Best Fireflies.ai Alternatives in 2026

Fathom is the strongest all-round Fireflies.ai alternative in 2026, because its free plan has unlimited recordings, transcriptions and AI summaries rather than a metered cap, and its $16-per-user Premium tier costs less than Fireflies Business. But switching is only worth it for a specific reason - a runaway AI credit bill, a 400-minute free storage ceiling, or a notetaker bot that upsets your customers. If none of those apply, stay put.

Fireflies.ai alternatives at a glance

Alternative	Best for	Free plan	Starting price	Main advantage	Main limitation
Fathom	Individuals and small teams	Yes	$16/user/mo annually	Unlimited free recordings, transcriptions and summaries	Three users per domain cap on free and paid
Grain	Rolling out to a whole team	Yes	$15/seat/mo annually	Unlimited notetaker seats free, no required annual contract	Free plan caps meetings at 45 min, history at 30 days
Granola	Privacy-first, bot-free capture	Yes	$14/user/mo	No bot ever joins the call; audio deleted after transcription	Desktop app required; no external-call capture
Avoma	Revenue automation	No (14-day trial)	$19/recorder seat/mo annually	Custom AI skills, topic trackers and CRM/dialer automation	Intelligence add-ons push real cost to $48+/seat
tl;dv	Large teams and enterprise	Yes	$18/seat/mo annually	Business tier sold with no usage-based AI fees	Free plan caps AI notes at 10 meetings; Business is $59
Notta	Budget and translation	Yes	$8.17/mo annually	Cheapest paid individual plan on the market	Free tier is only 120 minutes a month
Read AI	Sales coaching	Yes	$15/user/mo annually	Meeting Coach metrics included from the free plan	Free plan stops at five meeting reports a month
Otter.ai	Interviews, lectures, students	Yes	$8.33/mo annually ($99.99/yr)	Live in-app transcription and custom vocabulary	Free Basic caps at 300 min/month and 30 min per call
Sembly AI	Agencies and consultancies	No (trial)	$10/mo annually	Per-client branding and exportable pptx/docx deliverables	Trial capped at one meeting hour per user per month

Why look for a Fireflies.ai alternative?

The AI credit meter is the biggest structural complaint. Fireflies separates transcription from its newer AI features. AI Skills, voice agents, live assist, custom summary sections and the Slack assistant all draw on a credit pool, and according to Fireflies’ own guide to AI credits, that pool sits at 20 credits on Free and Pro, 30 on Business and 50 on Enterprise. Critically, it is shared across the whole team and does not grow when you add seats. Upgrade from Free to Business and you get 30 credits, not 50.

The sting is the auto-upgrade. If a paid account exhausts its pool mid-cycle, Fireflies moves the account to the next credit pack automatically - 50 credits for $5 a month, 200 for $20, 1,000 for $90, and so on. Unused purchased credits do not roll over. For a ten-person team living on AI Skills, that is a line item that appears on the invoice without anyone choosing it.

“AI credits are shared within your team and do not increase with added teammates.”

• Fireflies, on its own AI credits documentation

The free tier is generous until it is not. Fireflies’ own pricing page lists Free as permanently free with unlimited transcription, limited AI summaries, 400 minutes of storage per team and 20 AI credits. That is better than most rivals on raw transcription. But 400 minutes of shared team storage is roughly two hours of audio, and downloads of transcripts, summaries and recordings only start on Pro. If you have been using Fireflies free as an archive, your history is one storage reset away from being gone.

Pricing escalates at an awkward point. Conversation intelligence, team analytics and multi-language mode sit on Business at $19 per seat billed annually, not on Pro at $10. That jump is defensible, but if your team only needs the intelligence occasionally, a competitor that includes more at the entry tier may serve better.

The bot is increasingly a liability. Fireflies does let you record through its Chrome extension without the bot joining, and Enterprise offers a transcript-and-summary-only mode. For most commercial plans, though, guests still see a notetaker participant appear on the invite. That is the entire premise behind Granola and behind Fathom’s bot-free beta capture.

