Fireflies.ai is an AI meeting assistant that sends a visible bot, the Fireflies.ai Notetaker, into Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and other calls to record, transcribe and summarize them. It can also capture without a bot, through a desktop app, a Chrome extension and a mobile app. Pricing runs per seat: Free is $0 with no card and no time limit, and Pro costs $10 per seat per month billed annually or $18 per seat per month billed monthly [1]. Our verdict: a strong fit for teams that want call notes pushed into their CRM and project tools, held back by tight storage on the lower plans and a credit meter on the AI features. Read the defaults first.
The bot joins your calls, and by default it joins all of them
The core of the product is a meeting bot. It joins Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, GoTo Meeting, Dialpad, Lifesize, Jitsi and Discord calls as a named participant, shown as Fireflies.ai Notetaker plus the name of whoever invited it. It cannot be hidden. When it enters, it posts a chat message with a link to Fireflies' privacy policy, and where a meeting has a waiting room it asks to be admitted. Google Meet may flag it as a potential risk, and Teams needs guest access switched on before it can join at all.
The default setting is the part to watch. Right after sign-up, auto-join covers every calendar meeting with a video link, whether or not you host it. Recap emails go to everyone on the invite, and recaps open for teammates and anyone holding the link. You can narrow auto-join to meetings you own, meetings with teammates, or only meetings where you invite fred@fireflies.ai, then tighten recap privacy down to only yourself. Cancelling a paid plan does not stop the bot, because the account drops to Free and keeps joining; our guide to removing Fireflies walks through every switch.
Consent sits with you. Under Fireflies' Terms, the customer is responsible for getting every participant's agreement, with the bot or without it. On Zoom, if the host is not a Fireflies user, Zoom itself asks the host to allow recording and plays its own announcement. An optional compliance email can go out an hour before the meeting with an opt-out link, but it is off by default. One more limit matters for busy calendars: the bot attends one meeting at a time on Free and Pro, and three at once on Business and Enterprise.
Right after sign-up the bot joins every calendar meeting with a video link. On a new Free account, the only-meetings-I-own option keeps transcription unlimited for accounts created from September 2026 on; the invite-only option leaves them 3 to 10 transcription credits. Free storage still stops at 400 minutes per team, a running total, and AI features still use credits.
Bot-free capture works, but it gives things up
Fireflies offers several ways to record with no bot in the room, and all of them are on the Free plan. The desktop app for macOS and Windows has a Take Notes mode that records system audio and detects calls on Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Slack Huddles, FaceTime and phone calls routed through the computer [2]. The Chrome extension captures Google Meet in Chrome. The mobile app records in-person meetings, even offline, and uploads them later. A browser Web Recorder and plain file uploads round out the set.
The trade-offs are real. Take Notes saves no audio or video file, only the transcript and summary, and speakers appear as Speaker 1 and Speaker 2 instead of names. You cannot switch from Take Notes to the bot mid-meeting. The Chrome extension records audio only, and running it alongside the bot creates two copies of the same meeting. Uploads and mobile recordings also get generic speaker labels that you rename by hand.
Google Meet has one more route: once a Google Workspace admin authorizes the Meet SDK integration, Fireflies records Meet audio and video with no visible bot, for up to three active participants at a time. Participants see a consent prompt first, and recording stops if anyone declines. If you need playback with named speakers on other platforms, the bot remains the better tool. Bot-free capture does not change your consent duties, which is why the desktop app plays an audio consent message about 10 seconds in and can add an on-camera watermark, both on by default.
Plans, prices and the limits that bite
Every active workspace member, whether admin, member or editor, is a billable seat, and everyone sits on the workspace's plan. Sharing a recap link with someone outside the workspace adds no seat. Fireflies says annual billing saves up to 44%, which holds for Pro; Business saves 34.5% by our arithmetic. Enterprise has no monthly price at all. Above 50 members, Fireflies asks larger teams to contact it about volume pricing.
