Fireflies.ai

What Is Fireflies.ai?

Fireflies.ai is a cloud-based meeting intelligence platform that automatically joins your video calls, records the audio, transcribes the conversation, and makes everything searchable. Founded in 2016 by Krish Ramineni and Sam Udotong, it has grown into one of the most popular meeting transcription tools alongside Otter.ai, serving over 300,000 organizations worldwide. The company has raised over $19 million in funding and processes millions of meetings per month.

While Otter.ai focuses on individual productivity and consumer-friendly design, Fireflies positions itself more toward team and enterprise use cases. Its core differentiator is the ability to search across your entire meeting history — every word spoken in every recorded call becomes indexed and queryable. For sales teams reviewing client calls, managers tracking project decisions, and organizations building institutional knowledge from conversations, this search-first approach is genuinely transformative.

Fireflies operates as a web application with mobile apps for iOS and Android and a Chrome extension for browser-based recording. There is no desktop application. All transcripts, recordings, and search indexes are stored in the cloud, which enables cross-device access and team collaboration but requires trusting Fireflies with potentially sensitive meeting content.

Setup & Getting Started

Creating a Fireflies account takes about three minutes. Sign up with email or Google, connect your calendar (Google Calendar or Outlook), and configure the meeting bot. Fireflies' bot, called "Fred," joins your meetings as a participant to record the audio. You can configure Fred to join all meetings automatically, only meetings where you are the host, or only meetings you manually select.

The calendar integration is the most important setup step. Once connected, Fireflies detects all upcoming calendar events that include a video conferencing link (Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Webex) and prepares to join them. You can review upcoming meetings in the Fireflies dashboard and toggle the bot on or off for individual meetings. This granular control is important — you probably do not want to record every casual check-in.

We completed the full setup, including connecting a Google Calendar and configuring auto-join rules, in about five minutes. The first test meeting was recorded successfully, and the transcript was available within four minutes of the meeting ending. The onboarding flow is well-designed, with clear instructions and no confusing options.

Meeting Recording & Transcription

Fireflies integrates with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, GoTo Meeting, and several other video conferencing platforms. The Fred bot joins meetings as a participant, which means other attendees can see that recording is active. The bot captures the meeting audio but not video — only the audio stream is processed for transcription.

In our testing across ten meetings of varying types (1-on-1s, team standups, client calls, all-hands), Fireflies achieved 89-93% accuracy on clear English audio. This is slightly below Otter.ai's 90-94% in our comparable tests, though the gap is narrow enough that it may not be noticeable in daily use. Speaker identification was correct approximately 80% of the time — below Otter's 85% but still useful for following the conversation flow.

Transcripts are delivered within 5-10 minutes of the meeting ending, which is slightly slower than Otter's near-immediate processing. The delivered transcript includes timestamped segments, speaker labels, and confidence highlighting for uncertain words. You can play back the original audio synchronized with the transcript, which is essential for verifying important quotes or decisions that the AI may have transcribed imperfectly.

Search & Knowledge Base

Fireflies' cross-meeting search is its strongest feature and the primary reason teams choose it over Otter.ai. Every word from every recorded meeting is indexed in a searchable database. Type a topic, a person's name, a product name, or any phrase into the search bar, and Fireflies returns results across your entire meeting history with timestamps and context.

We tested the search with increasingly specific queries. Searching for "budget" returned 23 results across 8 meetings from the past month, each with a clickable timestamp that jumped to the relevant moment in the transcript. Searching for a client's name returned every meeting where that person was mentioned or participated. Searching for a specific technical term returned the exact meetings where it was discussed. The search is fast, accurate, and genuinely useful.

For sales teams, this search capability transforms meeting recordings from forgotten archives into a queryable knowledge base. A sales manager can search for "competitor mentioned" to understand how often specific competitors come up in client calls. A new team member can search for a client's name to quickly catch up on the relationship history. This institutional knowledge feature compounds in value over time as the meeting archive grows.

AI Features & AskFred

Fireflies offers several AI-powered features beyond basic transcription. Meeting summaries are generated automatically and include an overview, key topics, decisions, and action items. The summaries are formatted as structured bullet points and can be shared via link or pushed to integrated tools.

The "AskFred" chatbot lets you ask questions about your meetings in natural language. You can ask "What did John say about the timeline?" or "Were there any objections during the pricing discussion?" and AskFred searches through relevant transcripts to provide answers with direct quotes. This conversational interface is more intuitive than manual search for ad-hoc questions and works across your entire meeting history.

Sentiment analysis is available on the Business plan and tracks the emotional tone of meetings over time. It identifies positive, negative, and neutral segments and provides an overall sentiment score. For sales teams, this can highlight meetings where clients expressed concerns or enthusiasm. For managers, it can surface team morale trends across one-on-ones. The accuracy of sentiment detection is approximate — it catches obvious positive and negative signals but misses subtle sarcasm or nuanced emotional shifts.

