any teammate can search across meetings from a browser on any operating system, permissions are managed centrally, and the transcript is reachable when your laptop is shut.

Kanary stores recordings on the Mac that made them, syncing between your own Macs over iCloud Drive. There is no shared library and no way to grant a colleague access. That is not a missing feature but the direct consequence of not uploading anything by default: the only way audio leaves the Mac is iCloud Drive sync you turn on yourself.

If you need the first behaviour, stop reading and use Otter.ai; it is genuinely better at it.

02Who actually goes to the meeting?

Otter can attend and record for you. Kanary gets you into the meeting, then leaves recording under your control.

Connect Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook to Otter and its Notetaker can automatically join scheduled Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams calls as a participant. You can choose which kinds of meetings it joins, and it can record while you are absent. The host may still need to admit it or allow recording.

Kanary reads the calendars already synced to your Mac, including iCloud, Google, and Exchange, and opens the meeting link one minute before it starts. It does not join as another participant, does not record in your absence, and does not depend on the meeting accepting a guest bot. Recording still starts only when you choose it.

Otter offers more automation. Kanary keeps attendance and recording attached to the person at the Mac. The better model depends on whether you want a delegate that can attend without you, or a tool that helps you arrive without putting another participant in the room.

03What do the free tiers actually get you?

Otter.ai's free tier is metered in hours per month. Kanary's is metered in length per recording.

Otter.ai's free plan gives you about 5 hours of transcription a month, and each meeting is transcribed for the first 30 minutes only, so an hour-long call loses its second half. Past either limit, you are on a paid seat. The free plan also keeps only your 25 most recent conversations.

Kanary's free tier does not meter hours at all, because nothing is being processed on someone else's servers. Instead it limits how much of a single recording gets transcribed and summarised (1 hour 15 minutes), and the paid tier removes that limit.

Check the per-meeting cap too: it applies to one continuous call, so for an all-day planning session or a long workshop, transcription stops partway through. Kanary compresses audio in the background as it records, so a three-hour all-hands is an ordinary case, and if the disk starts filling the recording is stopped safely rather than lost.

04What running locally gives you

Kanary records the Mac rather than the meeting. Everything below follows from that one decision.

• Japanese subtitles appear while the English sentence is still being spoken
• Works on a plane, with no connection and no account
• Your voice and everyone else's are recorded as two separate tracks
• No bot in the participant list, and no one to admit
• Google Meet, Zoom, Teams, FaceTime, Discord, WhatsApp and LINE, with no per-service setup
• Drag in a .mov or .mp4 and the audio is extracted and treated like any other recording
• Cue hands the in-progress transcript straight to Claude, Codex, or Cursor
• When a call starts using the microphone, Kanary offers to record it in one click

Some things are not a matter of engineering effort. A cloud service has to upload, process, and return, and that round trip is the product. Because Kanary reads the speaker output directly on the Mac, there is no round trip to wait for.

The same locality is why your own voice never blends into the room: the microphone and the speaker are captured as two separate tracks, so your side and theirs are apart before any model gets involved.

It also reaches conversations a bot cannot. A bot only attends meetings it can be invited to, and the calls that matter most are often the ones nobody sends an invitation for.

Kanary

• Needs macOS 26 Tahoe or later on Apple Silicon. No Windows, iPad, Intel Mac, or browser version
• No shared team library. A colleague cannot open a meeting they were not in
• No Salesforce, HubSpot, or Zapier integrations. And no admin console or SSO
• Transcription and summarising use your own Mac’s processor

Otter.ai

• Audio is uploaded to and stored on its servers. As part of normal use, not as an option you turn on
• The free plan is capped. Both monthly and per meeting
• Some capture methods put a bot in the meeting. Which needs guest admission
• Team use is priced per seat, per month