Fireflies alternatives, compared honestly
Seven tools worth looking at, and the honest reason teams leave
It is Tuesday and someone on your team is deleting meetings. Not because they are old. Because the storage is full, and the only way to record Thursday's calls is to throw away last quarter's. Somewhere in the deleted folder is the call where a customer explained exactly why they nearly churned.
Here is the short answer. Most teams looking for a Fireflies alternative do not have a transcription problem. Fireflies transcribes well, in over 100 languages, and gives you unlimited transcription and unlimited AI summaries on every plan including the free one. What they have outgrown is the shape of the product: one summary per meeting, storage tiers that decide how much history you keep, and analytics that arrive on the Business plan pointed at the sales team. If your problem is any of those, the right replacement depends on which one.
What Fireflies is genuinely good at
A comparison is only worth reading if it can also explain why you might stay. So, first, the case for staying.
Fireflies has the strongest free tier in the category. Not a trial: a permanent plan with unlimited transcription and unlimited AI summaries, which no other major notetaker matches at zero cost. It supports over 100 languages with automatic detection, connects to more than 100 tools, and runs across Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams plus a desktop app that captures in-person audio. It is SOC 2 Type II compliant on all paid plans, does not use customer data to train models, and operates a zero-data-retention policy with its AI vendors.
For a solo consultant, a founding team of three, or anyone who mainly needs "what did we agree on," Fireflies at $10 per seat per month is a good deal and switching is a waste of a Tuesday.
The teams who leave are leaving for structural reasons, not because the transcripts were bad.
Why do teams actually leave Fireflies?
Four reasons come up repeatedly. Each has a person attached to it.
Storage is the real ceiling. The free plan holds 400 minutes across the entire team, not per person. Pro holds 8,000 minutes per seat. Unlimited storage starts at Business, $19 per seat per month billed annually. Marta runs ops at a twelve-person agency. Her team hit the 400-minute cap in week three, and every week since, someone has deleted old calls to make room. The record of what customers said only goes back as far as the last cleanup.
Fireflies gives you a structured summary of each meeting. That is a per-meeting product. The question a sales manager actually has is a cross-meeting one: how often did pricing come up in discovery last quarter, and what did people say right before they went quiet. AskFred can query your meetings, but it runs on AI credits that vary by tier and are charged per request, with more complex requests costing more. When the answer to "can I ask this a hundred times a week" is "it depends on the complexity," heavy querying becomes hard to budget for.
Conversation intelligence arrives on Business. Deal Intelligence, the sales-specific layer, arrives there too. That is a reasonable product decision, and it is also why the support lead who wants the same view of 900 support calls has no obvious path. Conversation data gets bought by sales and used by sales, which is how product ends up hearing about a feature request in a quarterly deck instead of in the words the customer used.
AI Skills on Pro and above will push action items to Slack, update a CRM field, create a task in Jira. Real automation, and useful. But the decision about what to push is still a human decision, made after reading the summary. That human is usually your best rep, on a Sunday.
The pattern underneath all four: a notetaker is built to file the conversation. At some point a team stops wanting a better file and starts wanting the thing that was supposed to happen after it.
The seven alternatives, described fairly
Different tools are built for different jobs. Most of the frustration in this market comes from buying one shape and expecting another.
Otter.ai. The strongest real-time transcription in the category, with live captions during the call and a chat layer across your meeting history. Choose it when someone needs to read the conversation as it happens, for accessibility or for note-taking in the moment. Worth checking against your markets: Otter's own materials list transcription support for English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese (Simplified). That is a narrower list than Fireflies' 100-plus, and it is the trade Otter makes for its real-time performance. It suits an English-first team well and a team selling in Polish or Portuguese poorly.
Fathom. The most generous free tier after Fireflies, and a different generosity: unlimited recordings and transcripts with unlimited storage, capping the AI summaries instead of the archive. Fast, clean, well-liked. Choose it when you want a free tool that will not make you delete anything, and you are working in English. Worth asking: language coverage sits in the high twenties to high thirties depending on which plan and which page you read, so check the current number against your actual markets.
