Fireflies.ai alternatives in 2026 for teams that are not sales

Short answer first: Fireflies suits a team that wants a bot in every calendar meeting and pays per seat. Pro is 18 US dollars a seat a month, or 10 on yearly billing, and one recording stops at two hours on Free and Pro. Free accounts opened since 1 September 2026 transcribe without limit only while auto-join is on. If your organisation already pays for Teams Premium, a paid Zoom Workplace plan or an eligible Google Workspace edition, that platform's built-in notes may be enough. Otter, Fathom and tl;dv are the nearest standalone alternatives, and Notibo covers a meeting recorded from your own computer with nothing joining the call.

Every price, limit and language count below comes from the vendors' own pages, read on 30 September 2026. Where two pages from the same vendor disagree, both are given, with the page each one comes from. A number no vendor page states is called "not published", not guessed.

How does Fireflies decide which meetings to join?

Fireflies is an AI notetaker built around a bot called Fireflies.ai Notetaker, with the address fred@fireflies.ai. You sign in with a Google or Outlook account, which the pricing page says are the only two ways in, and connect one calendar. From then on the bot joins calls on Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, records them and writes a transcript and a summary.

• Auto-join has four settings. The auto-join help article lists them: every calendar meeting with a web-conferencing link, only meetings you own, only meetings with teammates, or only when you invite fred@fireflies.ai. Recording Rules can add conditions on keywords, email addresses or domains.
• The bot can attend without you. The joining and recording FAQ says Fireflies records a meeting you invited it to even when you are absent, if the platform admits guest bots.
• Free transcripts are unlimited only with auto-join on. The article on unlimited free transcripts says accounts opened on or after 1 September 2026 get them while auto-join is on, and three meeting transcriptions with it off. The invite-only setting does not count.
• Two routes leave the bot out. The Chrome extension page records Google Meet calls with no bot, in Chrome, Brave or Edge. The desktop app page, for Windows and Mac, offers notes without a bot and tells you to get consent from every participant.

For a sales team, a bot in every call is the product doing its job. For a consultant in clients' meetings, or the chair of a small association, it means a notetaker arriving under your name in calls you never meant to record, unless you narrow the setting.

The routes without a bot change what the other people see, not what you owe them. The desktop page says a Fireflies indicator will let participants know when the notetaker is on, without saying where it shows. Either way, telling the meeting falls to you, the person recording. The rules on consent differ by country and by workplace, so settle that before you record.

What does a Fireflies seat cost, and what does Free leave out?

Fireflies prices every plan per seat, in US dollars, on its pricing page. Every teammate added to the workspace counts as a seat, while sharing one meeting recap with an outsider costs nothing.

• Free costs nothing and rations summaries. The card lists limited AI summaries, 400 minutes of storage and 20 AI credits. The free plan article says an account opened on the website gets three transcription credits, and each meeting summary uses one.
• Pro is 18 US dollars a seat a month, or 10 billed yearly. It adds unlimited summaries, 8,000 minutes of storage per seat and downloads. The Pro card lists video recording, while the FAQ on the same page and the help centre's joining FAQ place video on Business.
• Business is 29 US dollars a seat a month, or 19 billed yearly. It adds unlimited storage, Multi-language Mode, team analytics for admins and public meeting access.
• Enterprise is 39 US dollars a seat a month, billed yearly only. It adds single sign-on, HIPAA compliance, private storage and custom data retention.

A board of eight who all want their own access pays for eight seats on Pro, however few meetings each records. If one secretary records and sends recap links, one seat covers it.

Storage and the two-hour cap

The pricing page stops one recording at 2 hours on Free and Pro, 3 on Business and 4 on Enterprise, and the help article on meeting length agrees. At the limit the bot leaves; sending it back in splits the notes in two.

The pricing page gives Free 400 minutes of storage for the team, while the free plan article gives 400 minutes per seat and the storage limits article 400 per user, pooled across the team. Either way it is a total, not a monthly allowance: once it is full, you delete old meetings to open new ones.

What are AI credits, and when do they cost extra?

The plan cards list 20 AI credits on Free and Pro, 30 on Business and 50 on Enterprise, for AI Skills, the Personal Assistant and voice agents, not transcripts. The AI credits article calls them a one-time grant shared by the team, while the free plan article says 20 a month. Extra credits, on paid plans, start at 5 US dollars a month for 50, and a paid account that runs out is subscribed to the next credit tier automatically, a charge you can switch off under Billing.

