Is there a good alternative to Fireflies.ai?
Yes. Fathom and tl;dv both cover the same online-meeting ground as Fireflies.ai for free, Gong goes deeper on sales coaching for enterprise revenue teams, and Plaud Note Pro covers what none of them can: recording a phone call or an in-person conversation, since it is a physical device rather than a meeting-platform bot. The right pick depends on how much of your week happens outside a scheduled video call.
Why people look for a Fireflies.ai alternative or competitor
Fireflies.ai does the core job well. Its bot joins Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams calls, transcribes in 100 or more languages, and pushes summaries into Salesforce, HubSpot, and Slack. The reasons people go looking for a Fireflies.ai alternative come up again and again in reviews and pricing breakdowns.
The AI credit system is the most common complaint. Base plan pricing looks reasonable, but features like AskFred and advanced summaries draw down a separate credit pool that runs out mid-month, so the real monthly cost is often higher than the plan price suggests. Cancellation has its own problems too: some users report being charged again after canceling, with the cancellation flow itself designed to be hard to find. The bot causes problems on the call itself. It shows up in the participant list as "Fireflies Notetaker," and some users have reported it continuing to try to join meetings even after they deleted their account, which raises real questions about how cleanly a canceled account is wound down. Speaker identification also degrades with accents, overlapping speech, or background noise, and several reviewers describe spending real time correcting transcripts before they are usable.
There is also an enterprise-specific problem. At least one company with 500 or more employees flagged Fireflies.ai in a formal security review over vague data-flow documentation, admin controls that were not granular enough for that team size, audit logging that was not detailed enough for compliance needs, and no data residency options. And even when the transcript itself is accurate, some users report that it sits disconnected from their project management tools, so nothing gets acted on until someone manually reads through it.
The structural limitation is the same one that pushes people off most meeting-bot software: Fireflies.ai only works inside a scheduled online meeting. A phone call, a client visit, or a hallway conversation falls outside what it can capture, and the only workaround is manually recording audio and uploading it later, which defeats the point of having an automated tool.
What to look for in a Fireflies.ai alternative
Four things separate a good pick from a bad one.
- Total cost, not sticker price. Check whether advanced features draw from a separate credit pool, and whether per-seat pricing scales the way your team will.
- Where it can record. Some tools only work inside Zoom, Meet, or Teams. Others can also record a phone call or a face-to-face conversation without an app running in the background.
- What happens to the data after you cancel. If a bot can keep trying to join meetings after an account is closed, that is worth asking about directly before signing up.
- Accuracy on real audio. Accented speech, crosstalk, and background noise are where transcription quality gets tested for real, not clean solo audio.
Fireflies.ai alternatives compared
| Tool | Best for | Records in-person or phone calls | Languages | Starting price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plaud Note Pro | In-person and phone calls, offline | Yes, dedicated hardware | 112 | $189 device, free Starter plan |
| Otter.ai | Live captions during the call | No | A handful | Free plan, Pro from ~$8.33/mo |
| Fathom | Free individual use on Zoom | Coming to iOS | English-first | Free plan, Premium from ~$19/mo |
| Gong | Enterprise sales coaching at scale | No | Multiple | Custom quote, no public pricing |
| tl;dv | Lightweight teams on a budget | No | 30+ | Free forever plan |
| MeetGeek | Meeting analytics with a mobile app | Mobile app | 50+ | Free plan, Pro from ~$16/mo |
| Grain | Sales teams that share video clips | No | 100+ | Free plan, Starter from ~$15/mo |
The 7 best Fireflies.ai alternatives and competitors in 2026
Plaud Note Pro
The contrast with a bot-based tool is direct: Plaud Note Pro never joins a call as a visible participant, and there is no separate credit pool to run out mid-month. It is a physical device that clips onto a phone for call recording or sits on a table for in-person meetings, picking up clear audio from up to 16.4 feet away with 4 MEMS microphones and AI beamforming. Smart dual-mode recording works out on its own whether you are on a phone call or in a room with other people, and one charge lasts up to 50 hours in Endurance mode.
Plaud Intelligence handles the transcript and summary afterward, in 112 languages, with speaker labels and industry-specific vocabulary. When a meeting does happen on Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams, Plaud Desktop covers that too, and it solves the exact complaint people have about the Fireflies Notetaker showing up uninvited. Plaud Desktop does not join the call at all. It runs in the background, detects when a meeting starts, and records the computer's system audio directly, so there is no participant labeled with the app's name and no need for anyone to grant it access to a calendar. You choose whether it records automatically, asks first, or waits for you to start it manually, and the same app also picks up webinars and other streamed audio a bot would never be invited to. Pricing is flat rather than credit-based: the device is $189 with a free Starter plan built in (300 minutes of AI transcription a month), Pro is $99.99 a year for 1,200 minutes, and Unlimited is $239.99 a year. Plaud holds ISO 27001, ISO 27701, GDPR, SOC 2, HIPAA, and EN 18031 compliance, which addresses the data-residency and audit-logging gaps that have shown up in enterprise reviews of bot-based tools.
