What it does well

Fireflies.ai is one of the ai meeting assistant that joins, transcribes, and analyzes every call. In 2026, it's a serious option for anyone in this category. We tested it for two weeks on real work — here's the honest take on what's great, what's broken, and whether it's worth your money.

Who it's for: Anyone who spends 5+ hours a week in meetings and dreads writing notes afterward.

Key features

Notetaker Auto-joins every meeting

Add 'fred@fireflies.ai' to a calendar invite and it silently joins every Zoom/Meet/Teams/Webex call. No bot setup per call.

AskFred Chat with your meetings

Ask 'what was the budget approval timeline?' and get a citation-linked answer from across all your recorded meetings. Similar to Otter Chat.

Soundbites Shareable clips

Highlight a 30-second moment, generate a shareable link, and embed it in Slack or email. Killer for sharing customer quotes internally.

Analytics Talk time & sentiment

Tracks who talked how much in meetings, sentiment trends, and topic frequency. Useful for sales coaching and 1:1s.

The honest take

✓ What works

Cheaper than Otter ($10 vs $16/mo) with comparable transcription quality
Works on 8+ meeting platforms — including Webex and GoToMeeting
AskFred is excellent for sales teams reviewing customer calls
CRM integrations are best-in-class (Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho)
Apps for iOS, Android, Chrome, Edge — record anywhere

✗ What doesn't

Speaker labeling is less accurate than Otter in noisy calls
UI is busier — more features means more clutter
Free tier is stingy (3 recordings, 800 min storage)
The bot joining calls requires a brief onboarding for clients/team

Verdict

Fireflies is the better choice for sales teams and anyone running on a budget. The CRM integrations and AskFred are killer features for revenue teams. Otter still wins on pure transcription quality and the brand recognition, but for most use cases Fireflies is 80% of the value at 60% of the price.

💡 Transparency: This review contains affiliate links. If you sign up through our link, we may earn a commission at no cost to you. We only recommend tools we use ourselves. Full disclosure.