The free plan also has no export. This is the detail that catches people mid-switch. If you are on Fireflies Free and cancel, you cannot download your transcripts and recordings first.

How I chose these alternatives

Prices, plan names and usage limits come from vendor pages checked on 14 October 2026.

The nine tools here all do the same core job - record or transcribe a meeting and hand back a searchable summary - so the comparison is on the things that actually differ between them:

• Free-tier value. Permanent free plan versus time-limited trial, and whether the free plan is metered by minutes, by number of reports, or by seat count.
• Paid structure. Monthly versus annual pricing, per-seat versus per-recorder licensing, and whether cheap seats can be given away.
• AI cost predictability. Whether AI features are included in the seat price, capped by a monthly allowance, or metered separately.
• Capture method. Bot joining the call, bot-free desktop capture, or phone-based capture.
• Depth. Search across one meeting versus search and reporting across a whole team’s meetings.
• Control and compliance. Export formats, retention settings, SSO, SCIM and HIPAA availability.
• Migration friction. How easily existing recordings can be moved in or out.

Otter’s quoted prices come from its checkout page and official Apple App Store listing. MeetGeek was excluded because its current pricing could not be confirmed.

1. Fathom - Best overall

Fathom is the strongest general-purpose Fireflies.ai replacement for individuals and small teams. Its free plan has no minute cap at all, and its $16-per-user annual Premium tier undercuts Fireflies Business while still shipping a full-featured product.

What it does: joins Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams as a bot, records audio and video, transcribes, and generates a chronological summary plus an enhanced summary immediately after the call. On top of that sit AI action items, AI follow-up emails, a conversational assistant you can query about a single call, clips and playlists, and keyword search across calls and attendees.

Who it is best for: anyone who came to Fireflies on the free plan and hit the 400-minute storage wall, plus small teams that want a real paid tier without a sales call.

Why it is a valid alternative: it covers the same workflow end to end. Capture, transcript, summary, action items, CRM sync, Slack, and a public API with an MCP server on the Team tier.

Strengths, from Fathom’s own pricing page:

• Free is permanently free with unlimited recordings and transcriptions, instant AI summaries, clips, playlists and search, and it now offers a choice of bot-free capture (in beta) or bot capture.
• Premium is $20 per user per month monthly or $16 billed annually, adding advanced summaries, AI action items, the conversational meeting assistant and a custom meeting bot.
• Team is $19 monthly or $15 annually with a two-user minimum, adding global search, playlists, comments, folders, keyword alerts, Slack, Zapier and Make, CRM syncs, a public API and MCP, plus Claude and ChatGPT integrations.
• Business is $34 monthly or $25 annually, adding CRM field sync, a Deal View, coaching metrics with AI scorecards, custom summaries and a Launch Assist onboarding programme.
• Enterprise is quote-based, with SSO, Okta SCIM provisioning, custom data retention, org-wide security controls, dedicated success support and a signed HIPAA BAA.

Limitations worth naming: every self-serve tier caps you at three users per domain, so a four-person team cannot sit entirely on Fathom without talking to sales. The free plan also caps in-meeting usage of the conversational assistant. And there is no cross-meeting intelligence layer comparable to Fireflies conversation intelligence - Fathom gives you search and trackers, not a team-level analytics dashboard.

Direct comparison with Fireflies: Fathom is cheaper at the entry tier and has an unmetered free plan where Fireflies caps storage at 400 minutes per team. Fireflies is stronger on the breadth of its integration catalogue, on multi-meeting conversation intelligence, and on the depth of its admin and compliance story - HIPAA and private storage sit on Fireflies Enterprise at $39 per seat annually.

Verdict: this is the switch I would recommend first for almost anyone leaving Fireflies. You lose some analytics, you gain an unmetered free tier and predictable billing. If you have read our Fathom review it covers the product more broadly.

2. Grain - Best free

Grain’s free plan is the only one here with unlimited notetaker seats, which makes it the pick when the real goal is getting an entire team onto one tool for nothing. Paid, it is competitive but not cheap, and the sales features cost more than Fathom’s.

