Fireflies.ai review 2026: AI meeting notes, AskFred, AI credits, pricing, pros, cons and alternatives

Fireflies.ai is one of the best-known AI meeting assistants. Its bot, called Fred, joins your calls, records and transcribes them, and sends a summary with action items afterwards. Over the past year it has grown into a broader “AI teammate”, with live help during calls, AI Skills, a personal assistant and free dictation. This review covers what Fireflies does, what each plan costs as of October 2026, how its AI credits work, and who should choose it. It is based on Fireflies’ own website, pricing page and knowledge base, and we haven’t run extended hands-on tests, so treat the strengths as what the vendor documents rather than our own measurements.

Screenshot: The Fireflies.ai home page. Teams can request a demo (1); anyone can create a free account with Get Started (2). Captured by Universal Digital Assistant on October 20, 2026.

Fireflies.ai at a glance

What Fireflies can do

Fireflies’ home page sums it up as “Transcribe, summarize, search, and analyze all your team conversations.” Its pricing page and knowledge base list these main features:

• A notetaker for every call. Invite [email protected] to a meeting or let it auto-join your calendar events. The Chrome extension records Google Meet without the bot, the mobile app captures in-person conversations, and you can upload MP3, MP4, WAV or M4A files.
• Transcripts and summaries. Transcription in 100+ languages with speaker recognition and automatic language detection, followed by summaries with an overview, bullet points and action items. Summaries can follow templates for sales, recruiting or interviews.
• Search and AskFred. Search every meeting down to the sentence and timestamp, and ask AskFred questions about one meeting or many.
• Live Assist. Real-time suggestions, coaching and answers during calls, including briefings before sales calls. It works with the main video platforms and on desktop, the Chrome extension and mobile.
• AI Skills. Fireflies says it has 200+ AI Skills that extract details, draft follow-up emails, score candidates and more, for sales, recruiting, healthcare, engineering and other teams.
• Personal Assistant, Email Assistant and voice agents. Paid plans add a Personal Assistant with features such as a daily brief and meeting prep, an Email Assistant, and AI voice agents.
• Conversation intelligence. Speaker talk time, sentiment analysis, topic trackers and question detection, with team analytics for admins on Business.
• Integrations and MCP. Fireflies connects to CRMs, project tools, applicant tracking systems and Slack, and its MCP server brings meeting data into AI tools such as Claude and ChatGPT.
• Collaboration. Time-stamped comments and bookmarks, soundbites you can clip and share, channels to organize team meetings, and playback at up to 3x speed. People who weren’t in the meeting can view shared transcripts without a Fireflies account.
• Security. Fireflies lists SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliance on every plan, zero data retention, and HIPAA compliance with a business associate agreement on Enterprise.
• Fireflies Talk. A new dictation tool on desktop, iPhone and Android that types what you say into any app, in 90+ languages. Fireflies says it is free and unlimited on every plan, and that dictations stay on your device.

What Fireflies costs

Screenshot: Fireflies’ pricing page with annual billing selected (1): Free (2), Pro at $10, Business at $19 (3) and Enterprise at $39 per seat a month. Captured by Universal Digital Assistant on October 20, 2026.

Fireflies’ pricing page lists four plans, priced per seat:

Fireflies advertises savings of up to 44% for annual billing. Business adds multi-language mode, conversation intelligence, team analytics, user groups and unlimited private channels. Enterprise adds a rules engine, SSO and SCIM, audit logs, HIPAA compliance, private storage, custom data retention, a transcript-and-summary-only mode and a dedicated account manager.

The Free plan’s fine print

The Free plan is useful, but read the small print. Fireflies’ knowledge base says that for users who signed up on or after September 1, 2026, Free includes 3 meeting transcriptions, and you unlock unlimited transcripts by turning on Auto-join for your calendar meetings, or by using the Chrome extension, the mobile app or shared bot meetings. Choosing “Only when I invite [email protected]” doesn’t count. Summaries and uploaded files use transcription credits, of which new accounts get only a handful (3 when you sign up on the website). Downloading transcripts requires a paid plan.

How AI credits work

Unlimited transcription doesn’t mean unlimited AI. Fireflies’ help center says AI credits pay for AskFred, AI Skills, custom summary sections, soundbites, Live Assist suggestions, voice agents, the Slack assistant and the Personal Assistant. Plain transcription, standard summaries and recap emails don’t use credits. Credits are pooled across the team and don’t grow with extra seats, and each request uses a variable amount depending on how complex it is.

Fireflies’ own help pages describe the plan allowance differently: its Free plan article calls the 20 credits monthly, while its AI credits guide says plan credits are a one-time allowance at sign-up that doesn’t expire. Either way, heavy users will need to buy more:

Watch two settings. When a paid account runs out of plan credits, Fireflies automatically subscribes you to the $5 tier, and if you already have a credit subscription it moves you to the next tier up. The Personal Assistant features run on a schedule and use credits by default. You can turn off auto-upgrades and those features in your settings.

Pros

• Unlimited transcription and summaries on every paid plan, with no minute caps.
• Low entry price. Pro at $10 a seat a month billed annually is among the cheaper paid notetakers.
• Wide language support, with 100+ transcription languages and automatic detection.
• Many ways to capture, from the bot to the Chrome extension, desktop, mobile, dialers and file uploads.
• Deep integrations, including CRMs, project tools, Slack and an MCP server for AI assistants.
• Clear privacy terms. Fireflies says it doesn’t train AI models on your meetings, and HIPAA is available on Enterprise.

Cons

• AI credits add cost and confusion. The smart features draw on a small, shared pool, and auto-upgrades can add charges if you don’t switch them off.
• A tighter Free plan for new users. Only 3 transcriptions unless you enable Auto-join, few summary credits and 400 minutes of storage for the whole team.
• Monthly billing is expensive. Pro costs $18 and Business $29 a seat on monthly billing.
• A visible bot on most platforms, and you remain responsible for telling people you are recording.
• Recording caps of 2 hours a meeting on Free and Pro.

Who should use Fireflies.ai?

Choose Fireflies if your team has many calls, wants unlimited transcripts at a low per-seat price, and will use its CRM and project-tool integrations. Budget for AI credits if you plan to lean on AskFred, AI Skills or Live Assist. If you’d rather avoid a bot, look at Granola or Notion AI Meeting Notes, which record from your own device. Otter.ai is the closest like-for-like rival, and the Microsoft Copilot review covers the option built into Teams. Our best AI meeting assistants guide compares them all.