Fireflies is a team's shared archive. This is one Mac's folder.

Start with the arithmetic, because it is the reason most people arrive at a page like this one.

Fireflies' own pricing guide, updated July 2026, lists Pro at $10 per seat per month billed annually and $18 billed monthly, Business at $19 annually and $29 monthly, and Enterprise at $39 annually. There is a Free tier at $0. Their live pricing page is the place to confirm today's numbers — it renders the figures in the browser rather than in the page source, which is why this page cites their guide for the amounts.

Coii AudioNotes is $19 USD once, for three of your own Macs, updates included, nothing renewing. Six seats on Fireflies Business, annually, is $1,368 a year. One person on Pro is $120.

That comparison is unfair in one direction and misleading in the other, and this page is about both halves. It is unfair because six seats of Fireflies buys six people a shared, searchable archive with CRM integrations and a bot that attends meetings nobody remembered to record — things this app does not do at all, at any price. It is misleading because a lot of people paying for a seat are one person who wanted their own calls written up, and for them the second product is a different shape entirely.

The concession, and it is a large one

The obvious argument against a hosted notetaker is what happens to your conversations afterwards. Fireflies takes that argument off the table in its own words: its home page states that your data is never used for AI training or any purpose outside your direct business needs, and adds that you keep ownership and control of your data under its terms of service.

That is a clearer commitment than several products in this category make, and a comparison page that skipped past it would be dishonest. Read the wording yourself on their site, and read the terms it points at if this is a decision you have to defend to somebody.

So the difference between these two products is not "they train on you and we do not". It is narrower and more structural: with Fireflies, the audio, the transcript and the summary exist on somebody else's infrastructure under somebody else's policy, and that policy is a promise which can be excellent and is still a promise. With Coii AudioNotes, they never leave the Mac, so there is no policy to read. Which of those you prefer is a real question with two defensible answers, and it depends far more on what you record than on what you think of either company.

The participant called Fred

Fireflies works by attending. Its home page describes inviting fred@fireflies.ai to a live meeting or having it autojoin your calendar meetings. A notetaker appears in the participant list, and everyone on the call can see it.

That design buys real things. The meeting you double-booked still gets recorded. The call a colleague took on your behalf is in the archive. You do not have to remember anything, and the capture does not depend on which laptop you happened to open.

It also costs a moment. In a stand-up, nothing. In a first conversation with a client, a candidate talking about why they are leaving, or a call where the other side has a recording policy of their own, the bot is a thing to explain, and occasionally a thing to remove.

Coii AudioNotes has no bot because it has nowhere to send anything. It records what your Mac is already playing and what your microphone is already hearing. The attendee list is the same after you start recording as before.

Not having a bot is not unique to us, and pages that imply otherwise get caught: Granola works this way and says so, Fathom has shipped bot-free capture on the Mac, and Wispr Flow's notetaker captures locally. Against Fireflies it is a genuine difference. Against those three it is not.

The table

Where Fireflies is the better product

It is built for a team, and this app is built for a person. The value of Fireflies compounds with headcount: everybody's calls land in one searchable place, so the question "what did we tell that customer in June" has an answer even if the person who took the call has left. Coii AudioNotes is one person on up to three of their own Macs. There is nothing shared, nothing to administer and nobody else's meetings in it.

It captures without you. Autojoin means the recording does not depend on anybody remembering. If you have meetings that genuinely must be captured whether or not you were paying attention, that is a requirement rather than a preference, and only a tool with a bot satisfies it.

Languages. Fireflies advertises transcription in over a hundred languages with automatic detection. If your calls switch between languages, verify that capability directly with them and weight it heavily — it is not something a single-machine app matches by trying harder.

It reaches the tools the work lives in. CRM and app integrations, plus an API for audio files. If the point of a note is that it lands against a record without anyone retyping it, that is most of the value for a sales or success team, and this app has no version of it.

It is everywhere. Web, desktop, phones and a browser extension. Reading this morning's call on a phone is something Fireflies does today and this app will not do.

Every tier includes unlimited transcription and summaries. What the tiers meter is storage and meeting length, not whether you get a transcript at all — which is a more generous free tier than the category average.

Where Coii AudioNotes is the better product

Nothing is uploaded. Not the audio, not the transcript, not the summary. The only network traffic the app makes at all is activating your licence and a clock check at launch — no analytics, no crash reporting, no update check. There is no retention window, no region to select, no sub-processor to add to a register, and no policy that can be revised next year and apply to the calls you recorded this year.

To be clear about what that is and is not: it is a fact about where bytes go, not a certification. Coii AudioNotes claims no HIPAA, SOC 2 or ISO 27001 compliance, and anyone telling you that "it stays on the Mac" is the same as an audit is overselling. It is, however, usually the first thing an audit asks about, and it is a fact you can hand to your own compliance officer without a vendor questionnaire.

The minutes are written offline, not owed to you. The language model that turns the transcript and your typed notes into a summary is bundled with the app and runs on the machine. A call from a train with no signal produces finished minutes when it ends, not a queued job that completes when you reconnect.