Granola. No bot joins the call. It captures system audio on your laptop and improves the notes you were already typing, which changes the social dynamic of a meeting more than any feature list suggests. Around $14 per user per month. Choose it when the bot in the corner is the problem, whether that is a policy issue or just the feeling of one. Worth knowing: because it runs locally, the other side does not automatically see that anything is recording, so you need your own habit of saying so.
tl;dv. Built around video clips rather than text summaries, and German by origin, which matters if your procurement asks where the data sits. Choose it when the useful artifact is a 40-second clip of the customer saying the thing, dropped into Slack, rather than a paragraph describing it. Worth asking: the free plan auto-deletes recordings after a few months, so confirm the current retention policy before you treat it as storage.
Avoma. The closest thing to a mid-market conversation intelligence platform rather than a notetaker: scorecards, methodology scoring, and coaching, priced per recorder seat with free view-only seats so managers can watch without a licence. Tiers run roughly $19 to $39 per recorder seat per month on annual billing, with revenue add-ons priced separately on top. Choose it when you want structured sales coaching and Gong is out of budget. Worth asking: which capabilities are in the base seat and which are add-ons, because the answer changes the real per-seat number substantially.
Gong. The category's most mature product, built for enterprise sales organisations with dedicated enablement headcount. Deep deal inspection, rep coaching, and the deepest Salesforce integration in the market. Choose it when you have a large sales org and a budget that fits a premium annual contract, typically quoted per seat with a platform fee on top. Worth asking: how insight travels from sales to product and support, because Gong is a sales tool by design and that is not a criticism, it is the positioning.
Harmony. Built for companies where conversations happen everywhere, not only in sales, and where the point of capturing them is to get work done afterwards. Choose it when the bottleneck is the manual work sitting between the call and the outcome, and when you need the same view of a support queue that you have of a pipeline. Worth knowing: we are younger than the incumbents. Ten years of accumulated enterprise features is a real thing, and there are corners of Gong's and Fireflies' product surface we have not built.
| Tool | Built for | What it does that Fireflies doesn't | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Otter.ai | Live transcription and accessibility | Real-time captions during the call | Six languages listed, against Fireflies' 100-plus |
| Fathom | Free unlimited recording | Unlimited storage on the free plan | Caps AI summaries instead; narrower language list |
| Granola | Meetings where a bot is unwelcome | Captures without joining the call | No automatic signal to others that recording is on |
| tl;dv | Sharing moments, not summaries | Clip-first workflow, EU origin | Free-plan recordings auto-delete |
| Avoma | Sales coaching on a mid-market budget | Scorecards and methodology scoring | Add-ons change the real per-seat price |
| Gong | Enterprise sales organisations | Deal inspection and rep coaching at depth | Sales-shaped by design; premium contract |
| Harmony | Whole companies, not one function | Runs your questions on every conversation and does the follow-on work | Younger product; fewer accumulated enterprise features |
Where Harmony fits
We built Harmony on a belief that sounds obvious and turns out not to be: conversations carry the most valuable context in a company, and almost nobody uses them. Not because leaders do not care. Because the tools were built to file the conversation, not to act on it.
So Harmony captures the way everyone else does, then keeps going.
Capture, from anywhere. Meeting bots, desktop audio, IVRs, work phones. Over 100 integrations, transcripts in more than 100 languages with automatic detection and code-switching inside a single sentence. Speaker-labelled and searchable within minutes.
Your questions, on every conversation. Data Lake lets you define what you want to know once, then evaluates it on every call from then on and turns the answers into dashboards. Click any result and you land on the exact moment in the transcript. This is the piece that a per-meeting summary cannot do, no matter how good the summary is.
Every call scored, not a sample. Manual QA typically reviews 2 to 5 percent of calls, chosen by whoever had time. Define what good looks like once, and Scorecards runs it on all of them, with weighted scoring and a per-criterion breakdown, on every call rather than the handful a reviewer had time for.
