12 Fireflies AI Alternatives for AI Meeting Notes in 2026

Fireflies remains one of the most widely adopted AI meeting assistants, and for good reason: unlimited transcription on the free plan, broad integration coverage, and a low barrier to entry make it a reasonable default. But "default" isn't the same as "best fit," and a few specific gaps are pushing teams to look elsewhere in 2026.

Why you might want a Fireflies alternative

AI features are metered, not unlimited. Fireflies advertises unlimited transcription and summaries, but the more useful AI features — AskFred queries, advanced summaries, highlights — run on a monthly credit pool (20 credits on Pro, 30 on Business, 50 on Enterprise). Reviewers report overage charges of $15–50/month once a team leans on these features regularly, on top of the $10–39/seat sticker price.

Data residency is limited outside the US. Fireflies hosts and processes data in the US by default. EU data residency requires the Enterprise plan's Private Storage add-on, and even then processing still touches US infrastructure — a real consideration under Schrems II for teams handling EU personal data, not a theoretical one.

Ongoing legal and trust questions. A putative class action filed in an Illinois federal court in December 2025 (Cruz v. Fireflies.AI Corp.) alleges the company collected voiceprints without the consent required under Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act. As of early August 2026, the case remains in early stages — some claims have been dismissed or consolidated, one portion is stayed, and no court has ruled on the merits. Separately, The Verge reported in November 2025 that a Fireflies co-founder described the product's earliest version as the two founders manually dialing into customers' meetings and taking notes by hand, which The Verge characterized as raising privacy concerns; the co-founder said early beta users knew a human was listening in. Both items are worth knowing about, neither is a confirmed breach — no data breach at Fireflies has been documented in court filings, regulatory action, or major reporting as of this writing.

The bot is on by default. Fireflies' notetaker joins calls as a visible participant unless a team configures otherwise, which creates friction in client-facing or candidate-facing conversations where a visible AI participant changes the tone of the room.

None of this means Fireflies is a bad tool — it isn't. It means the right alternative depends heavily on what you actually need: tighter CRM automation, EU hosting, bot-free capture, or governance controls for a regulated industry. Here's how 12 alternatives stack up.

12 Fireflies alternatives for AI meeting notes in 2026

1. Otter.ai

Otter is generally regarded as strong on live transcription accuracy and captions, which is where it built its reputation with journalists and students before expanding into business use.

Key features: Live transcript editing with participant highlighting; AI meeting templates; speaker identification; integrations with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams; Salesforce and HubSpot sync on paid plans.

Pricing: Free tier with 600 monthly minutes and 3 exports/month; paid plans from roughly $15/user/month.

Limitations: Otter does not document an opt-out from training on customer data, unlike some competitors that offer one. It also faces an active 2025 class action alleging recording without consent.

Best for: Teams that want live, in-meeting transcript editing rather than waiting for a post-meeting summary.

2. Fellow

Fellow was the New York Times Wirecutter's top pick for transcribing and summarizing meetings. Fellow is an AI meeting assistant and notetaker built around structured meeting workflows — agendas, action items, and recap consistency — and makes security and compliance a core part of their product with features like optional zero-day retention and password-protected AI meeting notes.

Key features: Meeting agendas and pre-meeting briefs; collaborative note-taking; AI-powered action item tracking; Ask Fellow for natural-language search across meeting history; Claude official connector, option to record with a bot or botless; transcript redaction and admin-configurable privacy controls; native Salesforce, HubSpot, and project-management integrations.

Pricing: Free plan for up to 10 users with capped AI use; Team $7/user/month (annual); Business $15/user/month (annual); Enterprise from $25/user/month (annual, 10-user minimum).

Limitations: The free plan's AI allowance is capped at 5 AI notes and recordings lifetime, not monthly, which is a harder limit than some competitors' free tiers.

Best for: Teams and security-conscious organizations that run structured recurring meetings (team meetings, client meetings, deal reviews, portfolio review meetings, Investor Relations & LP Syncs) and want notes tied into that structure, plus organizations that need admin-level recording controls, governance, and security as a priority.

3. tl;dv

tl;dv leans into shareable moments over exhaustive transcripts — clip creation, timestamp navigation, and highlight reels built for asynchronous teams.

