Fireflies AI Alternatives: 7 Meeting Tools Compared on Price, Limits and Licence

Every Fireflies.ai comparison post opens with the same four numbers: free, $10, $19, $39. Those are the seat prices, and they are the least interesting thing about the bill. The number that actually decides whether Fireflies gets cheaper or more painful as your team grows is a pool of AI credits that does not grow with your team at all.

The real reason people leave Fireflies

Fireflies charges per seat. Its pricing page lists Pro at $10 per user per month and Business at $19 per user per month billed annually — $18 and $29 respectively if you pay month to month — with Enterprise at $39 per user per month marked annual only. Standard stuff.

The catch sits one layer down. Transcription is covered by your plan, but the parts people actually buy Fireflies for — AI Skills, the personal assistant, custom summary sections, Magic soundbites, Voice Agents, the Slack assistant, CRM autofill — are paid for in AI credits. Fireflies is refreshingly blunt about how those work: credits are "pooled at the team level" and "do not scale with the number of seats."

Read that against the plan table. Free ships 20 AI credits. Pro ships 20. Business ships 30. Enterprise ships 50. A two-person Business workspace and a forty-person Business workspace start from the same 30 credits. The plan-included credits are described as one-time and non-expiring rather than a monthly refill, and credits are charged per query with dynamic pricing, so a heavy custom summary costs more than a quick question. When a paid team runs the pool down, Fireflies "automatically subscribes them to the next higher AI credits tier" — the ladder starts at 50 credits for $5 and climbs to 1,000 credits for $90.

So the honest way to describe Fireflies pricing is: seats for the recording, credits for the intelligence. If you bought it for the intelligence, adding people makes the intelligence scarcer, not cheaper. The second axis is storage. "Unlimited transcription" is real, but the free plan keeps only 400 minutes of storage per team, and Pro keeps 8,000 minutes per seat. Genuinely unlimited storage starts at Business.

Neither of those facts is a scandal. They are just the two things that make people go looking, and they are the two things a feature grid will never show you.

How I picked these

• Every price, limit and licence below comes from the vendor's own pricing page or its public repository. No G2, no Capterra, no roundup blogs. If I could not source a tool first-party, it is not here.
• I named what each price is charged against — seats, minutes, credits, queries or tasks — because those words are not interchangeable and one of them is the reason your invoice moved.
• Where a vendor quotes the annual rate by default, I give both numbers.
• Every tool gets one real catch, including ours.
• Notis is our product. It is last, it is disclosed, and its catch is the bluntest one on the page.

The short version

1. Granola — no bot joins the call; it listens to your computer audio.
2. Otter.ai — cheapest seat here, but the meter is in minutes and AI queries.
3. Fathom — the only free plan on this list that does not meter recordings.
4. tl;dv — seat-priced in euros, which matters more than people expect.
5. Circleback — one flat, slightly premium seat price and no free tier.
6. Meetily — MIT-licensed, runs on your own machine, works offline.
7. Notis — ours; an assistant you message, not a notetaker that records.

1. Granola: device audio, so no bot in the call

Granola's differentiator is procedural rather than technical. It "uses your computer audio, so doesn't invite a bot," which means external attendees never see a third participant called "Granola Notetaker" appear in the room. If you sell, recruit or consult, that alone is the reason to switch.

Pricing is per user per month: Basic at $0 with limited meeting history, Business at $14, Enterprise at $35. Business is where you get unlimited history, the advanced models, the Notion, Slack, HubSpot and Attio integrations, MCP access and the API. At $14 a seat it undercuts Fireflies Business by $5 on the annual rate and $15 on the monthly one, and there is no separate credit meter to track.

Catch: device audio cuts both ways. Granola captures what your machine hears, so it needs you present with the app running. There is no bot you can send to a meeting you are skipping, which is exactly the workflow some Fireflies users rely on.

2. Otter.ai: the cheapest seat, with a minutes meter behind it

Otter has the lowest headline price on this list. Pro is $8.33 per user per month billed yearly — but $16.99 billed monthly, so the monthly rate is more than double the advertised one. That is the single most misquoted number in this category.

Otter meters in minutes and queries rather than credits. Basic gives 300 transcription minutes a month with a hard 30-minute cap per conversation and 20 AI Chat queries. Pro raises that to 1,200 minutes a month, 90 minutes per conversation and 50 AI Chat queries. Unlimited transcription only arrives on Business at $19.99 per user per month annually, $30 monthly, and even there AI Chat is capped at 200 queries per user per month.

Catch: the 90-minute per-conversation ceiling on Pro. If your workshops, interviews or board calls routinely run past an hour and a half, the plan that looks cheapest is the plan that will cut you off mid-sentence.

3. Fathom: a free plan that does not meter the recording

Fathom's free tier advertises unlimited recordings and transcriptions with instant AI summaries. In a category where free usually means 300 minutes or 400 minutes of storage, an unmetered free plan is a genuine outlier and the reason Fathom absorbs a lot of Fireflies churn.

Paid tiers are per seat with both rates published: Premium at $16 per user per month annually or $20 monthly for individuals; Team at $15 annually or $19 monthly; Business at $25 annually or $34 monthly. Team plans carry a two-user minimum, so the real floor is $30 a month.

Catch: the free plan limits Ask Fathom and AI action items to "limited use" without publishing the number, and CRM sync is capped at a maximum of three users per domain on Free, Premium and Team. If your reason for buying a notetaker is CRM hygiene across a sales team, that cap forces you to Business.