Prices shown are what Fireflies.ai lists for visitors in the United States, in US dollars. Your price can differ by country, currency and local taxes such as VAT.
| Plan | Price per seat per month | Storage (running total) | Recording limit per meeting | One-time AI credits (team) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 400 minutes per team | 2 hours | 20 |
| Pro | $10 per seat billed annually / $18 per seat billed monthly | 8,000 minutes per seat, pooled | 2 hours | 20 |
| Business | $19 per seat billed annually / $29 per seat billed monthly | Unlimited | 3 hours | 30 |
| Enterprise | $39 per seat, billed annually only | Unlimited | 4 hours | 50 |
Storage is a running total, not a monthly allowance. It counts live recordings, uploads and imports, and it never resets. Pro's 8,000 minutes per seat equal about 133 hours by our arithmetic, so a seat recording five hours of meetings a week fills its share in roughly six months [3]. At the limit, new meetings are still captured, but you must delete older ones before you can open the new ones; deleting a meeting returns its minutes. The Free plan's 400 minutes cover under seven hours for the whole team.
Free has a second meter. Accounts created from September 2026 on get a few transcription credits: 3 when you sign up on the web, 5 through the Chrome extension, 10 as a new mobile user [4]. Turning on calendar auto-join for all meetings, your own meetings or meetings with teammates makes transcription unlimited; the invite-only setting does not. Older accounts keep unlimited free meetings. Free also leaves out integrations, downloads and video capture, which start on Pro at 720p.
AI features run on a separate credit meter. Each plan includes a one-time allotment shared by the whole team: 20 credits on Pro, 30 on Business and 50 on Enterprise. AskFred, AI Skills, the Personal Assistant, Voice Agents at 1 credit per minute, Autofill CRM and the Slack and Email Assistants all draw on it. Transcription, standard summaries and templates do not. Extra credits are a paid add-on from $5 a month for 50 credits, pooled across the team. They are non-refundable.
On a paid plan that runs out of AI credits, Fireflies subscribes the account to the $5-a-month tier for 50 credits, a team pool, or moves an existing credit subscription up to the next tier. Auto-Upgrade can be switched off in billing settings.
Annual billing is cheaper only if you stay. Pro billed annually comes to $120 per seat a year by our arithmetic; at $18 per seat per month billed monthly, the running cost passes that total in the seventh month. So annual wins if you would keep Pro seven months or longer, and for Business the threshold is eight months. A five-seat Business team saves $600 a year on annual billing. The trial is 7 days of Business, needs a card and bills on day 7 unless you cancel, one trial per account. Our Fireflies pricing breakdown runs the seat math in full.
What Fireflies does well
The integration layer is the strongest argument. Fireflies says it connects with 240+ apps; most integrations open from Pro, though a few (Redtail, WhatsApp, Amazon S3, Snowflake, Affinity) need Business. Notes and action items flow into HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive and other CRMs, into Slack and Microsoft Teams channels, and into Asana, Jira, Notion, ClickUp and other project tools. HubSpot receives the summary and a link to the transcript, not the full text. Business adds Integration Rules that filter which meetings sync, plus Autofill CRM and Deal Intelligence for HubSpot and Salesforce, where nothing is sent until you review it.
Above the transcripts sits a broad AI layer. AskFred answers questions across meetings, and AI Skills, which Fireflies says number 200+, run templates per meeting or on a daily, weekly or monthly schedule and send the output to Slack, email or a CRM. Live Assist shows a real-time transcript and nudges during calls on every plan. Fireflies Talk, a dictation tool for Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android, is free and unlimited on every plan. Fireflies says its transcription is 99% accurate in English and 95% in other languages across 100+ languages. Multi-language Mode, a beta for several languages in one call, starts on Business.
Developers get a GraphQL API on every plan, from 30 requests a minute and 500 a day on Free up to a pooled 2,400 a minute on Enterprise, plus webhooks and an MCP server with tools to search and fetch meetings. SOC 2 Type II and GDPR cover every plan, and the Terms say Fireflies will not use customer content to train generative AI models. HIPAA is narrower than the product badges suggest. It applies only on Enterprise, with Private Storage switched on and a signed BAA. SSO, SCIM, custom data retention and the Rules Engine are Enterprise features as well.
