Fireflies alternatives: 4 honest options for 2026

Fireflies.ai is one of the most complete meeting bots on the market: Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Webex, 100+ languages, CRM integrations on every paid tier, an API on every tier including free, and a genuinely usable free plan. So why look for a Fireflies alternative? The bot that makes Fireflies powerful is also what people come to resent. It joins calls uninvited, the company is now named in a biometric-privacy class action, and the billing model confuses people. If that's you, read on. Everpaper is our product, it's first on the list below, and we've declared that bias up front. We've also stated its real limits and included an honest "stay with Fireflies" section at the end, because Fireflies is still the right answer for some teams.

Why people leave Fireflies

From G2, Trustpilot (632 reviews), Reddit, and review teardowns at tldv, Lindy, and itsconvo, the same five complaints repeat.

The bot is intrusive. Fireflies' "Fred" bot joins meetings as a visible participant, and the auto-join-via-calendar behavior is on by default. Users report it appearing in sensitive calls uninvited, and reviewers call it "hard to fully disable." Non-users whose meetings get recorded have objected to the practice. When your notetaker is the most talked-about attendee, something is off.

The BIPA voiceprint lawsuit. In December 2025, Cruz v. Fireflies.AI Corp. was filed in the U.S. District Court, Central District of Illinois. The complaint alleges Fireflies collected and stored voiceprints (the speaker-recognition feature that labels who said what) of meeting participants without the notice and written consent Illinois's Biometric Information Privacy Act requires. As of 2026-08-04 the case is ongoing with no settlement. The suit names the exact feature that makes meeting bots useful.

Accuracy complaints. Reviews consistently flag errors with heavy accents, crosstalk, and specialized vocabulary; G2's summary notes "occasional AI inaccuracies that require corrections." Speaker attribution degrades with overlapping speech. For a tool whose whole job is the record, "mostly right" reads differently.

AI-credit billing confusion. Fireflies lists transcription as "unlimited" on every tier, then governs it with monthly AI credits (20 on Free and Pro, 30 on Business, 50 on Enterprise). Trustpilot and review sites carry complaints about unexpected charges, hard-to-track usage, and bills higher than expected. "Unlimited, subject to a credit system" is a sentence that makes people shop for alternatives.

Storage caps that bite. The free tier stores 400 minutes per team, not per seat. Pro raises it to 8,000 minutes per seat ($10/seat/mo annual, $18 monthly); only Business ($19/seat/mo annual, $29 monthly) and up get unlimited storage (all pricing checked 2026-08-04).

If none of this bothers you, skip to the recommendation. Staying put may be correct. If it does, here are the honest options.

Quick comparison

1. Everpaper: best for private, bot-free meeting capture

Everpaper sits first because it addresses the complaint list above. There is no bot. Nothing joins your call. Meeting recording, transcription, and speaker labeling happen on your Mac.

Here's how it works. You press ⇧⌘M (or click the Record tile, or the menu-bar item, or open the Index with ⌘K and choose Begin minutes). Everpaper recognizes Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, Around, and Whereby links, records your microphone and system audio as separate time-aligned tracks, and transcribes on-device. The default speech model is Parakeet parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3 running on the Neural Engine. Whisper and MOSS (a ~2 GB combined transcription-plus-diarization model, happiest on 16 GB machines) are options. You get a live floating panel with level meters, Mute/Pause/Stop, a speaker-labeled transcript as it happens, and a Notes tab with /decision, /action, and /question snippets. Hide my voice or Hide any speaker (⌘4) removes a speaker from the record and persists. After the meeting, Extract todos pulls action items into Today's Focus automatically.

This architecture changes the privacy exposure at issue in Cruz: meeting recording, transcription, and speaker labels stay on your Mac rather than creating a meeting-vendor cloud copy. AI features such as summaries, Ask over the live transcript, and the day narrative wait until you configure a provider. Local options (Ollama, LM Studio, oMLX with the one-click Qwen3.5 4B setup, Apple Foundation Models) can keep AI processing on the Mac. Cloud providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter) sit behind an off-by-default toggle, and an offline redaction pass scrubs API keys, tokens, card numbers, SSNs, and OTPs before anything goes out. The meetings docs explain the recording flow, while the privacy docs cover provider controls.

The honest limits: macOS 14.2+ and Apple Silicon only. There is no Intel, Windows, mobile, or web version. Everpaper is in private beta with limited spots, with a founding-license option for early supporters, not a monthly subscription. A CLI, everpaper-cli, ships in the app bundle with meetings list/show/transcript/export and --json output for scripting; the CLI docs list its commands. The Second Brain sits behind a readiness gate of 5 days, 300 frames, 60 distinct things, and 3 recurring threads before it shows "Ready." Head-to-head detail: Fireflies vs Everpaper.