Best for: anyone whose most important conversations happen on the phone or in person, not just in scheduled meetings.
Otter.ai
Otter.ai is the most established name in this category, with real-time transcription that displays words as they are spoken, a generous 300-minute free tier, and a lower starting price than Fireflies.ai for individuals. For teams that mainly want live captions and a searchable archive of virtual meetings, it covers the same shape of problem Fireflies.ai does.
The tradeoff runs the other way on languages and integrations. Fireflies.ai supports well over 60 languages and translation, while Otter.ai's language list is much shorter, and Otter's integrations are narrower than Fireflies' CRM connections. Otter.ai also has its own consent controversy, including an active class-action lawsuit over how its bot joins calls, so it is not a clean upgrade on privacy either.
Best for: individuals who want live captions and a lower starting price than Fireflies.ai.
Fathom
Fathom's free plan is one of the most generous in this category: unlimited recordings, transcripts, and basic AI summaries for Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, with no monthly cap. G2 lists it as the top overall Fireflies.ai alternative, and its Ask Fathom feature lets you query past meetings in natural language.
Like Fireflies.ai, Fathom's classic mode joins as a visible "Fathom Notetaker" participant, and it trains on de-identified call data by default. In-person recording is listed as coming soon to the iOS app rather than available today, and advanced AI summaries are capped at five a month on the free plan before you need the roughly $19-a-month Premium tier.
Best for: individuals who want a genuinely free tool for Zoom-heavy days.
Gong
Gong is built for enterprise revenue teams that want conversation intelligence tied directly to coaching and deal analytics, and it is the name that comes up most often when people search for a Fireflies.ai alternative at the enterprise end of the market. It does not publish pricing. Deals go through a sales process, and buyers report a mandatory platform fee on top of per-seat costs that run roughly $100 to $150 a month per user before add-on modules.
That pricing model is also the biggest reason people look past Gong. Reviewers describe multi-year contract lock-ins, automatic renewal price increases, and a base module that keeps losing features to newly-priced add-ons. For a small team that only needs call recording and transcripts, Gong is usually more infrastructure than the job requires.
Best for: enterprise sales organizations that need coaching and deal analytics built on top of call recordings, not just transcripts.
tl;dv
tl;dv offers a genuinely free-forever plan with unlimited recordings and transcripts across Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, translated into 30 or more languages. Paid plans start at $18 a user a month and add CRM push, sales coaching analytics, and clip sharing.
For a small team or a solo user who wants Fireflies-style meeting capture without a subscription, tl;dv's free tier covers most of the basics that Fireflies.ai locks behind AI credits. It is still a software-only, online-meeting tool, so it does not help with anything that happens off a video call.
Best for: small teams that want unlimited meeting recording without paying for it.
MeetGeek
MeetGeek automatically joins calendar meetings across Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Webex, and its mobile app can also record in-person conversations, which is more than most software-only competitors offer. It supports 50 or more languages, with a free plan covering a few hours of transcription a month and Pro starting around $16 a month.
The free plan's transcript and audio storage windows are limited (three months and one month respectively), so teams that need a long-term archive will need to budget for a paid tier sooner than the headline price suggests.
Best for: teams that want meeting analytics and coaching insights alongside transcripts.
Grain
Grain records a computer's audio without a bot joining the call, and its standout feature is turning meeting moments into shareable video clips and playlists rather than just text summaries. Support for 100 or more languages and a genuinely free plan with unlimited recordings make it an easy tool to trial before committing.
The catch shows up at the edges. Per-seat pricing on the Business tier adds up quickly for larger teams, CRM sync is built mainly around HubSpot rather than Salesforce, and at least one reviewer has described being locked out of their own recordings after downgrading a subscription, which is worth testing with a small export before relying on it long term.
Best for: customer-facing teams that want to share video highlights, not just transcripts.
How to choose the right Fireflies.ai alternative for your workflow
Start with where your conversations happen, not with a feature list. If your week is almost entirely scheduled video calls, a free software option like Fathom or tl;dv covers the same ground as Fireflies.ai without the AI credit system. If you run an enterprise sales team that needs coaching built on top of call data, Gong is the tool built for that, at enterprise pricing to match. If you want video clips to share with customers or teammates, Grain is built specifically for that. If your pipeline runs through phone calls and in-person meetings as much as scheduled video calls, keep reading below.
Count the conversations your CRM never sees
A lot of the decision here comes down to one question: how much of your pipeline gets built in conversations that never touch a calendar invite. If your team's calls are all scheduled Zoom demos, Fathom or tl;dv will feel like a natural swap. If a real share of your best client relationships get built over the phone or in person, no bot-based tool on this list can pick that up, because none of them can capture audio that never touches a microphone connected to the internet. That is the specific gap Plaud Note Pro is built to close, without a visible bot or a credit meter running in the background.
