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Fireflies.ai is one of the most popular AI meeting assistants on the market. It joins your video calls, transcribes conversations, generates summaries, and extracts action items. For many teams, it works well enough.
In this article
But "well enough" has limits.
Maybe you've hit storage caps on the free plan. Maybe your team has concerns about a visible bot joining client calls. Maybe you need deeper analytics than meeting summaries can provide. Or maybe you've seen the 2025 class-action lawsuit alleging unauthorized recording and want to evaluate your options.
Whatever the reason, you're not alone. Here are five Fireflies.ai alternatives worth considering, each with a different strength, followed by a fundamentally different approach for teams that need more than meeting notes.
| Tool | Best For | Free Plan | Paid Starting Price | Languages |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fireflies.ai | General meeting transcription | 800 min/mo | $10/user/mo (annual) | 100+ |
| Otter.ai | Real-time English transcription | 300 min/mo | $8.33/user/mo (annual) | English-focused |
| tl;dv | Free unlimited recordings | Unlimited recordings | $18/user/mo (annual) | 30+ |
| Fathom | Simplicity, no storage limits | Unlimited recordings | $15/user/mo (annual) | 28+ |
| Gong | Enterprise sales intelligence | None | ~$108/user/mo + platform fee | 70+ |
| Avoma | Mid-market sales teams | Free trial | $29/seat/mo | 20+ |
Otter.ai built its reputation on transcription accuracy. If your team works primarily in English and needs real-time captions during meetings, Otter delivers the most polished experience in the category.
What sets it apart: Otter's real-time transcription is noticeably faster and more accurate than Fireflies for English-language meetings. The live caption feature works well for accessibility needs, and the collaborative editing interface makes it easy for multiple team members to annotate transcripts during or after a call.
Pricing:
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (per user/mo) |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 300 min/mo, 30 min per conversation |
| Pro | $16.99 | $8.33 (1,200 min/mo) |
| Business | $30 | $20 (6,000 min/mo) |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom |
Strengths:
Limitations:
Best for: Teams that prioritize transcription accuracy and real-time collaboration over analytics, and work primarily in English.
If budget is the primary constraint, tl;dv offers the most generous free tier in the meeting intelligence space: unlimited recordings with no storage limits.
What sets it apart: The free plan gives you unlimited meeting recordings and basic transcription in 30+ languages. The catch is that AI-generated summaries are limited to 10 lifetime uses on the free plan, which means you get the raw material for free but need to upgrade for AI-powered insights.
Pricing:
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (per user/mo) |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Unlimited recordings, 10 lifetime AI summaries |
| Pro | $29 | $18 (unlimited AI notes) |
| Business | $98 | $59 (sales coaching, playbook monitoring) |
Strengths:
Limitations:
Best for: Teams that need unlimited recordings on a budget and can work with manual note-taking, or sales teams willing to pay for the Business tier's coaching features.
Fathom takes the opposite approach from feature-heavy platforms. It focuses on doing a few things well: recording, transcribing, and summarizing meetings without unnecessary complexity.
What sets it apart: No storage limits on any plan, including free. The interface is clean, onboarding takes minutes, and the AI summaries are consistently good. For individuals and small teams that just want their meetings captured reliably, Fathom removes the friction that comes with more complex platforms.
Pricing:
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (per user/mo) |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Unlimited recordings, 5 AI summaries/mo |
| Premium | $19 | ~$15 (unlimited AI summaries) |
| Team Edition | $29 | ~$19 (shared libraries, keyword alerts) |
| Team Pro | $39 | ~$29 (CRM sync, scorecards) |
Strengths:
Limitations:
Best for: Individual professionals and small teams who want a simple, reliable meeting recorder that just works, without learning a complex platform.
Gong is not a Fireflies alternative in the traditional sense. It's an enterprise revenue intelligence platform that happens to include meeting recording. If your organization's primary goal is improving sales performance and pipeline forecasting, Gong is the market leader.
What sets it apart: Gong's conversation intelligence goes far beyond transcription. It analyzes talk-to-listen ratios, tracks competitor mentions, identifies winning talk patterns, scores deals based on conversation signals, and forecasts revenue. For B2B sales organizations, these insights are transformative.
Pricing:
| Component | Estimated Cost |
|---|---|
| Platform fee | ~$5,000/year |
| Per user (Core) | ~$1,300-$1,600/user/year |
| Per user (Bundled) | ~$2,880-$3,000/user/year |
| Implementation | ~$7,500 |
For a detailed comparison with a QA-focused alternative, see our Gistly vs Gong breakdown.
Strengths:
Limitations:
Best for: Mid-market and enterprise B2B sales organizations with budget for a full revenue intelligence platform. Not suitable for general meeting notes or non-sales teams.