What it does: captures meetings by bot or by bot-free desktop capture, produces AI notes and action items, and adds an AI Notepad with live notes, transcript and clip creation. The paid tiers add advanced AI notes, custom prompts and a full workspace layer.

Who it is best for: product, design and research teams, and any company that wants to trial a notetaker broadly before spending anything.

Pricing, verified on Grain’s pricing page:

• Free: unlimited meetings capped at 45 minutes each, AI notes and action items, basic MCP access, 30 days of history, a collaborative workspace, desktop capture, unlimited notetaker seats and unlimited free viewer seats.
• Starter: $15 per seat per month billed annually, or $19 monthly. Removes the 45-minute cap and the 30-day history limit, adds advanced AI notes, custom AI prompts, admin controls, teams, Slack, personal Zapier and personal API, plus audio and video file import at 10 uploads a month.
• Business: $29 annually or $39 monthly. Adds HubSpot and Salesforce, workspace-level Zapier, custom AI follow-up email, AI coaching, trackers, team interaction metrics, unlimited uploads, workspace API and advanced MCP access.
• Enterprise: quote-based, with SAML SSO, priority API support, custom invoices and a dedicated CS manager.

Grain is also unusually open about contract terms, stating on the same page that it does not require annual contracts.

Limitations: the free plan is only free while you tolerate 45-minute meetings and a month of history. Salesforce, HubSpot and AI coaching all require the $29 Business tier, which is well above Fathom’s Business at $25 and above Fireflies Business at $19. Starter’s 10-uploads-a-month cap is also tight if you are migrating an archive.

Verdict: take Grain when seat count is the problem. Take Fathom when budget per seat is the problem.

3. Granola - Best for bot-free capture and privacy

Granola is the answer for anyone whose customers object to a notetaker appearing on the invite. It captures audio from your own device instead of joining the call, and it is the cheapest paid tier here that includes both an API and MCP.

What it does: sits on your Mac, Windows desktop or phone, captures device audio, and blends your own typed shorthand notes with AI-generated summaries into a single document.

Pricing, verified on Granola’s pricing page:

• Basic: $0 per user per month, permanently free. AI meeting notes, limited meeting history, AI chat within and across meetings, shared folders, custom note templates, multi-language support, speaker tagging, recipes, a per-user model-training opt-out, apps for desktop, iOS, Android and Apple Watch, and configurable retention with auto-deletion.
• Business: $14 per user per month. Unlimited notes and history, access to advanced AI thinking models, integrations with Attio, Notion, HubSpot, Affinity and Zapier, centralized billing and user management, MCP in all your apps, and API access.
• Enterprise: $35 per user per month. SSO, SCIM group provisioning, MDM/Intune app wrapping on iOS, org-wide sharing and API controls, usage analytics, workspace-wide retention policy, workspace-wide model-training opt-out, and HIPAA-compliant workspaces.

Two things Granola does that almost nobody else does on a free tier: it deletes the audio after transcription, and it is SOC 2 Type II certified on every plan including Basic.

Limitations: it needs the desktop app running, so it is a bad fit for someone who takes most of their calls on a phone with no laptop. There is no bot, which means it cannot capture calls you are not on - a client call from a colleague’s phone or a Teams meeting you joined from a shared machine simply will not be recorded. Free history is capped at 30 days.

Verdict: for consultants, coaches and anyone selling to privacy-sensitive clients, Granola is worth the trade. For someone who needs to search every call their team makes, it is not enough.

4. Avoma - Best for power users

Avoma is the most configurable tool on this list and the most expensive, because its intelligence features are sold as add-ons on top of the base plan. It has no permanent free plan.

What it does: joins calls, records, transcribes in 70+ languages, generates notes against templates such as MEDDIC, SPIN and Sandler, assigns notes to CRM records automatically, and schedules 1:1, group and round-robin meetings.