Best for: Mac users who want meeting notes without a bot, a cloud, or a consent problem.

2. Otter.ai: best for mature live transcription (with its own lawsuit)

Otter is the most direct Fireflies rival: a bot (OtterPilot) joins Zoom, Meet, and Teams calls, transcribes live with speaker identification, captures slides, and emails a summary. The mature product includes real-time editing, comments, highlights, cross-meeting AI Chat, and business integrations (Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zapier on Pro; API and webhooks on Enterprise).

Pricing checked 2026-08-04: Basic is free with 300 transcription minutes a month, a 30-minute cap per conversation, and 3 lifetime file imports. Pro is $8.49/user/mo billed annually ($16.99 monthly) for 1,200 minutes and 90-minute meetings. Business is $24/user/mo annual ($30 monthly) for unlimited meetings up to 4 hours. Enterprise is custom.

Now the disclosure, because it matters for this audience: Otter has the same category of legal exposure as Fireflies. In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation, a consolidated federal class action in the Northern District of California combining four suits filed August–September 2025, alleges recording without all-party consent and using recordings to train AI under ECPA, CIPA, and BIPA. A motion-to-dismiss hearing was held May 20, 2026. Otter's privacy policy (effective June 16, 2026) explicitly reserves the right to train "proprietary AI technology on de-identified audio recordings and on transcriptions." Users also report the bot auto-joining confidential meetings and spamming entire companies. If you're leaving Fireflies over consent and privacy, Otter is a lateral move. If you're leaving over credits and storage caps, compare the limits carefully: Otter Basic's 300 monthly minutes are per user, and Pro includes 1,200 minutes per user.

Best for: teams who want a Fireflies-shaped tool and don't mind the cloud.

3. Granola: best for bot-free notes with human-in-the-loop AI

Granola's design answer to the bot problem is simple: no bot, ever. The desktop app captures your microphone and system audio locally, and you start it yourself by clicking the notification, opening the meeting note, or choosing New Note. It works with anything that plays through system audio, plus in-person meetings from the mobile app. The signature workflow is human-in-the-loop: you jot rough notes during the call, and Granola's AI fleshes them into structured notes from the transcript. Nat Friedman called it "the best meeting notes of anything I've tried," and long-term users report it replaced their entire note workflow.

The privacy trade is specific. Audio is not stored; Granola transcribes in real time and keeps only transcript and notes. Transcription runs through Deepgram or AssemblyAI, and note-writing runs through OpenAI or Anthropic, all in Granola's AWS-hosted cloud. Third parties are barred from training on your data, but Granola itself trains on anonymized data by default on consumer tiers (opt out in Settings; off by default on Enterprise). Speaker identification is weak: desktop labels are just "Me" and "Them," with named speakers only via a Google Meet browser extension or the Zoom macOS setup.

Pricing checked 2026-08-04: Basic is free with limited meeting history; Granola's official pricing page doesn't publish the exact cap. Business is $14/user/mo with unlimited notes, integrations (Attio, Notion, Slack, HubSpot, Affinity, Zapier), MCP, and API. Enterprise is $35/user/mo adding SSO, admin controls, and org-wide auto-deletion. Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android are all supported. Deeper dive: Granola vs Everpaper.

Best for: people who hate bots but are fine with cloud AI, and who like steering their notes.

4. ScreenPipe: best for developers who want the raw capture layer

ScreenPipe is a different shape of tool: a 24/7 local recorder for your screen (screenshots plus accessibility-tree text at a default 1 FPS) and microphone, written in Rust, storing everything in a local SQLite database (~/.screenpipe/db.sqlite) with a search API at localhost:3030. No bot joins anything. It records what your machine displays and hears, so it works with every meeting app by construction. Local transcription runs through Whisper (whisper-tiny up to whisper-large-v3-turbo), and "pipes" are scheduled agents (a pipe.md prompt plus a schedule) that can fire at meeting end, summarize, and drop action items into an Obsidian note. They can use local models via Ollama if you want zero cloud.

It's genuinely local-first: capture, OCR, transcription, search, and the API all work offline, with a default-on PII-removal flag redacting emails, phones, and card numbers. Cloud features (Deepgram transcription, Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini, team sync) are opt-in. There's an MCP server for Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor, and ChatGPT.