Storage is your disk, and it has no tiers. Fireflies meters storage minutes — 400 for a team on Free, 8,000 a seat on Pro, unlimited on Business and above — and caps meeting length by plan. Coii AudioNotes counts nothing. A four-hour workshop is not a billing question, and a three-year archive is a folder that got bigger.

Two tracks, not one mix. Your microphone and the system audio are captured as separate files, so the room and the call stay apart. That gives the speaker separation something clean to work with and means the app never has to decide whether the voice it just heard was yours.

$19 once. One payment, three of your own Macs, updates included, no second year. Against $120 a year for one Pro seat or $228 for one Business seat, the arithmetic is not subtle. It is also not the whole story, which is what the section above is for.

Speaker separation, honestly

Both label speakers. Both are good at the demo case: two people taking turns, each on their own device, each with a usable microphone. That is also most calls.

Both struggle in the same places, and so does everything else in this category. Three or more voices on one channel. People finishing each other's sentences. Somebody dialling in from a car. Four colleagues sharing one laptop microphone at the end of a table. Any comparison implying one product has solved that is selling something.

The practical advice, whichever you buy: say a name early. "Thanks for joining, Ines" in the first minute does more for a transcript than any setting in either app.

Storage tiers, two years in

The row in the table that looks least interesting is the one people write to support about, so it is worth expanding.

Fireflies meters storage in minutes: 400 for a whole team on Free, 8,000 per seat on Pro, unlimited on Business and Enterprise. It also caps how long a single meeting can be — two hours on Free and Pro, three on Business, four on Enterprise. Those are ordinary limits for a hosted product, and 8,000 minutes per seat is a lot of meetings.

But they are limits with a clock attached. A year of daily hour-long calls is roughly 250 hours, which is 15,000 minutes, so a heavy user on Pro meets the ceiling somewhere in the second half of the first year and then makes a decision about what to delete or what to upgrade to. That is not a flaw; it is how the business works. It is simply a decision that arrives on a schedule you did not pick.

Coii AudioNotes has no counter in it. The archive is a directory on your disk, and it grows the way directories grow. When it gets large the answer is an external drive or an archive folder, which is a problem you already know how to solve and which costs whatever a drive costs rather than a tier upgrade. A four-hour workshop records for four hours. There is no plan in which it does not.

The corollary is that the responsibility is yours. Nobody is holding a second copy. If the Mac is lost and the folder was not backed up, the recording is gone, and no support ticket recovers it. A hosted service is, among other things, a backup you did not have to think about — which is a genuine advantage of Fireflies and one that a table row marked "unlimited" hides completely.

What switching costs

Your archive stays with Fireflies. There is no importer here and none is planned. Export what matters while your subscription is live — that is worth doing before you cancel anything, wherever you go next, because a lapsed account is the wrong moment to learn how the export works. Recordings and transcripts held by a service are yours to retrieve and theirs to hand over; nothing on this page should be read as a promise about what that process looks like.

You lose the shared archive on day one. If colleagues search your calls, or you search theirs, there is no equivalent here at all. That is the single largest thing you give up, and it is not a habit you can adjust to.

You gain a directory. Recordings, transcripts and minutes become files in a folder you chose, covered by whatever backup you already run, readable by anything, outside anybody's retention schedule including ours. An expired licence would not make them unreadable, because nothing reads them but the filesystem.

The habit is the second cost. Fireflies attends on its own; this app expects you to start it. That is a small friction several times a day for about a week, and it is the most common reason somebody drifts back.

What neither of them does

Neither is a video library with faces and clips; both are audio, transcript and notes. Neither does live captioning for a room. Neither does real-time translation for an audience.

And neither one tells you whether you may record a given call. The rules differ by country and by state, one-party and all-party consent are genuinely different regimes, and nothing here is advice about your situation — ask somebody qualified. What the two tools change is the narrower question of who else ends up holding the audio.

On an older Mac

Fireflies does the heavy work on its own servers, so an eight-year-old laptop and a current one feel much the same; the network is the constraint. Coii AudioNotes does the transcription and the summary on your machine, so the machine is the constraint. On Apple Silicon the transcript keeps up with the conversation. On an older Intel Mac it works and the summary takes longer after the call ends. If your Mac predates Apple Silicon, use the thirty days on real meetings rather than a two-minute test.

Local processing is a trade rather than a free win: you get nothing uploaded and the offline capability, and you pay for it in CPU time and battery.

Which one to buy

Buy Fireflies if more than one person needs to search the same archive; if meetings must be captured whether or not you attend; if notes have to reach a CRM without retyping; if your calls are in languages a single-machine app should not be trusted with; or if you read notes on a phone as often as on a Mac.

Buy Coii AudioNotes if you are the only person who needs these recordings; if they are the kind that should not be uploaded at all; if a visible notetaker in a client call costs you more than it saves; if you want minutes finished offline rather than queued; and if $19 once fits better than a seat that renews.

There is a third answer, and it is free: for one meeting a week, Voice Memos and five minutes of typing is enough. These tools start paying for themselves around the fourth or fifth call a day.

If Fireflies is one of several tools on your list, Otter is the closest comparison to it and tl;dv sits in similar territory with a desktop recorder as well as a bot. The library has the others. Or download this one — thirty days, every feature, no card, no account, and the price comes up afterwards or not at all.