Recaps open for teammates and anyone with the link by default. Set privacy to only participants, only teammates or only you in the meeting settings.
Who it fits, and where Otter or Granola fit better
Fireflies fits sales, recruiting and customer teams that live in a CRM and want call notes landing there without retyping. Business is the plan most of those teams need: unlimited storage, a 3-hour recording limit, conversation intelligence and three concurrent bots. On annual billing it costs $9 more per seat per month than Pro, or $108 a seat a year by our arithmetic. Solo users with light meeting loads can start on Free. They should accept the storage cap of 400 minutes per team, a running total, and the credit meter up front, and turn on auto-join if they signed up after August 2026, since invite-only leaves them only a few transcription credits.
Skip it in two cases. First, if a visible bot in client calls is a problem and you still need playback, Fireflies forces a choice: outside Google Meet, only the bot saves the video of a live call, and the desktop app's bot-free mode keeps no audio at all. On Google Meet, the admin-authorized Meet SDK integration is the exception, since it records audio and video with no visible bot.
Second, regulated teams below Enterprise have no HIPAA path at all, and switching tools does not change that much: Otter.ai and Granola also keep HIPAA to their Enterprise plans. For the bot question, Otter.ai is the closest match, with its own bot plus a bot-free desktop app. Billed annually, Otter Pro costs $8.33 per user per month against $10 per seat per month for Fireflies Pro, though Otter caps Pro at 5 billed users and 1,200 transcription minutes a month. Granola takes the opposite route: no bot, no stored audio, and Business at $14 per user per month, billed monthly only. Our Granola vs Fireflies comparison weighs that trade-off in detail.
How we score Fireflies.ai
We score on eight axes, each on its own evidence, and weigh capture options, integrations and AI depth more heavily than support, because those decide whether a notetaker earns its seat. Pricing clarity counts too, since the seat model, storage caps and credit meter all shape the real bill. No axis is hidden. Here is the full breakdown, axis by axis.
Fireflies covers the meeting-notes job from more directions than any single capture mode: the Fireflies.ai Notetaker bot joins Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, GoTo Meeting, Dialpad, Lifesize, Jitsi and Discord calls from the calendar (auto-join), from an invite to fred@fireflies.ai or with Add to live meeting; bot-free capture comes from the desktop app's Take Notes mode (system audio on Windows 10+ and macOS 12+, auto-detecting Zoom, Meet, Teams, WhatsApp, Aircall, FaceTime, Discord, Slack Huddles and phone calls), the Chrome extension for Google Meet, a Google Meet SDK integration, a browser Web Recorder and the iOS and Android apps for in-person meetings (offline recording, uploads). It also takes file uploads (MP3, M4A, WAV, MP4, WEBM, up to 150 minutes per file), dialer imports (Aircall, JustCall, Outreach, Quo, RingCentral, Salesloft, Zoom Phone), Zoom cloud recordings and free read-only migrations from Otter, Fathom, Gong, Grain, Granola, Chorus and Read.ai. Around the transcript sit editable transcripts with find and replace, playback from 1x to 3x, global search, soundbites, bookmarks, channels, topic trackers (Pro and up), video capture (720p from Pro, 1080p on Enterprise), downloads in PDF, DOCX, SRT, CSV, JSON and MD (Pro and up), Multi-language Mode in beta for 60+ languages and a conversation intelligence dashboard on Business, transcription in 100+ languages, the bot in 3 meetings at once on Business and Enterprise, and Enterprise recording modes, auto-delete and the Rules Engine. Held back by storage caps (400 minutes per team on Free, 8,000 minutes per seat on Pro as a running total that does not reset; unlimited from Business), a recording limit per meeting (2 hours on Free and Pro, 3 on Business, 4 on Enterprise, after which the bot leaves), a bot that cannot be hidden, bot-free Take Notes capture that saves no audio or video and labels speakers generically, a Chrome extension limited to Google Meet with audio only, one bot meeting at a time on Free and Pro, no published live translation, native EHR integration or native cellular call recording, and new Free accounts created on or after September 2026 limited to a few transcription credits unless auto-join is on.