Key features: AI-identified meeting moments; shareable clips with timestamps; automated follow-up drafting; free tier with core highlighting features.

Pricing: Free tier available; paid tiers add advanced sharing and integrations.

Limitations: tl;dv had a significant, still-unresolved security incident: roughly 181,874 meeting records were exposed in January 2026 due to a missing Firestore security rule. As of August 2026 it remains a live consideration for compliance-conscious buyers evaluating the vendor.

Best for: Distributed and async-first teams that want quick, shareable meeting moments rather than dense transcripts.

4. Avoma

Avoma sits closer to a conversation-intelligence platform than a plain notetaker, aimed squarely at revenue teams that want coaching and pipeline analytics layered on top of meeting capture.

Key features: Smart summaries with custom categorization; conversation intelligence dashboards; coaching analytics; structured analysis against sales methodologies like MEDDICC and BANT; basic CRM sync included on every tier.

Pricing: Roughly $19–39/user/month, with conversation intelligence (the Gong-adjacent features) often gated as an add-on that pushes the effective price higher.

Limitations: Narrower fit outside sales contexts — teams without a revenue-coaching use case will pay for analytics they don't use.

Best for: Sales organizations that want coaching and deal analytics, not just transcription.

5. Fathom

Fathom's free tier is genuinely full-featured rather than a limited trial, which is unusual in this category and is the main reason it shows up on nearly every "best free" list in 2026.

Key features: Unlimited recording and transcription on the free tier; automated summaries with decision-point extraction; native Salesforce and HubSpot sync; classic (bot-visible) and other capture modes.

Pricing: Free; Premium/Business tiers add CRM sync and longer video caps, generally in the $19–25/user/month range.

Limitations: Fathom's classic mode joins as a visible "Fathom Notetaker" participant, same friction as Fireflies. It trains on de-identified call data by default, with an opt-out available — worth checking before assuming privacy-by-default.

Best for: Small teams and individual professionals who want full functionality without a subscription, plus SMB sales teams that need CRM sync without an enterprise contract.

6. Grain

Grain is built around customer-facing conversations — video highlights and moment-sharing rather than full-transcript review.

Key features: Video recording with automated highlight generation; customer insight extraction; shareable meeting moments for coaching; CRM integration with contact/deal association.

Pricing: Paid plans; check current vendor pricing directly, as third-party listings vary.

Limitations: Highlight-first design means less value for teams that need dense, searchable transcripts rather than curated clips.

Best for: Customer success and user research teams that want shareable moments from customer calls for internal training.

7. Circleback

Circleback has built its reputation specifically on action-item accuracy — correctly identifying who owes what, rather than just producing a transcript.

Key features: Automated recording across Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, and Slack huddles; in-person recording; 100+ language support; over 1,000 app integrations; per-seat (not credit-based) pricing.

Pricing: No free tier; individual plans from roughly $20.83/user/month (annual), Team around $25/user/month.

Limitations: No free tier to trial the product; customer support is chatbot-only for most users, which several reviewers flag as a real friction point when something goes wrong.

Best for: Teams and professionals who prioritize reliable action-item extraction and automation triggers over the lowest price point.

8. Krisp

Krisp's differentiator isn't note-taking — it's audio quality. It started as a noise-cancellation tool and has expanded into a bot-free meeting assistant, and the noise cancellation remains its sharpest edge.

Key features: On-device noise and echo cancellation (40+ dB, processed locally); bot-free, system-level audio capture; meeting transcription and AI summaries; real-time accent conversion.

Pricing: Free tier (limited daily noise cancellation); Core around $8–16/user/month (annual); Advanced around $15–30/user/month.

Limitations: AI summaries are comparatively basic next to purpose-built notetakers — several reviews describe limited customization beyond a single "summarize" action. It's a stronger audio/privacy tool than a conversation-intelligence one.

Best for: Professionals in noisy environments or cross-accent teams who want clean audio and bot-free capture as much as they want notes.

9. Jamie AI

Jamie skips the meeting bot entirely and layers a chatbot on top of captured meeting content for on-demand queries.

Key features: Multilingual transcription with reported strong accuracy across accents; AI chatbot for querying meeting content; screen-content capture combined with audio.

Pricing: Check current vendor pricing; positioned as a privacy-first alternative in Europe specifically.