Topic tracking automatically identifies and categorizes key themes discussed across meetings. Fireflies tags topics like "budget," "timeline," "hiring," and "product features" and provides dashboards showing topic frequency over time. This high-level view is useful for leadership teams who want to understand what their organization is spending meeting time discussing.

Integrations & Workflow Automation

Fireflies integrates with over 40 tools, which is substantially more than Otter.ai's integration ecosystem. CRM integrations include Salesforce and HubSpot — meeting notes and call summaries can be automatically logged against the relevant contact or deal record. Project management integrations include Asana, Trello, Monday.com, and ClickUp. Communication integrations include Slack and Microsoft Teams (for posting meeting summaries to channels).

The Zapier integration extends connectivity to thousands of additional tools. Common Zapier workflows include: automatically sending meeting summaries to a Google Doc, creating tasks in Todoist from action items, posting transcripts to a Confluence wiki, or triggering a notification in a custom webhook. The API (available on Business and Enterprise plans) allows fully custom integrations for organizations with unique workflow requirements.

For sales teams specifically, the CRM integrations are a major differentiator. After a client call, Fireflies can automatically log the meeting summary, key topics, and action items to the client's Salesforce record. This eliminates the manual step of writing up meeting notes and pasting them into the CRM — a task that sales reps notoriously skip, leading to lost information. Automated CRM logging is one of the highest-value features Fireflies offers.

Pricing Analysis

Fireflies offers four tiers. The Free plan includes limited transcription credits (approximately 800 minutes of storage), basic AI summaries, and limited search. The Pro plan costs $10 per seat per month (annual billing) and adds unlimited transcription, full search history, integrations, and AI features. The Business plan costs $19 per seat per month and adds conversation intelligence, sentiment analysis, advanced analytics, and team insights. The Enterprise plan offers custom pricing with SSO, data residency, and dedicated support.

For individual users, Fireflies Pro at $10/month is cheaper than Otter Pro at $16.99/month, making it a competitive option for budget-conscious users who want good meeting transcription with search capabilities. For teams, the per-seat model adds up: a 10-person team on Business costs $190/month, while the same team on Otter Business costs $300/month. Fireflies is generally cheaper at every tier.

The free plan is quite limited compared to Otter's free tier. Otter offers 300 minutes per month of recording; Fireflies' free plan restricts both the number of transcription credits and storage duration. For meaningful evaluation, you will need to try the Pro plan — fortunately, Fireflies offers a 7-day free trial with full access to Pro features.

Fireflies vs Otter.ai

The Fireflies vs Otter.ai comparison is the most common question we receive about meeting transcription tools. Both tools serve the same core use case — recording, transcribing, and summarizing meetings — but with different emphases. Otter excels in individual productivity: higher transcription accuracy, a more polished consumer experience, real-time live transcription during meetings, and a more generous free tier.

Fireflies excels in team and enterprise workflows: cross-meeting search, deeper CRM and project management integrations, conversation intelligence features (sentiment, topic tracking), and more competitive per-seat pricing. If your primary need is accurate transcription of your own meetings, Otter is the better choice. If your team needs searchable meeting archives, automated CRM logging, and analytics across conversations, Fireflies is the better choice.

In practice, many organizations evaluate both tools during a trial period and choose based on which set of strengths aligns with their workflow. Sales-driven organizations almost always prefer Fireflies for its Salesforce and HubSpot integrations. Product and engineering teams often prefer Otter for its simplicity and accuracy. There is no wrong choice between these two tools — both are excellent.

Who Is Fireflies.ai Best For?

Fireflies is ideal for sales teams that need CRM integration and call analytics, customer success teams reviewing client interactions, managers and executives who want searchable archives of all their meetings, and organizations building a knowledge base from conversational data. The search and integration features are what justify Fireflies over simpler alternatives.

It is less ideal for individual users who want the simplest possible meeting transcription (choose Otter.ai), users who need general-purpose dictation rather than meeting recording (choose Wispr Flow or SuperWhisper), or users who need offline transcription (choose MacWhisper).

Long-Term Value & Verdict

Fireflies.ai is the best meeting transcription tool for teams that treat meetings as a knowledge asset. Its cross-meeting search, CRM integrations, and conversation intelligence features are unmatched in the category. The more meetings you record, the more valuable the searchable archive becomes — this is a tool that compounds in utility over time.

The main weaknesses are slightly lower transcription accuracy compared to Otter.ai, a limited free tier that makes evaluation difficult, and the per-seat pricing that can strain team budgets. For individual use without team or CRM needs, Otter.ai is the simpler, slightly more accurate choice.

We recommend Fireflies for any team that conducts 10+ meetings per week and needs to retain and search through meeting knowledge. Sales organizations in particular should strongly consider Fireflies — the automated CRM logging alone saves hours of manual data entry per week and ensures that client conversation details are never lost.