AI meeting notetaker that records, transcribes, and summarizes calls.
Productivity
Fireflies.ai is the AI meeting notetaker that most operators reach for when they want transcription, summaries, and searchable meeting archives without thinking about it. You connect Google Calendar or Microsoft 365, Fireflies auto-joins every call on the schedule, and by the time the meeting ends there is a transcript, a summary, action items, and a searchable record sitting in your workspace. This is the boring, load-bearing meeting infrastructure category, and Fireflies has been one of the two or three defaults in it since 2020.
The one-line positioning: Fireflies is the notetaker for teams that treat meetings as a data source. It records everything by default, indexes it, and exposes the archive as something you can search across weeks and months. The competing model — represented by Granola — is that the notetaker should not join the call at all; you type sparse notes during the meeting and the AI enriches them from your device audio afterwards. Both models work. They serve different buyers.
Fireflies wins on breadth: it covers Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and dial-in numbers; it transcribes in 60+ languages; it integrates with roughly every CRM and project tool a growing company touches; and it treats the full archive as first-class product surface. Where it can feel heavy is the ambient always-recording posture, which some teams — especially those in Europe or regulated industries — have to explicitly gate.
In 2026, Fireflies has extended past pure notetaking into what the company now calls "conversation intelligence" — meeting analytics, sentiment tracking, competitive mention detection, and a workspace-wide AskFred assistant that answers questions across the archive. Some of these features are marketing gloss on top of transcription; some of them, particularly AskFred over a mature archive, are genuinely useful for revenue teams. For founders and small operators the core notetaker is the reason to be here. Everything else is optional.
Automatic meeting capture. Connect Google Calendar or Microsoft 365 once. Fireflies watches your calendar, joins meetings automatically as a bot participant, and posts a transcript, summary, and action items to your dashboard within minutes of the call ending. You can also invite the bot manually via email or dial it into a phone conference. Recording is on by default; disabling per-meeting or per-attendee requires policy configuration.
Multi-platform coverage. Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, RingCentral, Dialpad, and phone dial-in are supported natively. Upload an audio or video file for anything else. This breadth is the real feature — most competitors are strong on one or two platforms and awkward on the rest.
Transcription. English transcription accuracy is strong on clean audio and holds up on typical two-to-eight-person calls. Speaker diarization (attributing lines to specific people) is accurate when the participants are on separate audio channels and less accurate on shared mics. 60+ languages are supported at varying quality levels; European languages and Japanese are solid, and some smaller languages have visible gaps.
Meeting summaries and action items. The default summary is a structured recap: bullet-point takeaways, decisions made, action items with tentative assignees, and next steps. Quality is a function of the meeting quality — a rambling call produces a rambling summary. The action item extraction is the feature you actually use day-to-day.
Search across the archive. Every word of every transcript is searchable. Find "the SOC 2 conversation from March" or "when we discussed the pricing change with Acme" and Fireflies returns the exact moment. This is the feature that changes team behavior once the archive matures.
AskFred. The workspace-wide chat assistant that reads across all your meetings and answers questions. "What did the client say about the renewal?" "How many meetings this month mentioned pricing?" AskFred is stronger the older your archive is; on day one it is a curiosity, at month six it is load-bearing.
Smart search filters. Filter meetings by keyword mentions, sentiment, speaker talk-time, questions asked, and custom trackers. Sales teams use this to surface every call where a competitor was mentioned or every deal where a specific objection came up.
CRM integrations. Native two-way sync with Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho, and Copper. Meeting summaries write to the deal record, and follow-up tasks push into the CRM automatically. This is where Fireflies earns its keep on sales teams.
Task and project integrations. Push action items to Asana, Trello, Monday, Notion, Slack, and Microsoft Teams. The Notion and Slack integrations are the ones most small teams actually use.
Conversation intelligence. Sentiment analysis, topic trackers, question detection, and monologue detection at the transcript level. Managers use this on sales calls to coach reps. It is more valuable on high-volume outbound sales than on internal team meetings.