See how Gistly audits 100% of conversations in 48 hours
No complex setup. No months of onboarding. Just results.
Book a Demo →Avoma sits between Fireflies and Gong in both features and pricing. It combines meeting recording with conversation intelligence, automated call scoring, and deal tracking, without the enterprise price tag.
What sets it apart: Avoma includes built-in lead routing and meeting scheduling alongside its conversation intelligence, which means one less tool in your stack. The automated call scoring is useful for sales managers who want coaching insights without manually reviewing calls.
Pricing:
| Plan | Cost (per seat/mo) |
|---|---|
| Conversation Intelligence | $29 |
| Revenue Intelligence | $39 |
| Lead Router | $19 |
Strengths:
Limitations:
Best for: Sales teams that want Gong-like analytics and coaching features at a more accessible price point, with the convenience of built-in scheduling.
Every tool on this list solves a version of the same problem: capturing and summarizing meetings. They're designed for teams that attend dozens of video calls per week and need help keeping track of what was said.
But some organizations have a fundamentally different challenge.
Contact centers and BPOs don't need meeting notes. They handle thousands of customer calls daily and need to audit every single one for quality, compliance, and coaching opportunities. The math is straightforward: a 300-agent operation generates 3,000+ calls per day. Manual QA covers 2-3% of those. The other 97% goes unheard.
Meeting notetakers aren't built for this scale. They require you to invite a bot to each call. They don't offer QA scorecards, compliance monitoring, or automated auditing workflows. And they certainly weren't designed to handle Hindi-English code-switching in the same sentence.
Gistly is an AI governance layer for customer conversations, whether handled by humans, AI agents, or Voice AI. Instead of recording select meetings, Gistly connects to your telephony system and audits 100% of calls automatically.
How Gistly differs from meeting intelligence tools:
| Dimension | Meeting Notetakers (Fireflies, Otter, etc.) | Gistly |
|---|---|---|
| Coverage | Records meetings you invite it to | Audits 100% of calls automatically |
| Use case | Meeting summaries and action items | QA scoring, compliance monitoring, coaching insights |
| Scale | Dozens of meetings/week | Thousands of calls/day |
| Compliance | Basic (HIPAA on enterprise tiers) | DPDP Act, PCI-DSS, industry-specific compliance monitoring |
| Languages | General multilingual support | Purpose-built for Indic languages with code-switching |
| Analytics | Meeting summaries, topic tracking | QA scorecards, conversation analysis, trend detection |
| Deployment | Self-serve signup | First insights in 48 hours |
If your team is evaluating Fireflies alternatives because you need better meeting notes, the five tools above will serve you well. But if you're looking because you need to audit customer conversations at scale, with compliance monitoring, multilingual support, and automated QA, you're looking in the wrong category.
See how Gistly audits 100% of conversations
The best choice depends on your primary need:
Before switching, consider what's actually driving the decision. If it's pricing, tl;dv and Fathom offer more generous free tiers. If it's analytics depth, Avoma and Gong go deeper on sales intelligence. If it's privacy concerns, look for tools that offer bot-free recording options.
And if your real need is auditing every customer conversation for quality and compliance rather than summarizing internal meetings, the comparison shifts entirely. That's a different category, and it requires a platform built for that purpose.
Fireflies offers a free plan with 800 minutes of storage per month, basic transcription, and limited AI features (10 credits). For most teams, the free plan works as a trial but requires upgrading for regular use.
tl;dv offers unlimited free recordings (no minute caps), though AI summaries are limited to 10 lifetime uses. Fathom offers unlimited recordings with 5 AI summaries per month and no storage limits. Both are more generous than Fireflies' free tier for basic recording needs.
They serve different purposes. Fireflies is a meeting transcription and summarization tool. Gong is an enterprise revenue intelligence platform with deep sales analytics, deal forecasting, and coaching. Gong is significantly more expensive ($1,300+/user/year vs. $10-29/user/month) but far more powerful for sales teams.
Meeting notetakers (Fireflies, Otter, Fathom) record and transcribe scheduled meetings, generating summaries and action items. Conversation intelligence platforms analyze conversations at scale to extract patterns, score quality, monitor compliance, and surface coaching opportunities. The difference is passive capture vs. active analysis.
Most alternatives support multiple languages to varying degrees. Otter.ai is strongest in English. tl;dv supports 30+ languages. For specialized multilingual needs like Indic language code-switching in contact center environments, purpose-built platforms like Gistly are more reliable than general-purpose meeting tools.
Gistly is an AI governance layer that audits 100% of customer conversations, whether handled by humans, AI agents, or Voice AI. It delivers QA scoring, compliance monitoring, and coaching insights across 10+ languages within 48 hours of deployment. Request a demo
Gistly audits every conversation automatically — compliance flags, QA scores, and coaching insights in 48 hours.