Three things send people looking for a Fireflies alternative, and it is worth naming all three before recommending anything, because they point in different directions. Some people are done with the bot appearing in every client call. Some have simply run past the storage minutes on their tier and do not want to pay for more. And some have a security review in front of them that asks a plainer question than any policy answers: does the recording reach a server we do not control, at all, ever — a question Fireflies' own commitment not to train on your data does not resolve on its own, because "we do not train on it" and "we never received it" are different promises.
Fireflies is genuinely good at the job it is built for — a shared, searchable team archive with a bot doing the capturing. The seven alternatives below suit the readers for whom that shape has stopped fitting, and each one is named for the specific complaint it answers rather than ranked against the others in the abstract. None of them, including Coii AudioNotes, replaces the shared archive outright — that trade is the honest cost of solving any of the three reasons above, and it is worth knowing that going in rather than discovering it a week after switching.
Fireflies' own tiers are worth knowing precisely before comparing anything against them. Free caps at 400 minutes of team storage. Pro, at $10 a seat a month annually or $18 monthly per its own pricing guide, raises that with a one-time shared credit pool for AI summaries and the AskFred assistant rather than a monthly refresh. Business, at $19 annually or $29 monthly, raises the credit pool again and adds team analytics. Enterprise is $39 annually with SSO and further admin controls. A team relying heavily on AI summaries and the assistant should budget for add-on credits once the shared pool runs out, which is a real cost the headline per-seat price does not show.
Granola — for the same team-archive idea, without the visible bot
Granola gets close to what Fireflies offers a team — cross-meeting AI chat, shared folders, integrations with Notion, Slack and HubSpot on its Business tier — while using the computer's own audio instead of a participant joining the call. Business is $14 a user a month, below Fireflies Business's $19 annually or $29 monthly. Every tier carries a model-training opt-out, an explicit setting rather than a stated policy. What it cannot do is record a meeting nobody is running the app for, and its cross-meeting AI chat runs on every tier rather than being gated behind a paid credit pool the way Fireflies' AskFred assistant is. Full comparison here.
Otter — for a browser-reachable archive and a scheduled agent
Otter still uses a bot, so if the participant itself is not the objection, it is a near-equivalent shape to Fireflies with a browser-based archive on top. Pro is $16.99 a month or $8.33 annually — above Fireflies Pro's $10 annual price — and its free Basic tier caps at 300 minutes a month against Fireflies' 400 minutes of team storage. Its scheduled Meeting Agent can join a call nobody attends, which Fireflies also does and this whole list mostly cannot, and its archive is reachable from a browser on any machine rather than only from native apps. See the full comparison.
Fathom — for dropping the bot without dropping the price to zero, or paying nothing at all
Fathom's free tier includes unlimited recordings, transcriptions and summaries, and its own bot-free page documents a Mac-only bot-free capture mode at no cost — a direct answer to the bot objection that Fireflies has no equivalent for. Paid team plans start at $19 a seat monthly or $15 annually, close to Fireflies Business, and its integration list — Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce, Asana, Zapier, an API and MCP — is at least as wide. Full comparison here.
tl;dv — for CRM automation ahead of what Fireflies offers at the same tier
tl;dv can join as a bot or record through its desktop app, so the visible participant is optional rather than default. Pricing runs Free at €0, Pro at €29 monthly or €18 annually, Business at €39 monthly or €29 annually, per its pricing page — in euros, worth converting before comparing directly to Fireflies' dollar figures. Its automatic CRM updates and MCP server go further than Fireflies' equivalent integrations at a comparable price, and it claims SOC 2 and GDPR compliance along with support for more than thirty languages. See the full comparison.
Notta — for the cheapest paid tier and translation Fireflies does not offer
Notta Pro is $8.17 a month billed annually — $97.99 a year — below Fireflies Pro's annual price, with 1,800 transcription minutes a month per its pricing page. It adds paid translation, monolingual and bilingual, which Fireflies has nothing equivalent to, and its bot-free desktop mode captures system audio directly. Its integration list is narrower than Fireflies' at the same tier, and its own security page describes hosting on Amazon Web Services with data encrypted in transit and at rest. Full comparison here.
Wispr Flow's notetaker — for meetings and dictation from one subscription, no bot either
Wispr Flow's notetaker captures locally instead of joining as a bot, matching the no-bot property some people want without giving up a hosted service entirely. Pro is $15 a user a month or $12 annually, holding SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 — certifications Fireflies' own site does not claim. The notetaker is Mac-only for now, and the same subscription does dictation into any Mac app, a second job Fireflies has no answer for at all. See the full comparison.
MacWhisper — for owning the file locally instead of trusting any policy
MacWhisper sidesteps the whole training-and-storage question by being a local Mac app rather than a hosted service — its own site describes processing sensitive content without data leaving the Mac. Its licence is €64, paid once, and it does considerably more than Fireflies on the transcription side: batch processing, subtitle export, a CLI. It has no team archive and no bot at all, by design. Full comparison here.