The caveats. The license moved from MIT to the source-available Screenpipe Commercial License on 2026-06-09 (free for personal use, paid for commercial use of the source). The product now has clear Free, Basic, and Business plans: $0, $25/month, and $50/seat/month respectively, with annual prices of $250 and $500 for the paid tiers. It's a builder's tool: expect to configure, not unbox. Community reception has been mixed, including a 2024 r/LocalLLaMA thread asking to ban Screenpipe posts for spam. Detail: ScreenPipe vs Everpaper.

Best for: developers who want a local capture API and are happy wiring their own notes pipeline.

Fireflies vs the field

How to choose

Four questions, in order.

1. Is the bot itself the problem? If yes, your shortlist is Everpaper, Granola, and ScreenPipe; none joins the call. Switching to Otter keeps the bot.
2. May the audio leave the machine? If no, Everpaper (on-device transcription, local AI providers) or ScreenPipe (local Whisper) are the fits verified here. Granola keeps no audio but streams it to transcription providers in real time; Fireflies and Otter store recordings in their clouds.
3. Do you need CRM sync and team analytics? Fireflies and Otter are the verified options for both. Granola offers CRM integrations from its $14 Business tier.
4. What hardware are you on? Everpaper requires macOS 14.2+ on Apple Silicon. ScreenPipe covers Mac (Intel too), Windows, and Linux CLI. Granola covers Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android. Fireflies and Otter provide broad cloud-backed platform coverage.

FAQ

Is there a free Fireflies alternative?

Yes, several. Otter's free tier gives 300 transcription minutes a month per user (30-minute cap per conversation). Granola's free tier has AI notes with limited meeting history. ScreenPipe's CLI is free for personal use. Fireflies' own free tier is usable too, with 400 minutes of storage per team. Everpaper is in private beta with a founding-license model, not a free product.

Which Fireflies alternatives don't use a meeting bot?

Everpaper, Granola, and ScreenPipe don't join calls. Everpaper records mic and system audio on your Mac and transcribes on-device; Granola captures system audio locally but transcribes in the cloud; ScreenPipe records your screen and mic 24/7 into a local database. Otter joins as a visible participant, like Fireflies.

What is the Fireflies BIPA lawsuit about?

Cruz v. Fireflies.AI Corp., filed December 2025 in the Central District of Illinois, alleges Fireflies collected and stored voiceprints of meeting participants through its speaker-recognition feature without the written consent Illinois's Biometric Information Privacy Act requires. It's ongoing as of 2026-08-04. Otter faces a comparable consolidated suit (In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation, N.D. Cal., MTD hearing held 2026-05-20). Everpaper takes a different technical approach: it computes speaker labels on-device and stores meeting data on the Mac.

Can I move my Fireflies transcripts to another tool?

Fireflies Pro and above let you download transcripts, summaries, and recordings, but the supplied research doesn't identify the transcript file format. Everpaper's Import Transcript feature (release 1.11.0) imports .vtt files from Zoom, Teams, and Otter as real meetings, with no audio needed. Confirm a Fireflies download is a .vtt file before trying to import it. The meetings docs cover the verified import flow.

Which alternative is best for a sales team?

Honestly, Fireflies itself, or Otter. Salesforce and HubSpot sync, conversation intelligence, and team analytics are the bot platforms' home turf. If privacy rules the bots out, Granola's Business tier ($14/user/mo) has HubSpot and Slack integrations, which covers a lighter version of the workflow.

Does any alternative work offline?

Everpaper and ScreenPipe. Both capture and transcribe locally with no connectivity; Everpaper's AI features then wait for whichever provider you configure, local or cloud. Fireflies, Otter, and Granola require connectivity for transcription.

Our recommendation

Stay with Fireflies if you're a team that lives in its CRM. Unlimited integrations on Pro ($10/seat/mo annual), Salesforce and HubSpot sync, team analytics on Business, a GraphQL API on every tier including free, SOC 2 Type II, and a HIPAA BAA on Enterprise make it a workflow hub. Nothing on this list replaces that setup feature-for-feature. If that's what you bought Fireflies for, the honest advice is to keep it, review auto-join settings for sensitive calendars, and watch the Cruz docket.

Leave for Everpaper if you're on an Apple Silicon Mac and the bot is the problem: the uninvited attendee, the voiceprint suit, or the participant-consent questions. Bot-free capture and on-device transcription keep the core record local. AI waits for a provider you choose, including local options, and the privacy model documents the controls. You give up Fireflies's multi-platform reach, and Everpaper is still in private beta.

Leave for Granola if you want bot-free capture with polished AI notes and accept cloud processing; ScreenPipe if you're a developer who wants the raw local capture layer; Otter if you're leaving over billing and storage, not privacy.

Everpaper is in private beta with limited spots. Join the waitlist at everpaper.app, and read the meetings docs to see exactly what bot-free recording looks like.