Fireflies.ai

What it is

Fireflies joins your meetings and takes the notes. It connects to Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, transcribes the call in any of more than 100 languages, and produces a summary afterwards. Recordings become searchable, so a decision made six weeks ago is findable by typing what you remember of it.

On top of the transcript sit real-time notes, speaker analytics showing who talked and how much, comments and bookmarks on specific moments, file uploads for recordings made elsewhere, and AskFred, an assistant that answers questions about your meetings.

Who it's for (and who it isn't)

It fits teams whose meetings produce decisions that then get forgotten, and anyone who currently types notes while trying to listen. Sales teams, client services and any recurring internal meeting where the follow-up depends on someone's memory of it.

It is a weaker fit for sensitive conversations: performance reviews, disputes, anything where a recording changes how people speak. It is also unnecessary for a team that already writes a decision log by hand, since that habit produces a shorter and more useful record than a transcript does.

Pricing

Fireflies is freemium and the free plan is unusually strong: unlimited transcription and unlimited AI summaries, with 400 minutes of storage per team and 20 AI credits. Pro is $10 per seat per month billed annually, or $18 monthly, with 8,000 minutes of storage per seat. Business is $19 per seat per month annually, or $29 monthly, with unlimited storage and 30 credits. Enterprise is $39 per seat per month, billed annually, with 50 credits.

Note where the limit sits. Transcription is unlimited even on free, and storage is what you buy. That is a friendlier shape than per-minute pricing, and it means the free tier is genuinely usable if you do not need to keep everything.

Set it up

Official guide: How to Invite Fireflies to Meetings

1. Create a Fireflies account on the Free plan. Go to fireflies.ai, click "Get started", then click "Continue with Google" or "Continue with Microsoft (Outlook)". Tick the box that lets Fireflies see your calendar and click "Continue". If you are offered a free trial, click the close (✕) icon in the top-right corner to stay on the Free plan. You land on your Fireflies dashboard.
2. Choose which meetings the assistant joins. On the "Home" page click "Settings", open "Meeting Settings" and find "Auto-join calendar meetings". Pick "Only when I invite fred@fireflies.ai", the email address of Fireflies' meeting assistant. Fireflies now joins only the meetings you invite it to.
3. Invite it to a real meeting. In your Google or Outlook calendar, create or edit a meeting and add a video link ("Google Meet" in Google Calendar, "Microsoft Teams" in Outlook). Add fred@fireflies.ai to the invitees and save the event before it starts, because Fireflies does not join a call that is already running. You now see fred@fireflies.ai among the guests on the event.
4. Tell everyone before you start that the meeting is being recorded. Recording rules differ by country, and asking for consent is your job, not Fireflies'. Start the meeting. The assistant now joins the call as a participant.
5. After the meeting, open the "Meeting Status" page in the Fireflies web app and wait until your meeting shows "Completed" with a green checkmark. Click the meeting. You now see the transcript, a summary and action items.
6. Use the search bar to find a past meeting by title, host, date or a word spoken in it. Type one word from the meeting you just had. You now see that meeting in the results.

When this works, every meeting you invite Fireflies to leaves a written transcript, summary and action items that you can search later.

On Pro ($10/seat/mo billed annually ($18 monthly)): each seat, meaning one paying user, stores 8,000 minutes of recordings, where the Free plan stores 400 minutes for the whole team.

Strengths and limitations

The strength is the free tier plus search. Unlimited transcription at no cost removes the reason to postpone trying it, and a searchable archive of meetings is worth more after six months than it seems in week one.

The limitations are consent, accuracy and storage. Recording colleagues and clients carries legal obligations that vary by country and are yours to meet, and in the EU that means being explicit rather than quiet about it. Transcription quality drops with crosstalk and heavy accents, and AI summaries occasionally state something confidently that nobody said, so read them rather than forwarding them blind. And storage, not transcription, is what the plans meter. See Otter.ai vs Fireflies.ai.