Rev vs Otter.ai — transcription API vs meeting assistant
Rev vs Otter.ai: a speech-to-text service and API compared against a live meeting assistant — two different jobs, plus pricing and privacy notes.
| Attribute | Rev (Rev AI) | Otter.ai |
|---|---|---|
| Overall score | 5.8 | 5.9 |
| Deployment | cloud | cloud |
| Open source | No | No |
| Diarization | Yes | Yes |
| Languages | 58 | 3 |
| Accuracy (WER) | ~5% | — |
| Pricing | API $0.003/min (Reverb); Essentials ~$25/seat/mo; human transcription $1.99/min | Free; Pro ~$17/user/mo; Business ~$30/user/mo; Enterprise custom |
| Compliance | SOC2, HIPAA | SOC2, GDPR |
| API | REST, SDK | REST |
| Best for | developers, api, captioning | meetings, teams |
Rev and Otter.ai solve different problems. Rev is a transcription service built around a low-cost async speech-to-text API at $0.003/min (diarization included) with an optional 99%+ human transcription tier — a building block you send files to. Otter.ai is a live meeting assistant that joins Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams to capture and summarise calls in real time, starting from ~$17/user/mo (Pro). Comparing them is mostly a question of which job you have.
Choose Rev if you need to transcribe recorded audio or video, want a developer API and SDK for a pipeline, need the fallback of human-verified transcripts, or need a HIPAA-eligible vendor for regulated content. Choose Otter if your work is recurring meetings and you want automatic joining, live notes and calendar/conferencing integrations rather than raw transcript files.
Both are cloud-only, so audio leaves your environment in either case. If privacy or compliance rules that out, see the best on-prem transcription ranking and the on-prem vs cloud transcription guide.