Transcripted vs Fireflies.ai

What Fireflies actually costs

Fireflies.ai free tier limits you to 800 minutes of storage and requires their bot on every call. Pro is $10/month per seat, Business is $19/month, and Enterprise is $39/month. For a solo user that's $120–$468/year. For a team of five, you're looking at $600–$2,340/year just for meeting transcription.

Transcripted is $0. Not freemium with an asterisk. Actually $0, MIT licensed, no seat limits, no storage limits, no expiry.

The bot visibility problem

Fireflies joins your calls as "Fireflies.ai Notetaker." In enterprise environments, many IT and legal departments restrict third-party bots on calls. In client meetings, a bot joining can signal you don't trust your memory — or worse, make the other party uncomfortable.

More critically: you're sending audio from potentially sensitive conversations to a third-party cloud service that stores it indefinitely. Fireflies explicitly states in their terms that they store recordings and transcripts on their servers.

Local is faster too

Cloud transcription requires uploading audio, waiting for server processing, then downloading results. Transcripted runs the entire pipeline on your Mac's Neural Engine. For a 60-minute meeting on M5, transcription takes about 20 seconds after the recording ends. No upload queues, no rate limits, no waiting.

Where Fireflies wins

Fireflies has a richer feature set for teams: CRM integrations (Salesforce, HubSpot), Slack notifications, searchable meeting library with their own search UI, and AI-generated meeting summaries. If you need CRM integration or team-wide meeting search, Fireflies offers that at scale.

For individual users and privacy-conscious teams who primarily need accurate transcription and speaker identification, Transcripted covers the core use case at zero cost.