Limitations: No auto-joining bot means less automation for teams that want a fully hands-off experience; no mobile app or built-in video recording as of this writing.

Best for: Teams that want bot-free capture and are comfortable trading some automation for privacy and control.

10. MeetGeek

MeetGeek is a budget-oriented, largely hands-off option, historically strongest for Zoom-centric teams.

Key features: Automatic joining and summary generation; action item identification; meeting insights dashboard; calendar integrations.

Pricing: Free tier with meaningful functionality; paid plans add analytics depth.

Limitations: Platform flexibility is narrower than competitors built for multi-platform teams.

Best for: Budget-conscious, Zoom-first teams that want automated documentation without configuration overhead.

11. Read AI

Read AI leans on transcription accuracy and deep Microsoft Teams integration, plus meeting-analytics features like measuring participant engagement.

Key features: Real-time transcription; native Teams integration; multi-language support; cross-channel context (connecting meeting decisions to other work tools).

Pricing: Roughly $15/user/month, with clearer, less-tiered feature access than some competitors.

Limitations: Speaker identification reportedly degrades in larger meetings with many participants.

Best for: Microsoft Teams-centric organizations that prioritize transcription accuracy and fast deployment.

12. Supernormal

Supernormal has evolved from a straightforward bot-free notetaker into an AI-agent tool that turns meeting context into finished deliverables (decks, briefs, drafts), with client-services and agency teams as a clear focus.

Key features: Bot-free, computer-level audio capture (no visible participant); automated summaries and action items; AI agents that generate presentations, briefs, and drafts from meeting context; SOC 2 Type II and GDPR-oriented positioning.

Pricing: Free starter tier with 1,000 minutes of storage per member; paid tiers scale from there.

Limitations: The agent/deliverable-generation features are the newer, differentiating part of the product — teams that just want a straightforward transcript-and-summary tool may find the broader agent framing adds complexity they don't need.

Best for: Agencies and client-services teams that want meeting context turned directly into client-ready deliverables, without a bot on the call.

How to choose the right Fireflies alternative

Start with what's actually breaking. If it's cost creep from AI credits, look at Circleback or Fellow's flat per-seat pricing. If it's the visible bot in client or candidate conversations, prioritize Krisp, Jamie, or Supernormal. If it's EU data residency, none of the tools above are EU-hosted by default — that's a distinct category (Noota, Leexi, HappyScribe) worth its own comparison if that's the primary driver.

Match the tool to the meeting type, not just the team. A tool that's excellent for internal syncs (Fellow's agenda structure, for instance) may be overkill for ad hoc sales calls, and a highlight-first tool like tl;dv or Grain may under-serve teams that need dense, searchable transcripts for compliance reasons.

Check the free tier honestly. Fathom's is close to full-featured; Fellow's and Circleback's are more limited (lifetime AI caps, no free tier at all, respectively). Don't assume "free" means equivalent access across tools.

Frequently asked questions

What's the main reason teams leave Fireflies for an alternative?

The most common drivers in 2026 are AI-credit cost creep beyond the advertised per-seat price, the default visible bot in sensitive conversations, and US-only data residency for teams with EU compliance requirements.

Is Fireflies unsafe to use?

No confirmed data breach has been documented in court filings, regulatory action, or major reporting as of August 2026. There is an active, unresolved class action alleging biometric privacy violations under Illinois law, and past reporting has raised separate questions about the company's early data-handling practices — both are worth weighing, neither is a finding of wrongdoing.

Which alternative is best for avoiding a visible meeting bot?

Fellow, Krisp, Jamie AI, and Supernormal all can capture audio at the system level without a bot joining as a visible participant. Fathom and Fellow offer bot-free capture as an option, alongside their default bot-based modes.

Which alternative is cheapest for a small team?

Fathom's free tier is the most fully-featured no-cost option in this list. MeetGeek's free tier is also usable for straightforward Zoom-based needs.‍

Do any of these alternatives integrate with Salesforce or HubSpot?

Yes — Fellow, Otter, Fathom, Avoma, Grain, and Circleback all offer native CRM sync on paid tiers, though the specific plan gate varies by vendor and changes periodically, so it's worth confirming current tier requirements before purchasing.