The Best 5 Alternatives to Fireflies.ai in 2025

The number of AI meeting assistants in 2025 is almost endless. Well, at least there are a lot. One of the best known options is Fireflies.ai. It offers a wide feature set at a fair price, so it’s often the default choice. Yet, there are many other options you may want to take into consideration. Some companies value highly accurate transcription more than anything, because they use the transcripts to train AI for example. Others need an easy-to-use interface, deep sales analytics, or real-time captioning.

This guide explains where Fireflies shines, where it may not fit your needs, and then walks you through the best Fireflies alternatives with clear reasons to pick each one.

Fireflies.ai: Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths

Fireflies is built to be a meeting memory for your organization. It records across the common conferencing tools, supports many languages, and produces summaries that are easy to skim. The workspace experience is straightforward: you can search across transcripts, jump to specific moments, leave comments, and share links with colleagues. Integrations cover the essentials. It connects to calendars so it can auto-join, and supports some CRMs, project management tools, and a few more apps that may come in handy. Pricing is friendly to small and mid-sized teams. A free tier makes testing easy, Pro and Business cover most needs, and Enterprise adds security controls like SSO, retention, and administrative oversight.

Weaknesses

Where Fireflies doesn’t fit as well often comes down to policy and specialization. By default, data hosting is in the United States. If your organization requires EU-first storage or stricter data handling by design, you’ll either need Fireflies’ enterprise arrangements or you’ll gravitate to an EU-native vendor. Fireflies’ analytics are solid for single meetings but less focused on the multi-meeting coaching and trend analysis that some sales intelligence tools provide out of the box. The free plan is practical for trials, but not really feasible for anyone who wants to use Fireflies as a day-to-day tool.

The Best Fireflies.ai Alternatives

We've tested basically all the alternatives out there and try to give an honest review across the board. It's not really the case that there's one tool out there that beats all the others and which everyone should choose. Rather you should assess your needs and choose accordingly. Ask yourself questions like this:

• What integrations do I need to streamline my workflows?
• What do I actually look for? The answer may be anything like: accurate word-by-word transcripts, workflow automation, meeting summaries, to-do recognition
• Do I want an application for my whole team/company or just myself?
• Are there any "special" features that are important to me like short video clips, sales analytics, certain statistics and so on?
• ....

If you answer those questions first, finding the right tool becomes much easier quickly.

Otter

Otter built its reputation on live transcription that’s simple to start and reliable in day-to-day use. If you care about real-time captions for accessibility or comprehension, Otter is one of the easiest ways to add them across Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. After meetings, Otter’s summaries are clear and the search experience is familiar. A newer addition, AI chat over your meeting notes, lets you ask questions like “What did we commit to deliver next sprint” and get an answer without scrubbing through the recording.

Where Otter excels:

• Real-time transcription
• Polished mobile app
• Free plan to test
• Quick setup

Where Otter has it's weaknesses:

• Language breadth (only supports English, Spanish, and French)
• Privacy (Otter only supports enterprise-grade controls at higher tiers and likely uses meeting data for AI training)

Sally AI

Sally's a strong all-rounder that combines ease of use, powerful features, and enterprise-grade security for companies everywhere.

Feature-wise, Sally checks nearly every box. It supports high quality transcription and summaries, detects action items, and provides meeting analytics to help improve team performance. The interface is intuitive, so teams can adopt it quickly without long onboarding. Sally also covers a lot of integration options, covering CRMs, project management tools, calendars, and collaboration apps, so meeting notes and tasks flow seamlessly into daily workflows.

Where Sally stands out is how complete it feels: robust security, excellent usability, and rich features combined in one package. The only drawback is that there’s no permanent free plan, and the pricing is geared more toward serious business use than casual or individual adoption.