AI runs through every stage of the meeting: AI summaries on every plan (General Summary with keywords, overview, notes, time-stamped notes and action items; templates such as sales, 1:1 and BANT), AskFred inside a meeting and Global AskFred across meetings, connected apps (Gmail, Slack, HubSpot), custom MCP servers and optional web search; AI Skills (formerly AI Apps; Fireflies says 200+ templates) run per meeting or on a schedule and push results to Slack, email, Teams, HubSpot, Salesforce or Notion; Live Assist with live transcript, notes, nudges and Instant Summaries (no credits); Sales Assist answering from an uploaded Knowledge Base; a Personal Assistant (Daily Digest, Meeting Prep, free Tasks); an Email Assistant that drafts but never sends; a Slack Assistant; Autofill CRM and Deal Intelligence for HubSpot and Salesforce on Business; Voice Agents that run screening interviews, discovery calls and check-ins in 32+ languages with voice cloning (Pro and up); Talk to Fireflies in meeting chat; Fireflies Talk dictation free and unlimited on every plan; and an MCP server on every plan. Fireflies says its transcription is 99% accurate in English and 95% in other languages. Held back by the credit system: AskFred, AI Skills, Voice Agents (1 credit per minute), the Personal Assistant, Sales Assist, the Email and Slack Assistants, Autofill CRM and Magic Soundbites draw on AI credits priced dynamically per query; the plan allotment is a one-time pool shared by the whole team (Free 20, Pro 20, Business 30, Enterprise 50); more credits are a paid add-on from $5 a month for 50 credits (a team pool, on paid plans only); and on a paid plan with no credit subscription Fireflies subscribes the account to that $5-a-month tier when credits run out. AI Skills and the Personal Assistant are not on Free, and the Free plan's AI summaries and AskFred are Limited. On model training, Fireflies' Terms say it will not use customer content to train, retrain, fine-tune or improve generative AI models, while the DPA allows deidentified data to improve its products.
Fireflies says it integrates with 240+ apps: CRMs (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM, Dynamics 365, Close, Copper, Freshsales, Zendesk Sell, Attio, Affinity on Business, Salesflare and others), applicant tracking systems (Lever, Ashby, BambooHR, Greenhouse in beta, Workable and others), dialers (Aircall, JustCall, Outreach, Quo, RingCentral, Salesloft, Zoom Phone), Slack, Microsoft Teams channels, Notion, Google Docs, Sheets and Drive, OneNote, SharePoint, Confluence, Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, project tools (Asana, Trello, ClickUp, monday.com, Jira Cloud, Linear and more) and automation through Zapier, Make, Pabbly Connect, Relay.app and an n8n node. The GraphQL API is on every plan (Free 30 requests per minute and 500 per day; Pro 60 per minute and 5,000 per day; Business pooled at 60 per minute per paid seat up to 1,200 per minute with no daily cap; Enterprise pooled up to 2,400 per minute), with Webhooks V2 (meeting.transcribed, meeting.summarized, meeting.bot_joined; up to 5 configurations), a Realtime API in beta, rate-limit headers and documented error codes; the remote MCP server (OAuth or API key, on every plan) connects Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other clients. Held back by integrations not included on Free (the pricing page lists them from Pro), API audio uploads needing Pro or higher, Integration Rules and granular permissions only on Business, some apps gated to Business (Redtail, WhatsApp, Amazon S3, Snowflake, Affinity), HubSpot receiving a summary and a link to the transcript rather than the full transcript, automatic sync only for meetings after setup (older ones by manual Push Past Meetings), video files pushed to storage apps only on Business and Enterprise, one calendar per account (Google Calendar or Outlook only), and Fireflies' zero data retention not applying once data leaves through MCP.
