Fireflies records, transcribes, and summarizes meetings across Zoom, Meet, and Teams, with unlimited transcription on every plan including free. The limits sit elsewhere: 400 minutes of storage shared across your whole team on free, 20 AI credits a month on both free and Pro, and no video recording until Business. Pro is $10/seat annually — but $18 if you pay monthly, a 44% gap.
Affiliate link — we may earn a commission
This analysis is based on documentation, public user reports, and vendor materials — not yet on our own hands-on testing. How we rate
Fireflies is an AI meeting assistant that joins your calls, transcribes them, and produces searchable summaries with action items. It works across Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and more, supports 100-plus languages, and — unusually — gives you unlimited transcription on every plan, including free.
That's a real thing, not marketing. No meeting cap, no time limit, free forever.
The word "unlimited" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in Fireflies' marketing though, so it's worth being precise about what's actually capped. Three things:
| What's genuinely unlimited | What's actually capped |
|---|---|
| Transcription (all tiers) | Storage — 400 minutes across your whole team on free |
| AI summary length | AI credits — 20/month on Free and Pro |
| Number of meetings | Video recording — Business tier only |
| Language support (100+) | Meeting duration — 2h Pro, 3h Business, 4h Enterprise |
None of that makes Fireflies a bad deal. It's a good product. But if you pick a plan based on the word unlimited, you'll hit a wall you didn't budget for, and it'll probably be the storage one.
Fireflies suits people with high meeting volume who want a searchable archive without counting calls — consultants, customer success, recruiters, anyone whose week is mostly conversations they'll need to reference later. The unlimited-transcription-plus-100-languages combination is genuinely strong for multilingual teams, where most competitors thin out.
It's also a reasonable pick for sales teams on Business, where CRM sync and conversation intelligence land.
Skip it if: you need video recording on a budget (that's Business, not Pro), you rely heavily on AskFred and AI Apps (20 credits disappears fast), you run long workshops that exceed your tier's duration cap, or you'd rather not have a visible bot announcing itself on sensitive calls.
| Tool | Free tier strength | Free tier limit | Video on entry paid | Entry paid (annual) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fireflies | ✅ Unlimited transcription | 400 team min storage, 20 credits | ❌ Business only | $10/seat |
| Fathom | ✅ Unlimited recording | 5 AI summaries/month | ✅ Yes | ~$16 |
| Otter | ⚠️ 300 min/month | Minutes cap | ⚠️ Limited | ~$8.33 |
| Granola | ⚠️ Trial | — | ⚠️ Mac-focused | ~$10 |
| Read AI | ⚠️ Limited | — | ✅ Some | ~$15+ |
Pricing checked August 2026 from each provider's pages. Competitor prices are approximate and change frequently.
Fireflies vs Fathom: The two free tiers are almost mirror images. Fathom records unlimited but caps AI summaries at five a month. Fireflies transcribes unlimited but caps storage at 400 team minutes and AI credits at 20. Ask yourself which you'd hit first — if you need summaries on most calls, Fathom; if you need a big searchable transcript archive, Fireflies.
Fireflies vs Otter: Otter caps free at 300 minutes a month and is broader on transcription generally (voice notes, file uploads), with a lower entry price. Fireflies wins on unlimited transcription and language breadth. For general-purpose transcription, Otter; for meeting-focused volume, Fireflies.
Fireflies vs Granola: Granola enhances notes you take yourself rather than recording passively, and it's Mac-focused with no bot joining the call. Fireflies is the fuller archive. For high-stakes calls where you take notes anyway — and where a visible bot would be awkward — Granola; for passive capture at volume, Fireflies.
| Plan | Annual | Monthly | Storage | AI credits | Video |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 400 min per team | 20/mo | ❌ |
| Pro | $10/seat | $18/seat | Higher, capped | 20/mo | ❌ |
| Business | $19/seat | $29/seat | Unlimited | More | ✅ |
| Enterprise | $39/seat | Annual only | Custom | Highest | ✅ |
Pricing checked August 2026 against fireflies.ai; storage and credit figures vary slightly across sources, so confirm current limits. Additional AI credit packs run from $5 for 50 up to $600 for 10,000. No refunds after 20 recorded meetings.
Three things drive the real cost here.
Pay annually or don't bother. The 44% gap between $10 and $18 on Pro is the widest in this category. A ten-person team on Business saves around $1,200 a year going annual. Fireflies advertises the annual rate, so half the comparisons you'll read online are quietly comparing its annual price to a competitor's monthly one.
The Pro-to-Business jump is where video lives. If you need video recording, CRM sync, or unlimited storage, you're at $19, not $10. For a lot of teams that's the actual entry price and Pro is a stepping stone they skip.
Credits, not summaries, are the ceiling. Twenty AI credits a month covers light AskFred use. If querying your meeting archive is central to why you're buying, model your usage against credit packs before committing — $5 for 50 is fine occasionally, but it adds up.