Does Fireflies transcribe your language?

This is where two Fireflies pages part ways. The help centre's supported languages list claims 100+ languages, regional variants included, and has 117 rows: two auto-detect modes and 115 language entries. Merged by language code, the entries make 99 languages: six kinds of English, three each of Chinese and Portuguese, and two each of Danish, Dutch (Flemish is coded nl-BE), French, German, Hindi, Korean and Spanish count once.

The FAQ on the pricing page tells a shorter story. It calls English the primary language and says Fireflies also supports Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian and "100+ other languages in beta", which leaves open whether the four named ones are beta too. Danish, Arabic, Hindi, Polish and Swahili are on the help centre's list and, by the pricing page, in beta. Neither page publishes a quality figure, and a place on a list is not a promise of how well a language works.

• Meetings that switch language need Business. The pricing page puts Multi-language Mode on Business and Enterprise; the Multi-Language Mode article calls it beta, lists 60 languages for it and writes the summary in the dominant language. Plain Auto-Detect transcribes only the dominant one.

If your meetings run in English, the two pages agree. For anything else, record one real meeting on the free plan before paying for seats.

Where does Fireflies keep meetings, and does it train on them?

Fireflies' privacy policy and security page both say where meetings go, in slightly different words on training.

• Servers in the United States and other countries. The privacy policy, updated 28 September 2026, says Fireflies is based in the United States and that it and its service providers store personal information on servers there and in other countries. For data from Europe it cites contractual clauses and the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework.
• No training on personal information. The same policy says Fireflies does not use personal information to train AI models, bars its vendors by contract from doing so, and keeps meeting content under a zero-retention rule with vendors.
• The security page adds "by default". The security page says Fireflies does not train on customer data by default, and offers private storage in a location you choose on Enterprise.

For a reader in Europe, that means meetings that may be stored in the United States, with a chosen location only on Enterprise seats.

How do the alternatives compare?

The reasons to look past Fireflies are above: a bot that joins by itself, with a free plan that rewards letting it; seats priced for sales teams; 400 minutes of total storage and a two-hour cap below Business; and languages beyond the five its pricing FAQ names.

The Teams and Zoom rows give the meeting's own limits, since the pages on recap and summaries name no separate cap. Language counts are entries on each vendor's own list, not tested quality.

Are the notes built into Teams, Zoom and Google Meet enough?

Many readers already pay for a meeting platform whose own notes do part of Fireflies' job. The meeting notes comparison covers them briefly, along with permission to record; below are the licence each needs, its languages and who can switch it on.

Microsoft Teams: intelligent recap

Microsoft's recap support page says intelligent recap comes with Teams Premium, an add-on licence, or with a Microsoft Copilot licence. The Teams Premium page lists it at 10 US dollars a user a month, paid yearly, and says it requires a Teams licence.

The recap page lists 25 language entries, 23 languages once two kinds of Chinese and two of Portuguese are merged; Danish, Polish, Turkish, Arabic and Ukrainian are on it, Hindi is not. The meeting must be recorded or transcribed, and an AI summary needs at least five minutes. Microsoft's limits page caps a meeting at 30 hours and restarts a recording at four hours or 1.5 GB. Its page on recap data says Teams data resides in your Microsoft 365 organisation's region and is not used for AI model training.

Zoom: meeting summary

Zoom's announcement says the features that carried the AI Companion name are now called by what they do and stay included with eligible paid Zoom Workplace plans, and that ZoomMate, now on Zoom's AI pages, is a newer product built on top. The support page calls the feature Meeting summary with AI and lists Workplace Pro, Business and Enterprise accounts, and their Plus versions, as requirements; owners and admins enable it, and the host starts a summary.

The free plan is where Zoom's pages disagree. The pricing page gives Basic accounts summaries for three hosted meetings a month, with a 40-minute meeting limit, while the support page lists only paid plans. Pro is 16.99 US dollars a user a month, or 14.16 billed yearly; opened from Denmark, the same page prices in kroner. Zoom's language page lists 33 entries for summaries, Hindi and Polish among them, Bulgarian not. The support page says meeting content does not train Zoom's or others' models, and that data may be processed in US data centres.

Google Meet: Take notes for me

Google's support page says Take notes for me needs an eligible Google Workspace edition or a Google AI plan. The Workspace admin page names Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard and Enterprise Plus, and the meeting organiser must hold one of them. An admin may have to switch the feature on first.