Getting notes needs almost no effort once the calendar is connected: right after sign-up the bot auto-joins every calendar meeting with a web-conferencing link, transcripts usually arrive 5 to 10 minutes after the meeting, recap emails go out automatically, the same pane (Live Assist) works on the web, desktop, Chrome extension and mobile, and the bot can be added to a live meeting from the dashboard, the mobile app or the Zoom Surface App. Bot-free options (desktop Take Notes, the Chrome extension) avoid admitting a participant. Held back by that same default: a visible bot joins every meeting with a link, whether or not you host, until auto-join is changed, and recap emails go to everyone on the invite by default while recaps are viewable by anyone with the link; the bot must be admitted from waiting rooms and lobbies, Zoom may ask the host for recording permission, Google Meet may flag it as a potential risk and Teams may list it under Suspected threats; Zoom needs end-to-end encryption off and embedded passwords; cancelling a subscription does not stop the bot, and revoking calendar access fully means deleting the account; buyers must track storage minutes, transcription credits on new Free accounts, monthly upload limits per source and an AI-credit balance; and meetings shorter than 3 minutes produce no recap.
Free is $0 with no card and no time limit and keeps bot recording, the Chrome extension, the desktop and mobile apps, uploads, the API, the MCP server and Fireflies Talk; turning on auto-join makes Free transcription unlimited for new accounts. Pro costs $10 per seat per month billed annually or $18 per seat per month billed monthly; Business costs $19 per seat per month billed annually or $29 per seat per month billed monthly, adding unlimited storage, a 3-hour recording limit, Multi-language Mode (beta), conversation intelligence, user groups and priority support; Fireflies says annual billing saves up to 44% (true for Pro; Business saves 34.5% by our arithmetic). A 7-day Business trial, 10% off for NGOs, students and non-profits, a referral reward and volume discounts above 50 members (on request) exist. Held back by Enterprise at $39 per seat per month, billed annually only, as the only route to SSO, SCIM, HIPAA, Private Storage and custom retention; storage caps on Free and Pro that force deleting meetings; AI features gated by a small one-time credit pool and a paid add-on from $5 a month for 50 credits (team pool), with automatic subscription to that tier on paid plans when credits run out; uploads and imports above the monthly limit at $0.01 per minute; a custom notetaker name sold separately at $5 a month or $60 a year for an individual (teams sharing one name pay $5 a month for up to 5 users plus $5 per extra user); a trial that needs a card and bills on day 7 unless cancelled; and AI credits that are non-refundable. Against Otter, Fireflies Pro costs more per month on both billing terms while Fireflies Business costs slightly less (our arithmetic, same billing term).
Fireflies holds SOC 2 Type II on every plan (Type II since December 2021, audited annually; the report after an NDA), says it is certified to ISO/IEC 42001, offers GDPR with a DPA signable online and an EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework listing, encrypts with AES-256 at rest and TLS 1.2+ in transit, applies zero data retention with its AI and speech vendors (Fireflies names OpenAI and Anthropic), keeps staff away from meeting content unless support access is granted, runs a HackerOne bug bounty, and offers HIPAA and FERPA on Enterprise, SSO (SAML) and SCIM on Enterprise, priority support by email or chat on Business, and dedicated support, an onboarding program and a dedicated account manager for 20 or more seats on Enterprise. Held back by HIPAA only on Enterprise with both Private Storage switched on and a signed BAA (a downgrade or storage change disables it immediately), processing always in the United States even with Private Storage (no Private Cloud, no Azure for bring-your-own storage), no published uptime SLA, no built-in two-factor login (sign-in through Google, Microsoft or SSO), recap links viewable by anyone with the link by default, a Privacy Policy that discloses identifiers and web activity to advertising partners (it honors Global Privacy Control), Terms that require cancelling at least 24 hours before the period ends, binding individual arbitration with a class waiver, and a liability cap of the greater of $100 or six months of fees.
