Tactiq, Otter, Fireflies, Fathom — and the EU alternative you probably missed

Search for “AI meeting notes” and you'll land on Otter.ai, Fireflies, Tactiq, Fathom, or tl;dv. All five are solid products. All five are also incorporated in the United States. For most teams that's fine. For some European teams — healthcare, legal, public sector, anyone with a DPO who actually reads contracts — it's a blocker.

This post compares the category honestly and then explains where Punkto fits in. We built Punkto to be the obvious choice for one specific audience, not to outscore Otter on feature count.

The five products at a glance

Otter.ai

The category leader. Roughly 10 years old, ~$30M ARR, deep speaker diarisation, excellent mobile apps, integrations with Zoom, Teams, Meet. Free tier is generous (300 minutes/month). Pricing starts at $17/user/month. Trains its models on user audio unless you're on Business plan. Incorporated in Mountain View, California.

Fireflies.ai

Otter's main competitor with stronger CRM plays — native connectors to Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive. Pricing from $18/user/month. Great for sales teams; the “Smart Search” across call history is their standout feature. Based in San Francisco.

Tactiq

Chrome-native, Meet-first. The closest comparable to what a lightweight browser extension looks like in this space. No mobile app. Pricing $12–20/month. Captures live captions in the browser, generates AI summaries after. San Francisco.

Fathom

Aggressive free tier, Zoom-native integration, good clip-sharing for sales coaching. Free for individuals and remains usable (not a stealth trial). Incorporated in San Francisco.

tl;dv

Freemium heavy, multilingual focus (30+ languages), strong Loom-style highlight reels. Pricing from $20/user/month. Incorporated in Berlin but the parent company and significant infrastructure are US-hosted.

Where they all sit on EU compliance

This is the part most comparison posts skip. All five tools — with the partial exception of tl;dv — are US-headquartered or US-controlled. That matters for three specific reasons under GDPR.

First, the US CLOUD Act (2018) gives US authorities compelled access to data held by US-controlled companies, regardless of where the data physically sits. An EU region on AWS or GCP does not help. A Paris datacenter operated by an Amazon subsidiary is still reachable by a warrant served in Seattle.

Second, the Schrems IIruling of July 2020 invalidated Privacy Shield and forced EU controllers to add “supplementary measures” when transferring personal data to the US. The current legal basis — the 2023 Data Privacy Framework — is already being challenged in court, and Max Schrems does not quit. Anyone running a multi-year GDPR risk assessment has to assume another invalidation is plausible.

Third, the defaults. Otter famously trained its models on user audio by default for years (this was changed after public pressure, but still requires specific plan tiers for full opt-out). Fireflies has similar defaults. Unless you read the DPA closely, your meetings may be training someone else's model.

A compliance-first comparison

Here's the same five tools, but on the criteria that matter for a European DPO.

Hosting region & corporate control

• Otter, Fireflies, Tactiq, Fathom, tl;dv: US-controlled. EU hosting options when advertised are marketing, not corporate separation.
• Punkto: 100% EU-hosted, EU-controlled providers, no US subsidiary, no CLOUD Act reach.

Data used for AI training

• Otter: yes by default on lower tiers, opt-out on Business.
• Fireflies: opt-out, but not prominent.
• Tactiq: data processed via OpenAI by default; DPA specifies it's not used for training OpenAI models, but the transit itself leaves the EU.
• Fathom, tl;dv: no training by default.
• Punkto: never. Our AI provider is European; our contract forbids training on customer data, and this is written in our privacy policy.

Signed DPA

• Otter, Fireflies: available on paid plans, templated.
• Tactiq, Fathom, tl;dv: available, templated.
• Punkto: available on Enterprise, negotiable.

Subprocessor list

Otter lists ~25 subprocessors, Fireflies ~30, Tactiq a dozen. All typical for SaaS of that scale, all mostly US-based. Punkto's subprocessor list is short and EU-centric: an EU host, an EU AI provider, a transactional email provider, and an open-source data layer self-hosted in the EU. The point isn't that fewer is always better — it's that “known quantity” matters more than “lots of integrations” when you're auditing a transfer chain.

Where Punkto stops being the right answer

We'd rather be honest about where the US tools outperform us.

• Speaker diarisation.Otter's eight years of research produce noticeably better speaker labelling than anything else on the market. If clean per-speaker transcripts are your primary need, use Otter.
• Mobile apps. We ship a PWA. Otter and Fireflies have mature native iOS and Android apps. If you record in-person meetings from a phone, that matters.
• CRM-native workflows.Fireflies' Salesforce and HubSpot integrations have several years of iteration. Our outbound webhooks cover the 80% case via Zapier or Make, but a dedicated integration is not the same.
• Massive meeting volumes.At hundreds of concurrent users in a single company, US tools have the operational maturity we don't yet.

Where Punkto is the right answer

• Your DPO has said “no US SaaS” for regulated data and you've been looking for six months.
• You run structured meetings — retrospectives, Lean Coffee, topic-voted syncs — and Otter's “here's a transcript” workflow wastes half of what happened in the room.
• You want sovereignty as a default, not something you have to pay extra to enable.
• You want to pay €9/month per person and not $20.

How to choose

Open a Google Doc, write down your top three constraints, and rank the tools on those. If your top constraint is “maximum speaker diarisation accuracy,” pick Otter. If it's “tight Salesforce integration,” pick Fireflies. If it's “I can hand this contract to my DPO without flinching,” pick Punkto.

The category has room for multiple winners. We built Punkto because the European audience was being served last, if at all.

Want to compare more carefully? Our pricing page has a full feature breakdown, and our enterprise page lists every subprocessor and our full stack.