When you should use Sally:

• Sally is optimized for companies and team collaboration
• High quality transcripts and summaries
• High data protection standard
• Enterprise level security for all plans
• Deep integration and automation possibilities

Where Sally isn't the best:

• No free version for life (only free trial)

Fathom

Fathom is popular because the free plan is genuinely useful. You can record and transcribe meetings without worrying about monthly fees, which makes it ideal for solo consultants, early-stage startups, or teams testing AI notetakers across workflows. Summaries arrive quickly and are practical to share. Paid plans layer in CRM syncing, templates, and team features that fit sales and customer success routines.

Fathom’s strength is obvious: it removes the barrier to entry. If you want to prove the value of AI notes before you commit budget, it’s one of the easiest places to start. The experience is smooth, highlights are simple to capture, and the email follow-up after each call is concise enough that people actually read it.

The trade-offs mostly concern breadth and depth. Support for conferencing platforms and languages is improving, yet it still trails tools that were built for heavy multi-platform, multi-language use from day one. Free is generous, but for administrative controls, analytics, and robust integrations you’ll move into paid tiers. If your environment is complex or compliance-heavy, you’ll likely outgrow the free tier once the pilot ends.

Where Fathom is good:

• Free tier is actually useful
• Solid transcription and summarization features
• Easy to try

Fathom's weaknesses:

• Features not as polished
• Integration possibilites far worse compared to other platforms
• Less suitable for bigger companies or teams since free version won't suffice and there are better paid tools

tl;dv

The main USP of tl;dv is fast knowledge sharing. It records and transcribes meetings, then makes it effortless to clip highlights, tag moments, and circulate insights. You can also search across many recordings and you can find every mention of a topic and compile a cross-meeting summary for a product spec or user research report.

The trade-off is specialization. tl;dv is excellent for documentation, sharing, and cross-meeting discovery. It’s less focused on sales coaching, deep analytics, and there are tools with higher quality transcription and summaries out there.

Where tl;dv excels:

• Make meeting clips
• Search across multiple meetings
• Circulate meeting insights across your team

Where other tools are better:

• Quality of transcription and summaries
• Depth of native integrations (although many integrations are possible via Zapier)
• UI could be more intuitive

Happy Scribe

Happy Scribe is slightly different from the other Fireflies alternatives but we think it deserves a mention. It's general idea is combining AI transcription with human transcription. Businesses use it not only for meetings but also for interviews, podcasts, webinars, and content production where top level accuracy (achieved by combining AI with human transcription) is necessary. Another strength is language coverage: Happy Scribe supports more than 60 languages and dialects, making it useful for international teams or media companies. It also provides subtitle generation and editing, which is valuable if you want to repurpose meeting content for training, marketing, or publishing.

Where Happy Scribe shines is flexibility. You can upload almost any file, get a transcript in minutes, and collaborate with colleagues through a built-in subtitle and transcript editor. Pricing is transparent: you pay per hour of audio for pay-as-you-go, or choose a subscription if you have regular volumes.

The trade-off is that Happy Scribe is less of a meeting assistant and more of a transcription service. It can join your calls the way Fireflies or Sally would, but it can't compete when it comes to streamlining workflows or integrations. It’s best seen as a reliable transcription backbone for organizations that need accurate, multilingual transcripts and subtitles rather than a full AI meeting workflow.

Where Happy Scribe is the best choice:

• For anyone needing perfect transcripts
• If you want to repurpose the transcript later

Why you shouldn't go for Happy Scribe:

• Human transcription is expensive. If you want to transcribe meetings on mass, you won't get far
• If you want to save time and improve team collaboration, Happy Scribe isn't the right tool for you
• No integrations with CRM, project management tools and so on

Conclusion: That's the best Fireflies.ai alternative

Again, there's no universal winner in the AI notetaker market. (Even if we'd like to be the one clear winner.) The right choice depends on what you can’t compromise on. Start by writing your non-negotiables: data residency and privacy, required conferencing platforms, must-have integrations, language support, and so on. Pick two finalists that align with those constraints and run a short pilot. Use the same set of meetings, evaluate transcription accuracy, summary usefulness, search quality, task extraction, and how well the tool fits into your CRM or project system without manual effort.

Click here if you want to try Sally AI for free.