Pricing, verified on Avoma’s pricing page:

• No permanent free plan. There is an unrestricted 14-day trial of the Organization plan with all add-ons enabled and no credit card required; after it, the account switches to a Viewer role and keeps access to past recordings but cannot record.
• Startup: $19 per recorder seat per month billed annually, $29 monthly. Unlimited AI meeting assistant, unlimited view-only seats, 1:1 scheduling, automatic recording, unlimited real-time transcription and unlimited AI summary notes, up to 25 recorder seats.
• Organization: $24 annually or $39 monthly, up to 100 recorder seats. Adds custom AI topics and templates, group and round-robin scheduling, limited conversation intelligence, smart playlists, translation of transcripts and notes, API and webhooks.
• Enterprise: $39 per seat per month billed annually only, minimum 10 seats, with SAML/OIDC SSO, retention policies, HIPAA, mutually signed DPAs and concierge onboarding.
• Add-ons billed per seat per month: Conversation Intelligence $29 annually ($35 monthly), Revenue Intelligence $29 annually ($35 monthly), Lead Router $19 annually ($25 monthly).

Limitations: the arithmetic is the problem. A revenue team wanting both conversation and revenue intelligence on Organization pays $24 plus $29 plus $29, or $82 per seat per month - more than four times Fireflies Business. Avoma also insists all recorder users sit on the same plan tier.

Verdict: right for a revenue organisation that treats call data as a workflow input and has budget for it. Wrong for anyone who just wants searchable notes.

5. tl;dv - Best for enterprise

tl;dv is the clearest answer to Fireflies conversation intelligence, and its Business tier is sold explicitly with no usage-based AI fees. It is also more expensive than Fireflies at every paid level.

Pricing, verified on tl;dv’s pricing page:

• Free: $0 with no credit card. Unlimited video recordings, unlimited transcription in 30+ languages, email and calendar integrations, and mobile apps - but limited to 10 meetings with AI notes, up to 5 uploads, a 3-hour recording limit, roughly 40 web recordings a week and data retention of up to about three months.
• Pro: $18 per seat per month billed annually. Premium transcription, unlimited meetings with AI notes, custom AI note templates, action item assignment, unlimited single-meeting Ask AI, an email follow-up drafter, 5,000+ integrations, global transcript search, custom bot appearance, unlimited uploads and storage, plus MCP, API and webhooks.
• Business: $59 per seat per month billed annually, marketed with no usage-based AI fees. Adds advanced transcription with custom vocabulary, unlimited multi-meeting AI insights, scheduled AI reports, playbook monitoring, objection handling, team management and team-wide integrations and automations.
• Enterprise: quote-based, with SCIM provisioning, custom SSO, privately hosted AI, organisation activity logs, optional usage-based pricing and a dedicated success manager.

Strengths: unlimited recordings and storage on every plan including Free, transcription in 30+ languages, and EU hosting with EU-US data transfer framework alignment.

Limitations: the $10-per-month gap between Pro ($18) and Fireflies Pro is real but manageable; the gap between Business ($59) and Fireflies Business ($19) is not. Free users get AI notes on only ten meetings before paying.

Verdict: if your blocker is “we cannot predict our AI bill,” tl;dv Business is the most direct fix on this list. If your blocker is price, it is not.

6. Notta - Best for budget

Notta’s Pro plan is the cheapest paid individual plan in this comparison at $8.17 per month billed annually, and its Business tier removes minute limits entirely. It is the pick when translation and cost matter more than analytics.

Pricing, verified on Notta’s pricing page:

• Free: $0, no credit card required. 120 transcription minutes a month, up to 3 minutes per conversation, 50 file uploads a month, 10 AI summaries a month, one seat, 1,000 Notta Brain AI credits a month.
• Pro: $8.17 per month billed annually, $97.99 total. 1,800 transcription minutes a month, recordings up to 5 hours, 100 file uploads and 100 AI summaries a month, transcript export, translation, custom vocabulary.
• Business: $16.67 per month billed annually, $199.99 total. Unlimited transcription, video recording of online meetings, CRM and Zapier integration, usage reporting and advanced data security controls.
• Enterprise: quote-based, starting at 51 seats, with SAML SSO, full data access control, audit logs and unlimited uploads and summaries.
• Add-ons: monolingual translation $6 per month annually, bilingual transcription and translation $9 per month annually, Notta Brain from $93.59 a year.