Then the work. Follow-up drafted. CRM updated. Action items assigned to the right person in the tool they already use. The meeting becomes finished work rather than another file to read.
Ask anything, with sources. Companion sits on top of every conversation Harmony has captured and answers with sources you can open and check.
For teams with stricter requirements, Harmony Enterprise runs on your infrastructure: on-premises, private cloud, or air-gapped, with your choice of model. On security, where we are as of September 2026: SOC 2 Type I is complete and ISO 27001 certification is in progress. Fireflies holds SOC 2 Type II, which is the more demanding of the two, and if your procurement requires Type II today then that is a real difference and we would rather you heard it here.
How to choose
Start from the outcome you are buying, not the feature list.
- Solo user or a team of three who mainly needs the transcript: stay on Fireflies.
- Live captions during the call, English or one of five other languages: Otter.
- A free tool that never makes you delete anything, in English: Fathom.
- Meetings where a bot in the corner is not acceptable: Granola.
- Clips of what the customer said, shared in Slack: tl;dv.
- Structured sales coaching without an enterprise contract: Avoma.
- A large sales organisation with enablement headcount: Gong.
- The manual work between the conversation and the outcome, for the whole company and in every language you sell in: Harmony.
If you want the wider category map rather than the Fireflies-specific one, we wrote a buyer's shortlist covering all four shapes this market now comes in.
There is no universally correct answer here. There is a correct answer for the specific bottleneck you have, and most teams already know what theirs is before the first demo.
Ours was the ten minutes after every call. We built the thing that fixes it, and we run our own company on it every day, which is why our product opinions come from what annoys us rather than from a market report.
Take the meeting. Harmony turns it into work done.
How we checked this
Fireflies plan names, prices, storage limits, recording caps and compliance claims come from Fireflies' own published pricing material, read on 8 September 2026. Pricing for the other six tools was taken from vendor pricing pages and current published comparisons on the same date. Where sources disagreed on a number, we describe the range rather than picking one, and we say so in the text.
Software pricing moves. Every figure here is a starting point for your own check, not a substitute for it. This guide covers meeting-capture and conversation intelligence tools for business teams. It does not cover contact centre platforms, transcription-only services, or note-taking apps without call capture.
We make Harmony, and Harmony appears in this comparison. We have tried to give every tool a real reason to buy it and at least one honest thing to watch out for, including our own.
Frequently asked questions
There isn't one, because the tools below are built for different jobs. Otter is the alternative for live transcription, Fathom for a free tier with no storage cap, Granola for meetings where a bot is unwelcome, tl;dv for clips, Avoma for sales coaching on a mid-market budget, Gong for enterprise sales organisations, and Harmony for companies that need conversation data across every function rather than one.
Yes, and it is unusual. It is a permanent plan, not a trial, with unlimited transcription and unlimited AI summaries. The limits sit elsewhere: 400 minutes of storage across the whole team, no downloads or exports, no video recording, and a 2-hour cap per meeting. A working team usually hits the storage wall within the first month or two.
Usually storage, cross-meeting questions, or coverage beyond sales. Fireflies is built around the meeting as the unit: one call, one summary. Teams outgrow it when the question they need answered spans a hundred calls rather than one, or when a function other than sales needs the same view of its conversations.
As of September 2026, $10 per seat per month on Pro billed annually ($18 monthly), $19 on Business ($29 monthly), and $39 on Enterprise, which is annual-only. Unlimited storage starts at Business. HIPAA compliance is Enterprise-only.
Yes. Transcription supports more than 100 languages with automatic detection, including code-switching inside a single conversation, and scoring criteria run identically across all of them. This is the most common reason multilingual teams look past both Otter and Fathom.
No. Most teams start with one workflow: record a week of calls, define two or three questions that matter, and look at what comes back. If it does not change a decision within a week, it is not worth rolling out further.