Fireflies is undoubtedly a popular automated meeting notes tool. But let’s be real - it is not ideal for everyone and you probably already know this.
Selecting an alternative that ticks all your boxes might be an uphill task. And you certainly do not want to waste your time testing scores of similar products in the market. So, we have decided to take that burden off of you.
We have evaluated a dozen tools in detail and finally picked out the best five Fireflies.ai alternatives to narrow down your options.
What is Fireflies.ai?
Fireflies is an AI-powered tool that records, transcribes, and summarizes meetings across various video-conferencing apps and dialers, including Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, RingCentral, and Aircall.
In addition to generating meeting records, it uses conversation intelligence to analyze metrics such as topic trends, speaker talk time, and sentiments. These insights help teams run better meetings and make data-driven decisions.
Fireflies Pricing
Fireflies offers a free trial for individuals starting out, with 800 mins of storage. It also has several paid plans catering to your needs:
Pro Plan - $18 per seat monthly with 8,000 mins of storage.
Business Plan - $29 per seat monthly with unlimited storage
Enterprise Plan - Custom pricing billed annually
Why you might need a Fireflies alternative?
By my authentic test of the tool and searching through user reviews, the most common reasons customers require an alternative include:
Not-satisfying user experience: For one thing, users are left to explore the product by themselves without much onboarding guidance. For the other, Fireflies is not as intuitive and easy to use as many of its alternatives. According to some reviews on G2, this is a major con using Fireflies.ai.
No live transcription: Fireflies only has transcriptions available after the meeting. Instead, other alternatives like Airgram allow users to access the transcript in real-time and bookmark important information.
Slow processing: Fireflies.ai can be a bit slow in processing meeting transcripts—10 minutes at least and may be up to an hour, which is frustrating.
The 5 Best Alternatives to Fireflies.ai
If any of the points above apply to you, you can explore the following fireflies.ai alternatives and find the most suitable one for your needs.
Airgram
Airgram is a deserving top pick on this list not only because of its high-quality meeting recording, transcription, and summary but also because it centralizes the end-to-end management of your meetings from a single dashboard. And this sets it apart from similar tools in the market.
As an all-in-one meeting productivity tool, it is versatile enough to cater to diverse use cases including customer management, recruitment, sales training, and online classes.
Pros
Meeting booking: Airgram’s inbuilt scheduling function allows you to share open hours on your calendar with other meeting participants and efficiently align on a meeting time without lengthy email exchanges. This eliminates the need for a separate scheduling app.
Live transcription: Airgram generates real-time transcriptions, and thus, enables users to access, view, and highlight the meeting transcript while the meeting is ongoing.
Meeting collaboration: With the integrated and rich-text Notepad, teams can collaborate on preparing an agenda or taking meeting notes simultaneously.
AI summary: Airgram uses GPT-4 to generate a post-meeting summary of conversations while highlighting the next steps so that you can access important information at a glance; much time is saved.
Action item tracking: Airgram centralizes and organizes action items, the assignee, and the completion timeline by status.
Audio/video transcription: In addition to transcribing online meetings in real time, you can upload video and audio files for transcription, including meeting recordings, podcasts, and interviews.
Shareable meeting clips: You can share only the most important information by extracting a one-minute video highlight from a meeting recording without additional editing software.
Cons
No sentiment analysis
Pricing
Airgram has a simple two-tier pricing model:
Free Plan: $0 to access all Airgram’s basic features for life and no credit card is required to sign up. So, if your meetings are infrequent, this could be the right fit.
Plus Plan: $18 monthly for unlimited transcription credits and storage and access to all Airgram’s premium features.
Why is Airgram the best Fireflies alternative?
Airgram is the best Fireflies alternative for a myriad of reasons, but most especially because it offers a better experience and an affordable price.
Airgram has a single paid plan that offers unlimited transcriptions, unlimited storage, and up to 5 hours per meeting at $18 per user/monthly.
Fireflies, on the other hand, has a Pro plan that costs $18/user per month, but it excludes key features like video recording and limits the storage to 8,000 mins/seat. Its Business plan which has unlimited storage and transcription credits costs $29 per user/monthly.
Besides, Airgram focuses on the entire meeting lifecycle including scheduling, preparing an agenda, taking notes, summarizing meetings, and managing action items, making it a more cost-effective option.
Besides, Fireflies only works for virtual meetings, while Airgram can be used for both remote and in-person meetings.