Notta is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified and hosts on AWS.

Limitations: the free plan is the thinnest here at 120 minutes a month. Translation is a paid add-on rather than included. And the 51-seat Enterprise floor means a 30-person company sits on Business with no SAML SSO.

Verdict: the value choice, with the caveat that you are buying minutes and translation rather than intelligence.

7. Read AI - Best for sales coaching

Read AI is the only tool here that includes a personal coaching report - talk speed, filler words, bias, charisma - on its free plan.

Pricing, verified on Read AI’s plans and pricing page:

• Free: $0, always free with no credit card. Five meeting reports a month, unlimited enterprise search, summaries for meetings, email and messaging, the Meeting Coach report, basic integrations, topic readouts, 20+ languages, apps for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. Meetings capped at one hour; no audio or video playback; no uploads.
• Pro: $15 per user per month billed annually, $19.75 monthly. Unlimited reports, 100 file upload credits a month, premium integrations including Notion, Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, Confluence, Zapier and webhooks, audio and video playback, meetings up to four hours.
• Enterprise: $22.50 annually or $29.75 monthly. 200 upload credits a month, video highlights, workspace administration, For You Insights, recommendations, meeting policy reporting and coaching trends.
• Enterprise+: $29.75 annually or $39.75 monthly, requires five or more licences. Adds HIPAA, SAML and SCIM, domain capture, custom data retention, workspace onboarding and meetings up to eight hours.
• Volume discounts: 10% at 100+ licences, 15% at 500+, 20% at 1,000+.

Limitations: five reports a month on the free plan is very tight, and Ask Read - the cross-meeting AI search - does not arrive until Enterprise at $22.50 annually.

Verdict: if talk-time analytics and coaching are the reason you use a notetaker, Read AI is better than Fireflies. If you need a searchable archive, it is not.

8. Otter.ai - Best for interviews, lectures and students

Otter is the oldest name here and still the one with the best live in-app transcription, but its free plan is now the tightest of the free plans in this comparison.

Otter’s plan structure, read off its own plan comparison table, runs Basic, Pro, Business and Enterprise. Basic gives 300 transcription minutes per user per month across meeting recordings and imports, caps any single conversation at 30 minutes, keeps only the 25 most recent conversations, allows three file imports per user for life, allows 20 Otter AI Chat queries per user per month and exports only mp3 and txt. Pro raises that to 1,200 minutes per user per month, a 90-minute per-conversation cap, unlimited history, 50 AI Chat queries, ten imports a month, richer custom vocabulary and exports in mp3, txt, pdf, docx and srt. Business gives unlimited meeting transcription, 6,000 imported minutes per user, four-hour conversations, three concurrent meetings, 200 AI Chat queries, bulk export, unlimited CRM sync and prioritised support - while SSO and SCIM require a 100-user licence and HIPAA is a paid add-on.

Pro prices at $16.99 monthly or $99.99 a year, and Business at $30 monthly or $239.99 a year, taken from Otter’s own checkout page and its Apple App Store listing.

Two details that matter. Otter offers a 20% student and teacher discount on Pro for anyone signing up with an .edu address. And Otter is the only tool here with in-app live notes and captioning for both Google Meet and Zoom, plus live transcription of a meeting happening in front of you.

Limitations: the Basic free plan’s 300 minutes and 30-minute conversation cap are genuinely restrictive compared with Fireflies’ unlimited free transcription. The 4.8-star App Store rating comes with a long review history of complaints about tier restructuring and slow support responses - useful sentiment, though not a verified fact about current service.

Verdict: for recruiting interviews, lecture capture and academic accommodation, Otter remains excellent. For a commercial team, it costs more per seat than Fireflies and analyses less.

