Fireflies.ai vs Everpaper: an honest 2026 comparison

Fireflies.ai is a cloud meeting bot that joins your calls, transcribes them in 100+ languages, and pushes the results into your CRM. Everpaper is a private, on-device daybook for macOS that records meetings from your own machine, with no bot in the participant list. Choose Fireflies for team workflows; choose Everpaper if the recording should never leave your Mac.

One disclosure before anything else: Everpaper is our product. We'll still tell you where Fireflies genuinely wins, because it does win in a few places.

Quick verdict#

Choose Fireflies.ai if:

• You need meeting notes pushed into Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, or Notion automatically.
• Your team works across Windows, web, iOS, and Android, not just Mac.
• You want a usable free tier and can live with a bot appearing in your calls.
• You need compliance paperwork (SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA BAA on Enterprise) for a company-wide rollout.

Choose Everpaper if:

• You don't want a bot joining your meetings or your audio leaving your Mac.
• You're on an Apple Silicon Mac (macOS 15+) and want transcription, search, and a day journal that work offline.
• You want your meetings and your whole workday in one searchable archive on your Mac.
• You want speaker labels stored on your own Mac rather than in a vendor's cloud.

At a glance#

How we compared#

We pulled Fireflies' pricing and feature claims from its pricing, security, and integrations pages on 2026-08-04, cross-checked the bot-behavior and billing complaints against third-party reviews and Trustpilot, and read the Cruz v. Fireflies.AI complaint PDF. Every Everpaper claim below traces to the shipped docs — the meetings documentation is the source for the meeting-capture details.

Head-to-head#

Capture: a bot in the room vs no bot at all#

Verdict: Everpaper, unless your workflow needs the bot.

Fireflies' default capture mechanism is a participant named Fred. Connect your calendar and it auto-joins your Zoom, Meet, and Teams calls — that behavior is on by default, and it's the single most common complaint in reviews: the bot shows up in sensitive calls uninvited, and users report it's hard to fully disable. Everyone else on the call sees it. Some of them won't be happy about it.

Everpaper has no bot because it isn't a cloud service. Meetings records your microphone and system audio as separate time-aligned tracks, directly on your Mac. You start it with ⇧⌘M, the menu-bar item, or the Index (⌘K) → Begin meeting. If you want it tied to your calendar, Calendar Auto-Start is opt-in, and it gives you a 5-second cancellable countdown toast before anything records. Everpaper only reads your calendar, keeps no copy of it, and never uploads it. There's no participant to explain, apologize for, or kick.

The honest counterpoint: Fireflies' bot means it can record calls you aren't even on your Mac for, from any device, and its Chrome extension and mobile apps cover in-person capture too. Everpaper records what's in front of your Mac. That's the whole trade.

Privacy and the BIPA lawsuit#

Verdict: Everpaper, and this one isn't close.

In December 2025, Cruz v. Fireflies.AI Corp. was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois. The complaint alleges Fireflies collected and stored voiceprints — via its speaker-recognition diarization — of meeting participants without the notice and written consent Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act requires. Many of those participants never signed up for Fireflies at all; a bot joined their call. The case is ongoing as of 2026-08-04, with no settlement confirmed.

Fireflies' security page does say the right things: "You own your data. We don't train on it by default," 256-bit AES at rest, TLS in transit, SOC 2 Type II, and a 0-day retention policy with vendors. Enterprise adds HIPAA BAAs and private storage. That's a real compliance posture, better than most consumer notetakers.

Everpaper's answer is structural rather than contractual. Capture, OCR, transcription, storage, and search all happen on your Mac — the speech models run on-device, so there's no audio upload to encrypt in the first place. Speaker labels exist, but they live in your local database, never on a server where they could become a class action. An offline redaction pass at capture time scrubs API keys, tokens, card numbers, and SSNs into [REDACTED:api_key]-style placeholders, and it runs again before any outbound AI call you opt into. "No provider, no traffic" is the default state.

Transcription and AI#

Verdict: Fireflies for language breadth and team analytics; Everpaper for offline, speaker-labeled local capture.

Fireflies transcribes in 100+ languages in its cloud, with real-time notes, AskFred chat over your meetings, and conversation intelligence on Business and up. Reviews consistently flag accuracy drops with heavy accents, crosstalk, and specialized vocabulary — normal for the category, but plan on corrections.

Everpaper transcribes on-device: Parakeet (parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3) writes the words and Nemotron labels speakers by default, Whisper is an option, and Detailed meetings re-listen with MOSS (transcription and speaker separation in one model, ~2 GB download, happiest on 16 GB machines). Live meetings get a floating panel with a waveform, your notes with an "As we go" digest, and a speaker-labeled live transcript with an Ask field. Afterward, with an AI provider set up, the meeting gets an automatic Summary and its action items show up in Today's focus; More → Extract To-Dos into Today does it on demand. The catch is real: Ask, summaries, and drafting wait until you configure a provider — a local one via Everpaper Native (macOS 27), oMLX (Everpaper can install it and pick a model), LM Studio or Ollama, or a cloud one behind an explicit opt-in toggle that's off by default. Recording and search never need any of that.

Integrations and team features#

Verdict: Fireflies, decisively. This is its home turf.

Fireflies is a workflow hub: HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack, Notion, Asana, unlimited integrations on Pro and up, and API access on every tier including free, with a documented GraphQL API. Business adds team analytics, user groups, and multi-language mode. If your goal is "every sales call lands in the CRM with action items," Fireflies is built for exactly that, and a solo on-device app can't match it.

