You’re in a Zoom meeting, trying to listen attentively while taking notes on everything important. Halfway through, you realize you’ve missed half of it. Fireflies solves that problem by automatically recording, transcribing, and summarizing your meetings. You just need to invite the AI bot, the rest happens automatically.
Who is behind Fireflies?
Fireflies.ai Corp. was founded in 2016 by Krish Ramineni and Sam Udotong in Pleasanton, United States. It actually started as something completely different: a drone delivery service. Later they tried it as an NLP tool for task management. But both ideas didn’t work as hoped.
The breakthrough came when the founders themselves got frustrated with manually taking notes during meetings. They hated the process and realized others probably had the same problem. So they pivoted to meeting transcription. That choice proved to be golden.
Today, Fireflies has more than 20 million users and is used by 75% of Fortune 500 companies. The company has raised $ 19 million, with Khosla Ventures and Canaan Partners as key investors. They process billions of minutes of meetings and even reached unicorn status in 2024/2025. From failed drone delivery to a billion-dollar company – pretty impressive.
Who is Fireflies for?
Fireflies is built for anyone who has a lot of online meetings. Sales teams can review conversations to improve their pitch. Recruiters can transcribe interviews without constantly typing. Managers automatically get action items from team meetings. Remote teams can watch missed meetings later.
But it’s not suitable for everyone. If you don’t have many online meetings, you’re paying for something you barely use. And if you require 100% on-device processing for privacy reasons, you’re better off looking at alternatives. Fireflies sends a bot to your meeting that uploads everything to their servers.
What can Fireflies do?
The free version offers automatic transcription, basic AI summaries, and searchable text. For extensive CRM integrations, unlimited storage, and video recording, you need a paid plan. Here are the main features:
- Automatic transcription: Fireflies records your meetings and converts them to text. Works with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and other platforms. You only need to invite the bot through your calendar.
- AI Super Summaries: Afterwards you get a summary with the key points, decisions and action items. Useful when you want to quickly know what was discussed without reading the entire transcript.
- AskFred (AI assistant chat): You can ask questions about your meetings. For example: “What were the action items for Mark?” or “When did we talk about the budget?” Fred looks it up for you.
- Smart Search filters: Search by keywords, speakers, date or sentiment. For example, you can find all the times someone mentioned “deadline,” or all the negative reactions in a conversation.
- Creating Soundbites clips: Cut important clips from your meetings and share them with your team. Ideal for onboarding, training or sharing feedback.
- CRM and Slack integrations: Connect Fireflies to Salesforce, HubSpot or Slack. Transcriptions and summaries are automatically shared with your team or saved in your CRM.
Fireflies works on web, iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS. Linux is not supported. The tool recognizes more than 69 languages, including Dutch, although AI summaries are sometimes generated in English.
What does Fireflies cost?
Fireflies has a free plan with 800 minutes of storage and limited AI summaries. That’s enough to test the tool, but for regular use you’ll quickly run into the limits.
The Pro plan costs $ 18 per month or $ 10 per month if you pay annually (total $ 120). This gets you unlimited transcription, advanced AI summaries, and more storage space. The Business plan costs $ 29 per month or $ 19 per month with annual payment (total $ 228). That plan adds video recording, CRM integrations, and team features.
A 7-day trial period is available for the paid plans. Lifetime deals are not offered.
What should you watch out for?
Fireflies has its limitations. The speaker identification is often inaccurate, especially in larger meetings with many participants. You have to manually correct who said what regularly. That takes time and undermines part of the automation.
The transcription struggles with accents and jargon. If your team uses technical terms or industry-specific words, there are often errors in those. The same goes for non-standard accents. The text is usable, but not perfect.
There is no automatic language detection. You have to set in advance what language the meeting is in, otherwise you get a messy transcription. Difficult when you have meetings that switch between languages.
Some users find the presence of the bot disruptive. It appears as a participant in your meeting, which sometimes raises questions with external guests. You can’t make the bot invisible.
Fireflies alternatives
Fireflies is not the only player in this market. Here are three alternatives you can consider:
- Otter.ai: Choose this if you find real-time transcription during the meeting important. Otter displays the text live while people are talking, which is useful for the hearing impaired or if you want to read along immediately.
- tl;dv: This alternative has a stronger free plan with video recording included. If your budget is limited and video is important to you, tl;dv is a better choice.
- Fathom: Completely free for individual users. If you’re looking for a simple, no-nonsense solution without a paywall, try Fathom.
Frequently asked questions
Here are answers to the most frequently asked questions about Fireflies:
Does Fireflies work with Dutch meetings?
Yes, Fireflies supports transcription in more than 69 languages, including Dutch. The AI summaries are sometimes generated in English, even though the meeting was in Dutch. That can be confusing.
How does Fireflies join my meeting?
Fireflies adds a bot ([email protected]) to your calendar invitations. That bot automatically dials into Zoom, Google Meet or Teams calls at the scheduled time. You see it as a participant in the meeting.
Is my data safe with Fireflies?
Data is stored by default in the United States and the company is SOC 2 Type II compliant. Enterprise customers can choose Private Storage to store data in the EU, but that’s not available for standard plans.
Conclusion
Fireflies does what it promises: automatically transcribe meetings and make them searchable. The AI summaries are useful and the integrations with CRM systems work well. For sales teams and managers who have a lot of meetings, it really saves time.
But the speaker identification is mediocre and the transcription stumbles over accents. If you expect perfect accuracy, you’ll be disappointed. For those who have few meetings or conduct privacy-sensitive conversations, there are better options. But for the average remote worker who wants to automate their notes? Then Fireflies is a solid choice.