What "never used for training" does and does not cover
Fireflies' commitment is specific and worth taking at face value: your data is never used for AI training or any purpose outside your direct business needs, and you keep ownership and control under its terms of service. That is a clearer line than several competitors draw. What it does not answer is a narrower question some readers are actually asking — not "will this be used to train a model" but "does a copy of this recording exist anywhere I do not control at all." Fireflies is a hosted service, so the answer to the second question is yes regardless of the training policy; the recording is processed and stored on infrastructure Fireflies operates, encrypted or not, policy or not. For most meetings that distinction is academic. For a recording under NDA, or a conversation a security review is specifically asking about, it is the entire question, and no training clause resolves it either way.
Coii AudioNotes — for no storage limit, because there is nothing to store remotely
Coii AudioNotes is $19, paid once, for three of your own Macs. Recordings are files on your disk rather than minutes measured against a plan — Free on Fireflies caps at 400 minutes of team storage, and even Business raises that limit rather than removing it.
It gives up the entire reason a team buys Fireflies in the first place — a shared archive several people can search — for one person's folder on one Mac. That trade is wrong for a team and exactly right for someone who wanted their own calls handled without a third party holding them. Full comparison here.
What actually changes when you switch
Fireflies' archive does not export cleanly into any of the seven alternatives above, so pull anything worth keeping out while the subscription holding it is still active — a cancelled account is the wrong moment to test how good the export actually is. That is true whether the destination is another hosted service or a local app; none of them import a Fireflies archive directly.
The bot is the other thing that changes, in both directions. Moving to Granola, Fathom's bot-free mode, Wispr Flow's notetaker, MacWhisper or Coii AudioNotes removes the visible participant from every call, which some people notice immediately and others do not notice until a client asks why the attendee list looks different. Moving to Otter or keeping tl;dv in its scheduled mode keeps a bot in the room, just a different one.
Six seats on Fireflies Business at $29 monthly is $2,088 a year; the same six on Granola Business at $14 is $1,008 — a real gap, though it assumes the two products' integrations and admin tools are close enough to matter less than the price, which for some teams they are not.
The table
| Alternative | Price | Bot-free? | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fireflies (for reference) | $0–$29/seat/mo | No | A shared team archive |
| Granola | $0–$35/user/mo | Yes | Team archive without the bot |
| Otter | $0–$30/user/mo | No | Meetings nobody attended |
| Fathom | $0–$34/user/mo | Yes | Bot-free, and free |
| tl;dv | €0–€39/seat/mo | Either | CRM automation |
| Notta | $0–$16.67/mo | Yes | Cheapest tier, plus translation |
| Wispr Flow notetaker | $0–$15/user/mo | Yes | Dictation and meetings together |
| MacWhisper | €0–€64 once | Yes | A local transcription toolkit |
| Coii AudioNotes | $19 once | Yes | Nothing stored anywhere but your disk |
The table, read the other way
It is worth reading the table below by column rather than by row once, because "cheapest" and "bot-free" do not point at the same product twice in a row here. The cheapest paid alternative is Notta; the most generous free tier is Fathom; the widest integration set stays with Fireflies itself and neither Granola nor Fathom fully matches it; and the only two rows with no recurring bill at all are MacWhisper and Coii AudioNotes, priced once rather than monthly. Picking on price alone and picking on the bot alone can point at two different answers, which is exactly why the reason you are reading this page in the first place matters more than the table's shape.
Which to actually try
If the shared archive is what makes Fireflies worth it, Granola or Otter are the two alternatives that keep something close to that property. If the bot is the specific objection, Fathom's free bot-free mode costs nothing to try this week. If a security review is what is actually driving this search, Coii AudioNotes and MacWhisper are the only two products on this page where the honest answer to "where does the recording go" is nowhere but the Mac, and the difference between those two is scope — MacWhisper does far more with a batch of existing recordings, Coii AudioNotes does one job and writes the finished minutes itself.
A quick way to tell which reason is actually yours: if you can name a specific meeting from the last month that a colleague needed to find in the archive without asking you directly, the shared search is genuinely load bearing and Granola or Otter is the better direction. If nobody has ever searched your Fireflies archive but you, the team-archive premise the whole product is built on may never have applied to your use of it, and a one-person tool is worth trying before a one-person team keeps paying a team price.
Run whichever you pick through a real week of meetings before deciding — the gap between these tools shows up on the third or fourth call, not the first, and a single test recording of an empty room will not surface any of the differences that actually matter once real speakers, real crosstalk and a real deadline are involved. The library carries the full comparison for every name above, or download Coii AudioNotes directly — thirty days, every feature, no card and no account, and the price only comes up after that.