9. Sembly AI - Best for agencies

Sembly is a different shape of product: it builds client-branded deliverables from accumulated meeting knowledge, and exports them as pptx and docx. It is not a Fireflies replacement for team knowledge search - it is a replacement for the agency’s report-writing process.

Pricing, verified on Sembly’s pricing page:

• Free Trial: $0, one user, 750 credits a month plus a one-time 1,750-credit bonus, one meeting hour per user per month, two months of history, five clients, three integrations, microphone recordings only.
• Basic: $10 per month billed annually, $17 monthly. One user, 25 clients, 50 brand packages, 2,500 credits per user each month, unlimited capture and transcription in 45+ languages, standard video capture, one year of history.
• Pro: $20 per user per month annually, $29 monthly. Up to 40 users, 100 clients, 200 brand packages, 3,000 credits per user, multi-meeting AI chat, advanced search, sentiment analysis, collections, auto-sharing, retention settings, analytics dashboard, workspace automations, webhooks and MCP.
• MAX: $30 per user per month annually, $39 monthly, minimum three users. Up to 500 users, 500 clients, 1,000 brand packages, 3,500 credits, HD video, unlimited history, custom SSO, audit log, HIPAA and priority support.
• Enterprise: quote-based, starting at 10 users, with a dedicated success manager and custom agreements.

Limitations: the free tier is a trial capped at one meeting hour a month. Unused credits expire at month end on Basic and Pro. And the model is per-client, which makes it awkward the moment a team wants one shared search across all calls.

Verdict: for a consultancy that bills for written client deliverables, Sembly pays for itself quickly. For anyone else, it is the wrong shape.

Which Fireflies.ai alternative should you choose?

1. You want the best all-round replacement - Fathom. Unmetered free tier, $16 annually for Premium, summaries and action items everywhere, API and MCP on Team.
2. You need a whole team on a notetaker for free - Grain. Unlimited notetaker seats and viewer seats, with a $15 Starter tier to remove the 45-minute and 30-day limits.
3. You cannot have a bot on the call - Granola. $14 per user for the Business tier, audio deleted after transcription, model-training opt-out on every plan.
4. You are building revenue automation on call data - Avoma. Accept the 14-day trial and a base plan plus add-ons, and you get template automation, topic trackers, CRM and dialer integrations.
5. Your blocker is unpredictable AI costs - tl;dv Business at $59 per seat annually, sold with no usage-based AI fees.
6. Budget is the hard constraint - Notta Pro at $8.17 per month billed annually, or Otter Pro at about $8.33 a month on the annual plan.
7. You need coaching and engagement scoring - Read AI, whose Meeting Coach report is included on the free plan.
8. You transcribe interviews, lectures or student work - Otter.ai, for live in-app transcription, custom vocabulary and the 20% student discount.
9. You are an agency producing client deliverables - Sembly AI, for per-client branding and exportable pptx and docx artefacts.
10. You need HIPAA, SSO and SCIM under 100 seats - Fireflies Enterprise at $39 per seat annually is still among the cheapest enterprise-grade options on this list, alongside Fathom Enterprise and Granola Enterprise at $35.

When you should keep Fireflies.ai

Keep it if you have already wired Fireflies into HubSpot or Salesforce through its autofill CRM, Slack and its 100+ integration catalogue - the integrations directory alone covers ATS tools like Gem, Workable, Ashby and BambooHR, storage targets including Amazon S3 and Snowflake, dialers like OpenPhone, RingCentral and Aircall, and collaboration tools including WhatsApp, Telegram and Discord. Rebuilding that is weeks of work.

Keep it if conversation intelligence at $19 per seat billed annually is worth more to you than a cheaper notetaker. Fireflies Business is genuinely inexpensive for what it does at that price.

Keep it if you need compliance depth: SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA, private storage, custom data retention, SSO with SCIM, audit logs through the API, a super admin role and a transcript-and-summary-only mode, all on one $39 per seat enterprise tier.