G2 4.7 from 756 reviews, US App Store 4.82 from 5,462 ratings, Google Play 4.3 from 7,879, TrustRadius 4.5 from 36 and Trustpilot 4.5 from 895 (read November 2026). Axis score 4.5: the mean of each platform's displayed rating with at least 30 reviews, weighted by review count (15,028 reviews; computed 4.52). The two app stores carry most of the weight (13,341 of 15,028 reviews), so the axis leans on the mobile audience and Google Play's 4.3 pulls it down; the review sites sit between 4.5 and 4.7. Trustpilot is read as a map of complaints, not as a trend. A Capterra score could not be confirmed and is not counted. Fireflies' own rating badges on its pages are vendor displays and are not used.
guide.fireflies.ai is a large help center that states the plan for most features (storage, transcription credits, upload limits, AI credits and their prices, trials, seats, downgrades, integrations one by one, consent, HIPAA and FERPA set-up, Private Storage, bot removal) with a relative last-updated date on each article; docs.fireflies.ai documents the GraphQL API, rate limits per plan, error codes, webhooks, the MCP server and its tools, the Audit Logs API and a versioned change log, publishes an llms.txt and offers a separate Docs MCP for searching the documentation; the Terms, Business Terms, Privacy Policy and DPA are dated. Held back by help pages that disagree with each other and with the pricing page on several plan details (storage units, how plan AI credits work, overage wording, the plan for video capture), so buyers must read the pricing page and the newest help article together, and by older blog posts that were not updated and still show earlier limits, plan terms and integration counts.
Weighted across the axes above (weights reflect what actually drives the decision in this category). How we score →
User sentiment is one axis of eight, and it is worth reading on its own. The review platforms where verified users describe daily work rate Fireflies well, and the mobile app stores largely agree. We read Trustpilot only as a map of complaints, never as a trend. Our composite lands at 4.0/5: a capable, well-connected assistant whose defaults and meters need attention on day one, not a tool to install and forget.
Frequently asked questions
Can I rename the Fireflies bot?+
Yes, with the custom notetaker name add-on on Pro and Business: $5 a month or $60 a year for an individual or for each unique name, while a team sharing one name pays $5 a month for up to 5 users plus $5 per extra user. It is included on Enterprise, and the custom name shows only in meetings you host or invite the bot to. The Fireflies team activates the name, and it cannot be changed afterwards.
Where does Fireflies store meeting data?+
By default in the United States, on AWS and Google Cloud. Enterprise Private Storage keeps data in a chosen region or your own AWS S3 or Google Cloud Storage, but processing still happens in the US.
Can I upload recordings made elsewhere?+
Yes: MP3, M4A, WAV, MP4 and WEBM files up to 150 minutes each, with video up to 100 MB on Free and 2 GB on paid plans and audio up to 500 MB on every plan. On Free, each upload uses one transcription credit.
What happens when a meeting runs past the recording limit?+
The bot leaves automatically once the plan's limit is reached (2 hours on Free and Pro, 3 on Business, 4 on Enterprise). You can add it back with Add to Live Meeting, and the meeting then shows as two parts.
The bottom line
Fireflies.ai earns its place when meeting notes need to travel: into a CRM, a project board or a Slack channel, without anyone retyping them. The bot is visible, the desktop app's bot-free mode gives up audio and speaker names, and the AI features run on a small one-time credit allotment. Change auto-join and recap privacy before your first call. Pick Business if your team records heavily, since Pro storage runs out. Our score reflects a capable tool with defaults you must manage.
- [1] Pricing & Plans (2026-11) https://fireflies.ai/pricing
- [2] How to Record Meetings Without a Bot on the Fireflies Desktop App (2026-11) https://guide.fireflies.ai/articles/6666374717-how-to-record-meetings-without-a-bot-on-the-fireflies-desktop-app
- [3] Understanding storage limits (2026-11) https://guide.fireflies.ai/articles/4777633252-learn-about-meeting-storage-limits
- [4] Learn about transcription credits (2026-11) https://guide.fireflies.ai/articles/1055386295-learn-about-transcription-credits