It lists eight languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish, one at a time. The organiser and people inside the host's organisation can start it, or only the organiser, hosts and co-hosts when host controls are on. Meet tells everyone and shows a pencil icon, and the notes go to a Google Doc in the organiser's Drive.

The built-in notes suit a group that meets on one platform and already holds the licence. They suit a freelancer less: in Google Meet the organiser needs the edition, and in Zoom the host starts the summary, so a guest in someone else's meeting depends on the settings on the other side.

Would Otter, Fathom or tl;dv suit you better?

Otter's bot also joins Zoom, Teams and Google Meet, and its desktop app can record a meeting without it. On its pricing page, Basic is free with 300 minutes a month and 30 minutes per conversation; Pro is 16.99 US dollars a month, or 8.33 billed yearly, with 1,200 minutes and 90 per meeting. Its language page lists six languages, and its language settings article marks German and Chinese (Simplified) as still in beta. The Otter comparison covers the rest.

Fathom is the one to try if the free plan matters most. Its pricing page gives Free unlimited recordings and transcription, with a choice of bot or bot-free capture, the latter a beta that its help centre limits to Macs and English-language meetings. The help centre also limits advanced summaries to five calls a month, and Fathom's comparison with Read AI says the free plan has no meeting-length ceiling. Premium is 20 US dollars a month, or 16 billed yearly. The Fathom comparison goes through its limits.

tl;dv comes from a company in Aachen, Germany, and its pricing page says data is hosted and stored in the EU, the clearest difference from Fireflies for a European team. The page renders Pro at 29 US dollars a seat a month, or 18 on yearly billing, while the structured data in its code labels the same amounts as euro, so check the currency at checkout. Free recordings are kept up to three months. The tl;dv comparison has the detail.

Which should you choose?

Two facts settle most of this: who pays, and which platform the meetings run on.

• If your organisation already pays for Teams Premium or Copilot and you meet on Teams, try intelligent recap before buying seats anywhere, and check your language is among its 25 entries.
• If you meet on Zoom on a paid Workplace plan, switch on meeting summary. It costs nothing extra and covers 33 language entries.
• If your organisation is on Google Workspace Business Standard or above and meets in one of eight languages, Take notes for me is already there for the organiser.
• If you pay yourself and join other people's calls on several platforms, a notetaker with its own account travels with you. Fathom's free plan keeps unlimited recordings; Fireflies Pro at 10 US dollars a seat on yearly billing suits a team that wants the bot in every call.
• If the data has to be stored in the EU, tl;dv's pages place storage in EU data centres, with an AI step you put in the EU or the US; Fireflies, Otter and Fathom point to the United States.
• If nothing may join the call, Fireflies' Chrome extension covers Google Meet, and its desktop app and those from Otter and tl;dv skip the bot; Fathom's bot-free capture is a beta for Macs and English-language meetings, and a recorder on your own computer is the other route. With each of them, telling the meeting is up to you.

Whichever you pick, test one real recording in your own language before paying for a year.

Where Notibo fits

Notibo is not a meeting bot and does not replace Fireflies for a team that wants a notetaker in every call, a shared library or a CRM sync; for that, pick one of the tools above. It covers narrower ground: a meeting recorded from your own computer with nothing joining it, a meeting in a room, and a meeting in a language the others do not list.

It runs in the browser on a computer, with nothing to install. In Chrome or Edge you choose the tab the Teams, Zoom or Google Meet call runs in and turn on tab audio; on Windows the whole system sound works too, which covers the desktop apps. Your microphone is recorded with it. On a Mac only a browser tab gives sound, Safari and Firefox give the microphone only, and in a room the computer's microphone does it. A phone works for a room as well: open Notibo in the phone's browser, or add it to the home screen with nothing to download from an app store, and keep it open while it records.

You get a transcript and notes with a summary, the main points and the action items. The transcript is in the language spoken: 78 languages, or 89 entries when regional variants are counted, detected automatically by default. Speakers are split only where Notibo can tell the voices apart, so a meeting with several people should not count on it. One recording runs up to two hours.

Files are stored in the EU, on Supabase in Frankfurt; transcription and the AI notes run on US processors under standard contractual clauses. The audio is deleted once the notes are saved, so nobody can play the meeting back and no video is kept. Pro is free for 14 days with no card, and after that the account keeps 30 minutes a month for free. Pro costs 9.99 euro a month or 88.99 euro a year per person, with no seats, as the pricing page shows.

With no bot in the call, nothing announces the recording to the others, so tell them before you start.