Keep it if you have learned the AI credit system and budgeted for it. Twenty credits on Pro is thin for heavy AI Skills use, but if your team mainly transcribes and summarises, credits barely move.

Keep it if you are already on Enterprise and have automated workflows built on AI Skills and voice agents. The switching cost there is technical, not financial.

When switching makes sense

When the credit auto-upgrade bit you. If your invoice carries credit packs you did not consciously buy, move. Fathom includes its assistant and action items in the seat price with no meter.

When 400 minutes of storage is not enough. Two hours of team audio on the free plan is not an archive. Fathom, tl;dv and Notta Business all give unlimited or uncapped minutes; Granola’s free tier deletes audio after transcription and keeps 30 days of notes.

When a customer objected to the bot. Granola if all your calls are on your own machine, Fathom’s bot-free beta capture if you need coverage on Mac.

When you need live captions for participants. Otter has integrated live notes and captioning for Google Meet and Zoom. Fireflies does not offer that in the same way.

When you need CRM field-level writeback rather than note syncing. Fathom Business and Grain Business do CRM field sync; Avoma adds two-way CRM updates on its Revenue Intelligence add-on.

When you want coaching metrics. Read AI gives you talk speed, filler words and bias without a sales call.

When seat cost has to drop. Granola Business at $14 and Grain Starter at $15 both undercut Fireflies Pro’s $10-per-seat-equivalent only marginally, but tl;dv Pro at $18 and Fathom Premium at $16 sit between Pro and Business - and Notta Pro at $8.17 is half of Fireflies Pro.

How to migrate without chaos

Export before you cancel, and check which plan you are on. Transcripts, summaries and recordings are downloadable from Pro upward. The Free plan does not include downloads, and its 400-minute storage cap means you may already have lost older meetings. Start there.

Export in bulk if you can. Fireflies offers a GraphQL API and webhooks; the API documentation covers meeting queries and audit events. If you have a Business or Enterprise subscription, a scripted export is far less painful than clicking through hundreds of meetings. If you are on Pro, do it manually in batches, oldest first.

Keep the transcript format. Fireflies exports text and structured summaries. Grain, Fathom, Notta and Otter all accept audio and video file imports, and Fathom’s and Otter’s paid tiers additionally accept transcript files. Otter in particular exports mp3, txt, pdf, docx and srt with bulk export on Business.

Expect re-transcription to take time and cost credits. Audio imports consume minutes on every competitor. Budget roughly the same volume of audio you are moving. Note Avoma’s upload limits: five files per user per month on Startup, ten on Organization, twenty on Enterprise, with bulk import carrying a possible one-time fee.

Re-wire one integration at a time. Start with the one that matters most - usually the CRM or Slack - and leave the rest. Switching notetaker and switching automation stack in the same quarter is how projects stall.

Run both in parallel for one month. Almost every plan here is billed monthly except Fireflies Enterprise, tl;dv’s annual Pro and Business, and Avoma Enterprise. Overlap costs you one month of double billing and saves you from a month of missing notes.

Re-learn the AI feature names. Fireflies’ AskFred, AI Skills and voice agents do not map one-to-one onto anything else. Granola calls them recipes, Avoma calls them templates and skills, tl;dv calls them custom AI note templates and playbooks. Budget an afternoon.

Final recommendation

Best overall: Fathom. The unmetered free tier is the strongest free plan for an individual or a small team, Premium at $16 per user annually is cheaper than Fireflies Business, and the paid tiers add the API, MCP and CRM sync that most teams eventually need. You give up Fireflies’ cross-meeting conversation intelligence and its much larger integration catalogue.

Best free: Grain. Nothing else gives unlimited notetaker seats and unlimited viewer seats permanently at no cost. The catch is honest and small - 45-minute meetings and 30 days of history.

Best for power users: Avoma. The deepest template automation, topic tracking and CRM and dialer integration on this list. Budget $24 to $82 per seat depending on which add-ons you take, and accept that there is no permanent free plan.