Worth flagging: no refunds after 20 recorded meetings. Test deliberately within that window.
Searchable meeting archive: A consultant transcribes every client call and later queries the archive with AskFred instead of scrubbing recordings — the core use case, and where unlimited transcription genuinely pays.
Multilingual teams: A distributed team records calls across several languages with 100-plus language support, where most competitors narrow sharply.
Sales coaching: On Business, managers use conversation intelligence and talk-time analytics to coach reps on real calls, with notes syncing to the CRM.
Recruiting interviews: A recruiter captures candidate interviews for later review and structured comparison across a hiring round.
Async catch-up: Someone who missed a meeting reads the summary and action items rather than watching a recording end to end.
Fireflies delivers something rare: genuinely unlimited transcription on a free plan, with no meeting cap and no expiry, plus 100-plus language support that outclasses most of the category. For high-volume meeting professionals who want a searchable archive, it's a strong product at a fair price, and the Business tier's CRM sync and conversation intelligence make it credible for sales teams.
The reservations are about how the limits are framed rather than the limits themselves. Marketing leans hard on "unlimited" while the binding constraints — 400 minutes of team storage on free, 20 AI credits on both Free and Pro, video gated to Business, duration caps by tier — sit further down the page. The 44% annual-versus-monthly spread means the advertised price assumes a year's commitment. And the visible bot, plus a BIPA class action around recording practices, is worth reviewing if you operate under biometric privacy law.
For meeting-heavy work, recommend on annual Pro or Business depending on whether you need video. For summary-heavy use on a free tier, Fathom goes further.
Note: Fireflies does not currently have an active affiliate program with AIVario. We earn no commission, and this rating carries no commercial incentive.
Best for: High-meeting-volume professionals, multilingual teams needing broad language support, sales teams on Business wanting CRM-synced intelligence, anyone building a searchable conversation archive Not ideal for: Budget users needing video (Business only), heavy AskFred users (20 credits goes fast), long workshops exceeding duration caps, sensitive calls where a visible bot is a problem Bottom line: The best unlimited-transcription free tier in the category, with the caps moved somewhere less obvious. Pay annually, and pick your tier based on storage and video rather than the word unlimited.
Four tiers, and the annual-versus-monthly gap is the widest in the category. Free is $0. Pro is $10/seat/month billed annually, or $18 monthly — a 44% difference. Business is $19 annually or $29 monthly. Enterprise is $39/seat, annual billing only. A ten-person team choosing annual Business over monthly saves roughly $1,200 a year, so if you're committing at all, commit annually.
Unlimited transcription, yes — genuinely, with no meeting cap and no time limit. It's free forever, not a trial. But three other limits bind hard: storage caps at 400 minutes shared across your entire team (a five-person team meeting regularly burns that in days), transcript downloads and exports are blocked, and there's no video recording. Once storage fills, older transcripts become inaccessible until you upgrade or delete.
This is the detail most reviews skip. Fireflies advertises unlimited AI summaries, and that's technically true — there's no limit on summary length. But AskFred queries, AI Apps, and advanced analytics all draw from a monthly credit pool, and both Free and Pro get only 20 credits a month. Business gets more. Run out and Fireflies offers add-on packs starting at $5 for 50 credits, scaling to $600 for 10,000. Plan around the credits, not the word unlimited.
No, and it surprises a lot of buyers. Video recording is a Business-tier feature at $19/seat annually. Pro at $10 gives you audio and transcripts only. Some sources note 720p video with a two-hour cap at Pro level, so this may vary by plan configuration — check the current pricing page. Either way, if video matters to your workflow, budget for Business rather than assuming $10 covers it.
Yes, tiered by plan: roughly two hours per meeting on Pro, three on Business, four on Enterprise. For standard calls that's irrelevant. For all-day workshops, training sessions, or long client sessions, check your tier's ceiling before relying on it — a cut-off recording at hour two of a critical session is an expensive surprise.
Different generosity, different limits. Fathom keeps recording unlimited but caps advanced AI summaries at five per month on free. Fireflies keeps transcription and summaries unlimited but caps storage at 400 team minutes and AI credits at 20. If you record constantly and need summaries occasionally, Fathom's free tier goes further. If you want unlimited searchable transcripts and 100-plus language support, Fireflies. Both are strong; the free-tier trade-offs are opposite.
Yes — Fireflies joins as a visible bot participant, so everyone on the call can see it's recording. That's transparent by design, but worth flagging for sensitive conversations where you'd rather not announce a recorder. Fireflies has also faced a class action under Illinois's Biometric Information Privacy Act relating to recording practices, so if you operate in a state with biometric privacy law, review consent requirements before deploying it broadly.
Anthropic's AI for deep reasoning, long documents, and writing that doesn't sound like AI.
AI meeting notes that combine your rough typing with audio transcript into structured summaries. The smart note-taking tool that won 2025.
AI meeting recorder for Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams. Unlimited free recording; AI summaries capped at 5/month on the free tier.
