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Fathom vs Fireflies: Which AI Notetaker Wins in 2026?

Published 2 July 2026 · Updated 2 July 2026

Fathom has the better free plan for solo users; Fireflies is the better team tool. Fathom gives you unlimited recording, transcription and storage for free, then gates the AI — advanced summaries on only your first five calls a month. Fireflies flips it: unlimited transcription and AI summaries free, but capped storage, and bot-free capture, video and downloads all sit behind paid plans. Fireflies runs everywhere — Windows, Mac, iOS, Android — and plugs into almost anything; Fathom is faster and more polished but still can’t record in-person meetings. Here’s the full referee’s report: current pricing in USD and AUD, the free-plan traps, the bot question, and a verdict by persona.

Fathom vs Fireflies at a Glance

Both tools transcribe your meetings and write AI summaries with action items. The decision almost never comes down to transcript quality — it comes down to these:

Pricing Compared (Checked July 2026)

These are the prices published on fathom.ai/pricing and fireflies.ai/pricing as of 2 July 2026. Both vendors price in USD only; the AUD figures are approximate conversions.

On annual billing, Fireflies Pro undercuts Fathom Premium by a wide margin — US$10 versus US$16 a month. At the top end the picture reverses: Fathom’s Business plan at US$25–34 per user sits at the premium end of the whole notetaker category, while Fireflies’ Enterprise tier is US$39 but only sold annually. Watch the monthly-versus-annual gap on both — Fireflies Pro nearly doubles from US$10 to US$18 if you pay month-to-month.

The Free Plans: Two Different Traps

Fathom free: unlimited recording, five real summaries

Fathom’s free plan is genuinely uncapped on volume — unlimited recordings, transcription in 38 languages, unlimited storage. The catch sits exactly where the value lives: advanced AI summaries apply only to your first five calls each month; after that you get the general template. Free users also miss AI action items, AI follow-up emails, custom summaries and Ask Fathom. Third-party coverage consistently flags the five-summary cap as the free plan’s real constraint — for anyone taking more than a meeting or two a week, it works more like a funnel than a product.

Fireflies free: unlimited summaries, capped storage

Fireflies’ headline is the more generous one: unlimited transcription and unlimited AI summaries on the free plan. The catches are structural instead. Storage is capped — the pricing page listed 400 minutes when we checked, though the per-team wording is ambiguous, so treat the exact figure loosely. AI actions (the AskFred assistant and AI apps) are gated behind 20 AI credits, and Fireflies doesn’t publish what a single credit buys. There’s no video recording, you can’t download your recordings, and the bot-free desktop mode — the thing many people switch for — isn’t on the free plan at all.

The Bot Question: Who Shows Up in Your Meeting?

This is where the two products genuinely diverge, and it matters more than any feature list. A visible notetaker bot in the participant list changes how people talk — and in plenty of rooms it’s simply not welcome.

Fireflies is bot-first. Its Notetaker joins Zoom, Google Meet and Teams calls as a participant by default, and the most common complaint in Fireflies reviews is the uninvited bot: if any attendee has Fireflies connected, the bot can join and record everyone — reporting has described it disrupting 12-step recovery meetings, and getting it out reliably takes calendar or admin-level changes, not just an app setting. Fireflies did ship a real fix in November 2025: a desktop app for Mac and Windows that captures system audio locally — no bot, and it works for phone calls, WhatsApp, FaceTime, Discord and in-person conversations. But that mode is Pro and above only.

Fathom used to be bot-only — historically its most common gripe — until Fathom 3.0 in April 2026 made capture your choice per meeting: a bot with full video, bot-free audio plus transcript, or bot-free transcript only. The bot-free modes currently run on the Mac desktop app, and Fathom now records Slack Huddles without a bot too.

There’s a legal dimension as well. Fireflies is facing an Illinois BIPA class action (Cruz v. Fireflies.AI Corp., filed December 2025) alleging it collected biometric voiceprints without written consent. We found no comparable case against Fathom. Either way, recording laws still apply to you as the user — in Australia the rules differ by state, so tell people they’re being recorded regardless of which tool you run. If the bot itself is your dealbreaker, we’ve rounded up the bot-free field in Fireflies alternatives.