Stay on Fireflies.ai if your integration coverage, conversation intelligence at $19 per seat, or enterprise compliance stack is worth more than a cheaper seat price - and if you have learned to live with the AI credit pool. Fireflies is not a weak product. It is a product with one confusing pricing layer, and the right reason to leave is that layer, not the core.

Switch if the credit meter is billing you, storage is too tight, or the bot is costing you customer trust. In that order of likelihood, move to Fathom, then Grain, then Granola.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best Fireflies.ai alternative overall? Fathom. Of the Fireflies.ai alternatives covered here, it is the strongest all-round swap: the free plan has unlimited recordings, transcriptions and AI summaries rather than a metered cap, and Premium costs $16 per user per month billed annually, which sits below Fireflies Business at $19. The trade-off is that Fathom has no equivalent to Fireflies’ cross-meeting conversation intelligence.

Is there a free alternative to Fireflies.ai? Yes, several. Grain is the best free option for a team because its free plan includes unlimited notetaker seats and unlimited viewer seats. Fathom’s free plan is unlimited too, but capped at three users per domain. Granola’s Basic plan is free but caps history at 30 days, and tl;dv’s free plan limits AI notes to ten meetings.

How much does Fireflies.ai cost compared with its alternatives? Fireflies Pro is $18 per seat monthly or $10 billed annually, Business is $29 monthly or $19 annually, and Enterprise is $39 per seat billed annually. Fathom Premium at $16 annually, Grain Starter at $15 annually, Granola Business at $14 and Notta Pro at $8.17 are all cheaper entry points, while tl;dv Business at $59 per seat annually is more expensive than anything Fireflies sells self-serve.

What are AI credits in Fireflies.ai and do they cost extra? Yes, they are a separate meter on top of your seat price, used by AI Skills, voice agents, live assist and similar features. Free accounts get 20, Pro 20, Business 30 and Enterprise 50, pooled per team and not increasing with seats. Credits can be bought in packs from $5 for 50, and paid accounts are automatically upgraded to the next pack when the pool runs out mid-cycle.

Can I move my meeting history out of Fireflies.ai? If you are on Pro or above you can download transcripts, summaries and recordings from each meeting. The Free plan does not include downloads and caps storage at 400 minutes per team, so archive anything you care about before you cancel. Re-import is straightforward on Grain, Fathom and Notta through file upload, though Avoma limits uploads to 5 to 20 files per user per month depending on plan.

Which alternative has no meeting bot at all? Granola. It captures audio from your own device rather than joining the call as a participant, so guests never see a notetaker. It also deletes audio after transcription and allows a model-training opt-out on every plan, including the free one. Fathom offers a bot-free capture option in beta on Mac, and Grain supports bot-free desktop capture on paid tiers.

Is Otter.ai cheaper than Fireflies.ai? For a single user, yes. Otter Pro is $16.99 monthly or $99.99 a year, which works out to about $8.33 a month billed annually, against Fireflies Pro at $18 monthly or $10 annually. Otter’s free Basic plan is much tighter, though, at 300 transcription minutes a month and a 30-minute cap per conversation.

Which Fireflies.ai alternative is best for a sales team? Read AI for coaching and engagement scoring, or Avoma for automation. Read AI includes its Meeting Coach report on talking speed, filler words, bias and charisma even on the free plan, while Avoma adds AI call scoring, deal-risk alerts and sales methodology tracking as a $29 per seat monthly add-on.

Do any of these alternatives have a free trial rather than a free plan? Avoma and Sembly AI do. Avoma gives an unrestricted 14-day trial of its Organization plan with all add-ons enabled and no credit card required, after which the account drops to a Viewer role. Sembly’s free tier is a trial limited to one meeting hour per user per month.

Is it worth switching from Fireflies.ai at all? Only if a specific thing is wrong. Stay if you rely on Fireflies’ 100+ integration catalogue, need conversation intelligence under a predictable per-seat price, or have built workflows around its API and AI Skills. Switch if the AI credit meter is producing surprise invoices, if 400 minutes of free-tier storage is not enough, or if a visible notetaker bot is landing you on sensitive calls.