Everpaper has no CRM integrations and no team features. What it has instead: export to a full Obsidian vault as linked Markdown, graph export as GraphML and Mermaid, meeting exports in txt/markdown/srt/vtt/json, and everpaper-cli in the app bundle for scripting your own pipelines (--json on most commands, plus an llm group that takes a provider and key per call and stores nothing). If your destination is a personal knowledge base or your own tooling, that works. If your destination is Salesforce, it doesn't.

Beyond meetings#

Verdict: different products wearing similar jackets.

Fireflies is a meeting tool. Everpaper is a daybook: alongside Meetings, the Day Journal takes a full-screen screenshot every 2 minutes by default (or, in Activity only mode, keeps an app-and-window timeline with no screenshots), OCRs it on-device, and, with an AI provider, writes the day up as an entry you can ask about. Memory (also called Second Brain) builds a local knowledge graph and a self-model — People, Files, Sites, Projects, Topics, each tied to exact moments, plus one-line Beliefs with (tentative)/(likely) confidence markers — gated behind a readiness threshold of 5 days, 300 frames, 60 distinct things, and 3 recurring threads so it doesn't make things up on day one. ⇧⌘A asks your captured history and answers with sources you can click back to the exact frame; ⌥Space summons the Concordance search panel over any app. Screenshots are kept 30 days by default (7/30/90/Forever); on a new install the day's text and written entry expire with them unless you choose Forever or turn off Also delete their text & recall data. Meetings aren't affected. None of that exists in Fireflies.

Use cases#

Fireflies fits better when you're running a sales or CS team and meeting outcomes need to land in a CRM, when your org is mixed Windows/Mac/mobile, when you need 100+ language transcription, or when procurement requires SOC 2 reports and a BAA.

Everpaper fits better when you're one person (or a privacy-first team) on Apple Silicon Macs, your calls include people who never consented to a cloud recorder, or you want the transcript plus searchable memory of your whole workday.

Honest pros and cons#

Fireflies.ai — pros

• Genuinely generous free tier: unlimited transcription (rate-limited) and 400 mins of team storage for $0.
• Broad integration and API coverage across paid tiers.
• Broad platform coverage — web, desktop, iOS, Android, Chrome extension.
• Real enterprise compliance: SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA BAA, SSO/SCIM, private storage.

Fireflies.ai — cons

• The bot auto-joins by default and users report it's hard to fully disable.
• Named defendant in an ongoing BIPA voiceprint class action filed December 2025.
• Storage caps bite: 400 mins per team on free, 8,000 mins per seat on Pro.
• Billing and AI-credit confusion is a recurring complaint, with higher-than-expected bills.

Everpaper — pros

• No bot, no account, no upload — capture, transcription, search, and export all run locally.
• Live speaker-labeled transcript, plus a per-meeting option to hide your voice or any speaker from the transcript view (⌘4).
• More than meetings: Day Journal, Memory (whose answers are checked against their sources), and clickable frame sources.
• Transcription runs on your Mac, so there are no minute caps or transcription credits to track.

Everpaper — cons

• macOS 15+ on Apple Silicon only; no Intel, Windows, mobile, or web version.
• Private beta with limited spots.
• AI features (Ask, summaries, Reflection) wait for a provider you configure yourself.
• No CRM or team integrations, and Memory's readiness gate takes about a week of real use.

Pricing#

Fireflies (checked 2026-08-04, fireflies.ai/pricing), 12-month totals:

Gotchas: storage is the meter (per team on free, per seat on Pro), AI credits are capped at 20/20/30/50 by tier, and Enterprise is annual-only. A 10-person team on Pro paid annually is $1,200/year, every year.

Everpaper is in private beta with limited spots. No public price is available. To try it, apply for the private beta.

FAQ#

Is Fireflies.ai safe? Its security posture is real — SOC 2 Type II, encryption at rest and in transit, a stated no-training-on-your-data default, HIPAA BAAs on Enterprise. Recordings live in Fireflies' cloud, and the company is defending an ongoing BIPA class action (Cruz v. Fireflies.AI, filed December 2025) alleging it collected meeting participants' voiceprints without consent. Those are separate architectural and legal considerations.

Does Fireflies join meetings automatically? Yes. With calendar integration connected, the Fred bot auto-joins your meetings by default, and it appears in the participant list like any attendee. You can tune auto-join rules in settings, but multiple reviews note that fully disabling it is harder than it should be — which is how bots end up in calls nobody invited them to.

Does Everpaper work on Windows or mobile? No. It requires macOS 15 or later on Apple Silicon. There's no iOS, Windows, Linux, Android, or web version.

Can Everpaper push meeting notes to Salesforce or HubSpot? The supplied Everpaper docs do not list Salesforce or HubSpot connectors. They do document Markdown/GraphML exports, an Obsidian vault export, and everpaper-cli with --json output for user-built automation.

What happens to my Everpaper data if I stop using it? Nothing to cancel — there's no account and nothing on a server. Your journal, meetings, and graph are files on your Mac, and plain-Markdown export means no lock-in.

Is Everpaper free? Everpaper has no public price. It is in private beta; apply for the private beta to try it.

Final recommendation#

If you need meeting intelligence piped into a CRM across a mixed-device team, Fireflies.ai is the right tool and its free tier is a fair way to test it — just go in knowing a bot joins by default, storage is metered, and a biometric-privacy lawsuit is pending over how it handles voices.

If the reason you're reading this is that a bot showed up in a call it shouldn't have, or the BIPA filing made you re-read your notetaker's security page, Everpaper uses a different architecture: your meetings and workday are captured, transcribed, and searched on your Mac, with the whole meetings flow documented and no vendor-side recording archive. For more options beyond these two, see our Fireflies alternatives roundup.

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Everpaper is in private beta. Apply for the private beta; if you're selected, you'll hear back within 48 hours.