AI apps and workflows. Trigger custom outputs from each meeting — a followup email draft, a Slack summary in a specific format, a Notion page with your team's template. Configurable per meeting type. This layer is newer and less mature than the core notetaker but useful for teams that want branded summary formats.
Storage and export. Meetings are stored indefinitely on paid plans. Transcripts export to text, PDF, DOCX, SRT, or JSON. Audio and video downloads are supported.
Fireflies prices per user with a real free tier and aggressive discounting on annual billing.
Free ($0) — 800 minutes of storage per seat, unlimited meeting recording and transcription, limited AI summaries, no AskFred over archive, no CRM integrations. Enough to evaluate whether the product fits your workflow.
Pro ($18/user/month, billed annually) — Unlimited transcription, 8,000 minutes of storage per seat, AI summaries and smart search, AskFred, 10+ AI apps, CRM push, video recording download. Monthly billing is $23/user/month.
Business ($29/user/month, billed annually) — Everything in Pro plus unlimited storage, conversation intelligence (sentiment, topic trackers, coaching), video downloads, team analytics, priority support. Monthly billing is $39/user/month.
Enterprise (custom, typically $39+/user/month) — SSO, SAML, custom retention, private storage, dedicated success, HIPAA compliance where available, admin controls, custom integrations.
| Feature | Free | Pro | Business | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transcription minutes | 800/seat | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Storage | 800 min | 8,000 min | Unlimited | Custom |
| AskFred over archive | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| CRM integrations | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Conversation intelligence | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| SSO / SAML | No | No | No | Yes |
Fireflies is priced in line with Otter and slightly above tl;dv on the Pro tier. The Business tier is where sales-team buyers land because the conversation intelligence and unlimited storage are what make CRM-integrated notetaking sustainable at scale.
Pros.
Cons.
Sales teams with CRM discipline. The archetypal Fireflies buyer. Every sales call transcribed, summarized, and pushed to Salesforce or HubSpot automatically. Conversation intelligence surfaces objection patterns, competitor mentions, and coaching opportunities. Business tier at $29/user/month is defensible against the alternative — reps not writing call notes at all.
Customer success teams doing renewal and expansion work. Full archive of every customer call, searchable by keyword and account. When the renewal conversation starts three months later, the full context is one search away.
Founders taking many partner, investor, or customer calls. Free tier or Pro is enough. The value is not conversation intelligence — it is having a searchable memory of what everyone said in twelve conversations you cannot remember cleanly.
Distributed teams with async workflows. Recorded meetings become an artifact anyone in a different timezone can review. Summaries reduce the need for real-time attendance.
Recruiting teams running high-volume interview loops. Every interview transcribed, action items assigned to hiring managers, decisions searchable across candidates. Especially useful when multiple interviewers debate a single candidate.
Bad fit. Teams whose culture rejects always-on recording. Regulated industries without a properly configured consent flow. Small teams with three meetings a week — the free tier of Granola or a manual note-taking discipline serves this better. Product and design teams whose meetings are collaborative sketching sessions where transcripts miss most of the value.
Otter.ai. The other established notetaker. Similar shape — auto-join, transcribe, summarize. Otter has a stronger consumer following and a marginally better free tier; Fireflies has stronger CRM integrations and platform breadth. For revenue teams Fireflies is usually the pick; for education, journalism, and general professional use Otter is often better.
tl;dv. The competitor optimized for summary quality and video moment sharing. tl;dv's summaries and highlight clips are cleaner than Fireflies' by a meaningful margin. Weaker on CRM integrations and archive-wide search.
Granola. The anti-bot notetaker. Runs on your device, no bot joins the call, you type sparse notes and Granola enriches them. Preferred by teams that find the bot-joins-meetings model awkward. Trades platform breadth and CRM integrations for a cleaner UX and calmer meeting posture.
Motion notetaker. Bundled into Motion's task and calendar product. Adequate for teams already committed to Motion. Not a standalone competitor.