4. tl;dv: seat-priced, and priced in euros

tl;dv is a Germany-based product and its checkout is denominated in euros, not dollars. Pro is €29.00 per seat per month billed monthly, or €216.00 per seat per year, which works out at €18.00 a month. Business is €39.00 per seat monthly or €348.00 per seat per year, roughly €29.00 a month.

Feature-wise it sits close to Fireflies: recording, transcription across 30-plus languages, AI notes, and CRM push. The free tier exists and includes recording and transcription, with the AI note and query allowances limited.

Catch: euro pricing means a US buyer's actual monthly charge floats with the exchange rate and may attract a card foreign-transaction fee. It is a small thing until finance asks why the same subscription costs a different amount every month.

5. Circleback: one price, no free tier

Circleback lists Individual at $20.83 per user per month and Team at $25 per user per month, with a monthly and yearly toggle and Enterprise on request. Both tiers advertise AI notes for unlimited meetings and support for in-person recordings, and the pitch is accuracy of action items rather than breadth of features.

The pricing model is refreshingly flat. There is no credit pool, no minutes ceiling and no query allowance to watch. You buy a seat and use the product.

Catch: there is no permanent free tier. "Start for free" is a trial, so unlike Fathom, Granola, Otter, tl;dv and Fireflies itself, there is no zero-dollar plan to leave running for the occasional call. It is also the most expensive entry-level seat on this list.

6. Meetily: MIT-licensed and it never leaves your laptop

If the reason you are leaving Fireflies is that a vendor holds your transcripts, the licence is the fact that matters. Meetily is published under the MIT License, which means you can run, fork and self-host it commercially with essentially no restrictions and no warranty.

It captures system audio, so it works with Google Meet, Zoom, Teams, Discord, Slack huddles and Webex without joining any of them. Meetily states that all processing happens locally and that it can run completely offline using local Whisper models for transcription and local LLMs through Ollama, with GPU acceleration on macOS, Windows and Linux. There is a hosted Pro tier at $10 per user per month billed annually, or $120 a year, for enhanced accuracy, advanced exports and auto meeting detection.

Catch: you are the operations team. Local Whisper and a local LLM want real CPU or GPU headroom, quality tracks the model you can afford to run, and when something breaks at 9am there is a GitHub issue queue rather than a support SLA.

7. Notis: an assistant you message, disclosed as ours

Disclosure: Notis is our product. It is last on this list because that is the honest position for a vendor writing its own comparison, and because for the specific job of recording meetings it is not the best tool here.

Notis is a personal assistant you reach from WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram, Slack or email, and from your coding agent through MCP. The pricing axis is different from everything above: it is not seats. Plans are Free at $0 for the CLI inside Claude Code, Codex or Cursor; Pro at $20 a month, which includes a $20 usage allocation, about 230 tasks at average cost, and an hour of cloud computer time; Pro+ at $59; and Ultra at $149 with uncapped cloud computer time. Usage is metered per task at published rates — roughly 1 to 5 cents for a quick task, about 9 cents for an everyday one, about 19 cents for a heavy run — and model tokens can draw on your existing ChatGPT or Claude subscription instead of the allowance.

Where it fits next to a notetaker: you send it the transcript, and it does the work that follows. File the summary into Notion, create the follow-up tasks, draft the replies, run a saved skill across your last month of calls, set the reminder. That is the half of the Fireflies proposition that AI credits meter, running against a per-task meter instead of a shared team pool.

Catch: Notis does not record meetings. There is no bot, no calendar-joining notetaker, no recorder — it reads transcripts you hand it. It is also cloud-only with no self-hosting and no open-source code, it has no mobile app of its own since it lives inside the messaging apps you already have, and the free plan is CLI-only, so messaging channels start at $20 a month. If your problem is capturing the call, buy one of the six above. Notis is what you point at the transcript afterwards.

Which should you choose

• External calls where a visible bot is awkward: Granola.
• Lowest cost per seat, short meetings: Otter Pro at the annual rate, watching the 90-minute cap.
• You want to spend nothing and still record everything: Fathom's free plan.
• European team, euro invoicing: tl;dv.
• Flat pricing with no meters to babysit: Circleback.
• Transcripts must not leave your machine: Meetily, MIT-licensed and offline-capable.
• The recording is fine, the follow-through is the problem: Notis alongside whichever recorder you keep.

My verdict

Most people who leave Fireflies do not leave because the transcription was bad. They leave because they discovered that the AI layer they were sold runs on a shared team pool that does not grow with headcount, and because the storage on the cheap tiers quietly caps what they can keep. Both are checkable on Fireflies' own pages in under five minutes, and neither shows up in a feature grid.

If you are replacing Fireflies like for like, Granola and Fathom are the two strongest swaps: one removes the bot, the other removes the metering from the free tier. If the licence is the sticking point, Meetily is the only genuinely open answer here. And if what actually broke was the work after the meeting, changing notetakers will not fix it — that is a different tool, and we make one.

Sources and research notes

Every number above was read from the vendor's own pages: Fireflies pricing and its AI credits documentation, Granola pricing, Otter pricing, Fathom pricing, tl;dv pricing, Circleback pricing, Meetily, and Notis pricing. No aggregator, review site or roundup was used as a source for any price, limit or licence.

Prices and limits were verified in August 2026 and vendors change them without notice. Where a vendor advertises the annual rate by default, both rates are given. If you find a figure that has moved, trust the vendor's page over this one.