Platforms, Mobile and In-Person Capture

Fathomruns as a desktop app (the redesigned app is live on Mac), a web portal and a Chrome extension for Google Meet. Windows users can use the bot and web today, but the new full desktop experience is still “coming soon” on PC. There is no mobile app yet — iOS was listed as “almost here” on Fathom’s what’s-new page when we checked (2 July 2026), so that may have changed by the time you read this. Until it ships, Fathom cannot capture in-person meetings at all.

Fireflies covers the board: web app, Chrome extension, iOS and Android apps, and the Mac/Windows desktop app. In-person conversations work through the mobile apps, or bot-free through the desktop app on paid plans. If in-person capture is what drives the decision, Fireflies wins this match-up by default — we compare the wider in-person field in AI notes for in-person meetings.

Features Beyond the Transcript

Fathom’s pitch is speed and polish: AI summaries land about 30 seconds after the call ends, with 15+ summary templates on Premium, AI action items, the Ask Fathom assistant (account-wide search on team plans), a live in-call summary and scratchpad in the new desktop app, clips and playlists, HubSpot/Salesforce CRM sync, Zapier/Make, and ChatGPT and Claude MCP integrations. Business adds coaching metrics, scorecards and Deal View for sales teams.

Fireflies’ pitch is coverage: transcription in 100+ languages (Fathom: 38), the AskFred assistant, Live Assist real-time coaching on desktop, AI action items with a built-in task manager, and conversation intelligence with talk-time analytics on Business. Its integration catalogue is one of the largest in the category — CRMs, Slack, Notion, Zapier — with API access available even on the free plan.

Fathom: pros and cons

Fireflies: pros and cons

Verdict by Persona: Which Should You Pick?

• Solo consultant or founder on a Mac: Fathom. The unlimited free recording plus fast summaries is the best individual deal here — pay US$16/mo (~A$24) annual only when the five-summary cap starts to bite.
• Team on Windows and Android:Fireflies. Fathom simply isn’t all there on PC or mobile yet.
• Multilingual teams:Fireflies — 100+ languages versus Fathom’s 38.
• Field work and in-person meetings: Fireflies, via its mobile apps — or a browser tool (more below). Fathom is out until its iOS app ships.
• Revenue teams: genuinely close. Fathom Business brings coaching metrics and Deal View; Fireflies Business brings conversation intelligence and talk-time analytics. Pick whichever fits your CRM stack — both sync HubSpot and Salesforce.
• Bot-averse or privacy-cautious: Fathom, for the per-meeting capture choice and the quieter legal record — or skip meeting bots entirely.
• Already invested?Stay put. If your Fireflies workspace is wired into your CRM and task manager, or your team already lives in Fathom summaries, switching costs outweigh the marginal wins. Neither product is bad — they’re just shaped differently.

The Live-Research Alternative: What Neither Tool Does

Here’s the honest framing: Fathom and Fireflies are both post-call tools. Their value arrives after the meeting ends, as a summary document with action items. SpeekSearch is a live tool. You hit record in the browser during a podcast, interview or meeting; it transcribes in real time from your mic — no bot ever joins anything, and it works for in-person conversations too — and surfaces research cards on the people, places, products and topics as they come up. Each card lets you pin it, run an Ask AI deep-dive, or jump to Google or YouTube. It’s built for the person running the conversation — podcast hosts, journalists and researchers doing interview transcription — not for minute-taking across a sales org.

To be equally straight about the limits: SpeekSearch doesn’t join Zoom, Teams or Meet, doesn’t produce post-call summary documents (you keep the full transcript and your pinned cards), and has no CRM or task integrations. If a summary in your inbox after every meeting is the job, Fathom or Fireflies do that job better. Pricing is simple and in actual Australian dollars: a free 15-minute lifetime trial with no card, then Starter at A$12/month for 2 hours or Pro at A$25/month for 8 hours of live AI research, with A$5 one-hour top-ups — and it runs in the browser, including Safari on iPhone.

Weighing other pairs? See Fireflies vs Otter and Granola vs Otter, or the full Otter.ai alternatives and Granola alternatives round-ups.

FAQ

Pricing and plan limits were checked directly on fathom.ai and fireflies.ai on 2 July 2026; both vendors publish USD only, and the AUD figures are approximate conversions. Product details come from vendor documentation, changelogs and the reporting linked above, and may have changed since. Full disclosure: we build SpeekSearch, so read the final section as the pitch it is — the Fathom and Fireflies sections referee it straight, and this page gets updated when either vendor moves.