Fathom
Fathom is pretty straightforward. It focuses mainly on meeting records, i.e. recording, transcribing, and summarizing meetings on Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. And post-meeting, users can edit, highlight, and copy transcripts.
It supports 7 languages including English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, and German.
This tool is a decent Fireflies alternative for people who are content with simply creating meeting records and might not be ideal for more collaborative purposes - especially on its free plan.
Pros
Users can mark key moments, feedback, and reactions during the meeting.
Fathom allows users to get recording consent from attendees of external calls before the meeting.
Fathom creates summaries of meeting conversations, emphasizing the highlighted moments.
Fathom can be integrated with HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack, and Close.io.
Cons
Does not have live transcription.
Typically requires a software download to set up.
Slow customer support.
Pricing
Fathom has a free plan that gives individual users access to its core features.
Fathom’s Team Edition starts at $19 per user monthly. However, you need to directly inquire from Fathom’s customer support team to confirm how much you would be charged.
Otter.ai
Otter.ai is a big player in the AI meeting notes market - and with good reason. Beyond being one of the pioneer software, it offers solid meeting transcription and summary solutions. It also allows users to upload their audio and video files for transcription.
Otter.ai is designed mainly to help users generate high-quality meeting notes and speech transcriptions.
Pros
Otter generates live transcriptions while conversations are ongoing. This way, you can utilize the transcript to facilitate your understanding.
The Otter Assistant acts as a personal note-taker. It can attend meetings when you are unable to and make notes of the conversation so that you remain in the loop.
Its Takeaways panel allows you to make annotations and assign action items.
Otter automatically adds unique slides or screen shares from a meeting and places them directly into the transcript for easy reference.
Cons
Only has English transcription.
Does not have video recording.
Customers frequently complain about the quality of its support.
Pricing
Otter.ai has four tier classes:
A free plan with 300 monthly transcription minutes.
Pro plan for individuals at $10 per user for 1200 transcription minutes per month.
Business plan at $20 per user for 6000 transcription minutes per month.
Enterprise plan with custom pricing.
Avoma
Like Airgram, Avoma functions as an end-to-end meeting productivity tool by facilitating and automating tasks, but its core functions are automatic recording and transcription.
What distinguishes it from Fireflies is the conversation and revenue intelligence feature that offers useful insights from the meeting transcript.
This tool targets small and medium-sized businesses, not individuals.
Pros
AI-generated notes and summaries: Avoma uses artificial intelligence to generate detailed meeting notes and summaries that can be accessed after the meeting.
Collaborative note-taking: It allows team members in a digital workspace to take notes simultaneously
Meeting templates: Users can access several different meeting templates and receive guidance on how to map out their own meetings.
Meeting analytics: Avoma provides a data overview on meetings including the items covered on the agenda and meeting length.
Cons
Cannot sign up with a personal email.
Lags when added to an impromptu meeting.
Relatively expensive.
Pricing
Avoma has a Basic plan for free for users to access its basic features.
Its paid plan starts at $24 per user monthly and all the way to an Enterprise plan for $149 per user monthly.
Gong
Gong is specifically designed to transcribe calls and analyze client interactions to identify opportunities for improvement.
It then offers recommendations for how to improve sales pitches and overall client interactions so that teams can improve decision-making and increase revenue efficiency.
Pros
Revenue intelligence: Gong provides users with insight into buyer relationships and engagement activity.
Integrated data: It automatically catches and updates data across a team’s tech stack to provide a clear view of all its activities and deals
Supports 70+ languages including English, Dutch, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.
CRM integrations: Gong offers integrations with popular CRM tools like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Klue.
Cons
AI is a little too intrusive when it comes to making recommendations for improving sales pitches.
It is expensive.
Has limited use cases because it is designed primarily to serve sales teams
Pricing
Gong operates a custom pricing model for all its plans. Some sources, however, suggest that their average plan is around $100 per user monthly.
Conclusion
The Fireflies alternatives highlighted above have very obvious strengths and the unique needs they cater to. However, we can observe that Airgram and Avoma are the two most versatile and all-inclusive meeting solutions of the bunch.
The choice depends largely on your needs and the scale of your organization. Airgram is more suited to individuals and small to medium-scale organizations and offers highly affordable pricing without compromising on quality. So if you have a limited budget, I encourage you to try Airgram for free.
Tobi is a writer and communications consultant with five years of experience in creating content for corporate and non-profit organizations. She enjoys writing on best practices for business processes, technology, ESG, and climate change.