Notion AI Meeting Notes. Bundled into Notion Business. Works if your team already lives in Notion and meets in a small number of tools. Transcription quality lags Fireflies.
Zoom AI Companion, Google Meet Gemini, Microsoft Teams Copilot. The native summarizers in the video platforms themselves. Free with existing subscriptions. Adequate for single-platform teams. If your entire org uses one platform, this may be enough — but archive search and cross-tool integration are meaningfully weaker than Fireflies.
Go to https://fireflies.ai and sign up with a Google or Microsoft account. The calendar connection is the first setup step and the one that matters — Fireflies uses your calendar to know which meetings to join.
Configure the auto-join rules. Default is "join every meeting on my calendar." Sensible alternatives are "join only meetings with external attendees," "join only meetings I organize," or "join only when explicitly invited." Choose based on your comfort with ambient recording.
Run one real meeting. When it ends, open the Fireflies dashboard and inspect the transcript, the summary, and the action items. This is the fair evaluation — not the demo call, but a real conversation where you know what was actually said.
If the output is useful, configure two integrations: your CRM (if you have one) and your team collaboration tool (Slack, Notion, or Teams). The value multiplies when meeting outputs flow into where your team already works.
Configure consent for external attendees. Fireflies can auto-send a notification and pause recording if a participant declines. This is critical for external customer or partner calls, and it is optional in the setup so people forget.
Wait two to four weeks before evaluating AskFred. On day one the archive is empty and the assistant has nothing to say. By week four you have enough recorded conversation for AskFred to be useful.
Is Fireflies safe to use with customers? Yes, with configured consent. The visible bot in the meeting and any consent notification you send are the transparency layer. Some customers will decline; the tool handles that gracefully if configured. Do not use ambient recording without disclosure — legally required in some jurisdictions, culturally required in most.
How accurate is the transcription? On clean English audio, high 90s percent accurate. On accented English, non-English languages, or noisy audio, quality degrades gracefully. Speaker attribution is accurate when each speaker is on a separate channel and fuzzier on shared mics.
Does Fireflies work without joining meetings as a bot? No — this is the tradeoff. If you want a notetaker that does not appear in the meeting, use Granola instead. The bot-based model is what enables Fireflies' cross-platform breadth.
Which notetaker should I choose — Fireflies or Otter? For sales teams with CRM discipline, Fireflies. For education, journalism, or general professional transcription, Otter. Both are mature; the differences are integration-specific.
Can I hide the bot from meeting participants? No — the bot appears as a participant by design. Some users configure a friendly name (like "Notetaker") to make it feel less clinical, but it is always visible.
Does Fireflies work on phone calls? Yes, via dial-in. Fireflies provides a phone number you dial into any call as a participant, and it records and transcribes the audio.
Is the free tier enough for solo use? For someone with fewer than five meetings a week and no CRM integration need, yes. Past that, Pro at $18/user/month is the upgrade path.
Fireflies is the right notetaker for teams that want ambient meeting capture, mature CRM integrations, and a searchable archive that pays off compounding over months. It is the boring, reliable choice — the tool you install on the whole team and stop thinking about. Sales and customer success organizations get the most value; the Business tier at $29/user/month is the standard entry point.
The tool is not for everyone. If the always-on bot posture is culturally awkward for your team, Granola is the calmer alternative. If you want the cleanest summary and highlight-clip quality on the market, tl;dv is stronger there. If you already pay for Notion Business, Notion AI may cover enough of the surface to defer this purchase. If your team runs entirely on one video platform, the native summarizers in Zoom, Meet, or Teams may be enough.
Start at https://fireflies.ai with the free tier and one week of real meetings. If AskFred and the search across your first week feel like they save time, upgrade to Pro. If your team is CRM-driven and you want the conversation intelligence layer, jump directly to Business. Fireflies is not the flashiest tool in the category, but for teams that need meeting notes to work every day without conscious effort, it is one of the two safest picks on the market.