Seal
An Otter.ai alternative with no bot and no minute meter
No Otter Assistant in the participant list, no 300-minute ceiling, no monthly bill — because the transcription happens on your Mac instead of on a server.
Otter sends a visible assistant into your meetings and transcribes in its cloud, under monthly minute caps, on a subscription. Seal listens from your own Mac, transcribes on-device with no cap, needs no account, and costs $49 once — or nothing at all.
The two objections people actually have
Search for a way off Otter and you'll find two complaints, and they're different problems with the same root.
The first is social. Otter joins your calls as a participant — the "Otter Assistant" that appears in the Zoom, Teams, or Meet list, often pulled in automatically through calendar sync. People notice it. Guests ask about it. Sometimes it turns up in a meeting you didn't intend to record, which is why "how do I stop Otter from joining my meetings" is such a well-worn search. A note-taker should not be something you have to apologise for.
The second is structural. Your audio is uploaded to Otter's servers, transcribed there, and stored in your account. Otter's policy allows it to keep material after you delete it where it judges that necessary for legitimate business purposes, and outside an enterprise agreement Otter acts as the data controller rather than a processor working on your behalf. That is a normal arrangement for a cloud service. It is also a real answer to give a client who asks where the recording of your conversation is kept.
Both problems come from the same decision: the meeting is processed somewhere other than your computer. Change that, and both go away at once.
Otter.ai vs Seal, line by line
| Seal | Otter.ai | |
|---|---|---|
| Bot in the call | Never — records from your Mac | Yes — a visible assistant participant |
| Where audio is transcribed | On your Mac | Uploaded to Otter's cloud |
| Free tier limits | Unlimited minutes and meetings | 300 min/month, 30 min per conversation |
| Paid tier limits | No caps of any kind | 1,200 min/month on Pro, 90 min per call |
| Account required | None | Yes |
| Works with no internet | Fully | No |
| Who controls the data | You — they're files on your disk | Otter, as data controller by default |
| Price | Free core; $49 once, or $149 lifetime | Pro from $8.33/user/mo annual; Business from $19.99 |
| If you stop paying | Everything keeps working; export never locked | Back to the free tier's caps |
What you give up by leaving
Otter is a mature product with a large surface area, and a fair comparison has to say so. You would be giving up real things:
- Cross-platform access. Otter runs on the web, iOS, and Android. Seal is a Mac app; your notes are on that Mac.
- Shared team workspaces and live collaborative editing during a call.
- A large integration catalogue — CRM sync, Slack, and the rest.
- Transcribing meetings you didn't attend, which is exactly what a bot is good at. Seal has to be on a Mac that is in the call.
- Uploading existing recordings in bulk to a cloud archive shared with colleagues.
If your work depends on those, Otter is the better tool and you should keep it. Seal is the better tool if what you want is for the conversation to stay on your machine — and to stop counting minutes.
On minute caps. They aren't arbitrary meanness. Cloud transcription costs the vendor money per minute of audio, so a cap is how the free tier survives. Seal has no cap for the same structural reason it has no subscription: your Mac does the work, so a longer meeting costs us nothing.
How Seal handles the same job
When Zoom, Meet, or Teams starts using your microphone, Seal notices and offers to record — you say yes or you don't, and it stops by itself when the call ends. It hears both sides: your microphone and the call's audio. Whisper runs on your Mac and the transcript builds live. When you stop, a language model on your Mac writes the structured notes, names the meeting, and pulls out who promised what.
Afterwards you can search everything you've ever recorded, ask a question about a meeting from months ago and get an answer drawn from the transcript, and export to Markdown or PDF — which stays free forever, on every plan, because notes you can't get out aren't really yours.
Questions people ask
How do I stop Otter.ai from joining my meetings?
In Otter, open Settings, find the meeting assistant section, and turn off auto-join for calendar events; revoking Otter's calendar access stops it more definitively. If you would rather not manage a bot's behaviour at all, use a note-taker that records from your own machine instead of sending a participant into the call.
Is there an Otter.ai alternative that works offline?
Yes. Seal runs the speech model on your Mac, so it records and transcribes with no internet connection at all. Otter cannot transcribe offline, because the audio is processed on its servers.
Does Otter.ai store my recordings?
Yes. Audio is uploaded to Otter's cloud, transcribed there, and stored in your account. Otter's privacy policy also allows it to retain material after you delete it where it considers this necessary for legitimate business purposes, and it acts as data controller unless you hold an enterprise agreement.
Is there a meeting transcription app with no monthly limit?
Seal has no minute cap and no per-meeting time limit on any plan, including the free one, because there is no server cost per minute — your Mac does the transcription. Otter's free tier allows 300 minutes a month with a 30-minute cap per conversation.
Keep reading
No bot to disable, no minutes to count
Free to download, unlimited meetings, no account to create.