Is Fellow or Fireflies.ai cheaper?

Fellow starts at $0 (Free), then $7 per user per month billed annually (Team) (free plan available). Fireflies.ai starts at $0 (Free), then $10 per user per month billed annually (Pro; $18 monthly) (free plan available).

Fellow vs Fireflies.ai

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Editorial assessment

Fellow compared with Fireflies.ai

Fireflies is the larger platform: bots, 100-plus languages, conversation intelligence, voice agents, and 200-plus integrations, metered by storage minutes and AI credits. Fellow counters with botless capture, meeting agendas and workflow, and a far more serious regulated-industry story including redaction, information barriers, and audit export. Take Fireflies for breadth and analytics; take Fellow if compliance or meeting management is the actual requirement.

Choose Fellow if

Managers and teams that want meeting workflow rather than just transcription, and regulated organizations in finance, legal, or healthcare that need retention controls, redaction, information barriers, and auditable archiving alongside AI notes.

Choose Fireflies.ai if

Multilingual teams and startups that want one vendor covering transcription, conversation intelligence, task routing, and automation across sales, recruiting, and support, and who are willing to model minute and credit consumption rather than buying on the headline price.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Fellow	Fireflies.ai
Category	Meeting Notes	Meeting Notes
Starting price	$0 (Free), then $7 per user per month billed annually (Team) (free plan available)	$0 (Free), then $10 per user per month billed annually (Pro; $18 monthly) (free plan available)
Pricing model	Freemium per-seat subscription metered by AI note and AI recording counts, with unlimited AI from the Business tier and a 10-user minimum on Enterprise.	Per-seat subscription across four tiers, metered on two axes: storage minutes and monthly AI credits. Annual billing is roughly 35 to 45 percent cheaper than monthly.
Free plan	5 AI notes and 5 AI recordings in total, not per month, plus audio and video uploads, summaries, transcription, action items, AskFellow, and Google Meet, Zoom, Teams, and Slack integrations.	Free forever with unlimited transcription and unlimited AI summaries, 400 minutes of storage per team, 20 AI credits, Zoom, Meet, and Teams support, 100-plus language transcription, real-time notes, search, AskFred, and audio or video upload.
Free trial	No fixed-length trial is published; the free plan is the evaluation path but is capped at lifetime rather than monthly usage	No fixed trial period published; the free-forever tier is the evaluation path
Best for	Managers and teams that want meeting workflow rather than just transcription, and regulated organizations in finance, legal, or healthcare that need retention controls, redaction, information barriers, and auditable archiving alongside AI notes.	Multilingual teams and startups that want one vendor covering transcription, conversation intelligence, task routing, and automation across sales, recruiting, and support, and who are willing to model minute and credit consumption rather than buying on the headline price.
Setup time	Fifteen to thirty minutes for an individual: connect a calendar, install the desktop app if you want botless capture, and pick your default capture mode. A team rollout takes longer because agendas and one-on-one templates deserve configuration, and an Enterprise deployment with SSO, provisioning, retention policy, and redaction rules is a multi-week project with the vendor.	Fifteen minutes for basic capture: connect a calendar, confirm which meetings the bot should join, and install the Chrome extension if you use Google Meet. Configuring CRM field mapping, AI Skills, and topic trackers adds a few hours.
Learning curve	Moderate, and higher than pure notetakers, because Fellow is two products stacked: a meeting workflow tool and an AI assistant. Teams that adopt only the AI half get a fine notetaker and wonder why they are paying for the rest.	Moderate, and higher than any other product in this set purely because of surface area. The transcription and summary layer is immediately obvious; AI Skills, conversation intelligence, the rules engine, and voice agents each need their own learning session.
Platforms	macOS desktop app, Windows desktop app, iOS, Android, Web, Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex	Web app, Desktop application, iOS and Android apps, Chrome extension for Google Meet, Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, Aircall and RingCentral dialers, MCP server
Compliance	SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA, Global Relay archiving for SEC and FINRA record-keeping	SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA (Enterprise tier), Zero data retention for AI training
Founded	2017	2016
Headquarters	Ottawa, Ontario, Canada	Miami, Florida, United States (previously Pleasanton, California), with a distributed team across 20 countries and 47 cities
Ownership	Venture-backed	Venture-backed

Strengths and limitations

Fellow

Strengths

The only product in this batch that offers both bot-based and botless capture with the choice made per meeting, which resolves the client-call awkwardness without giving up proxy attendance.
A genuine meeting workflow layer with collaborative agendas, one-on-one templates, and persistent action items, built over eight years rather than bolted on last quarter.
Regulated-industry controls that nothing else here comes close to: zero-day retention, transcript redaction of MNPI and account numbers, information barriers, and Global Relay archiving.
Conference-room speaker diarization, which is the scenario where system-audio-only competitors produce an unusable single-speaker transcript.

Limitations

The free plan's 5 AI notes and 5 AI recordings are lifetime allowances, which is close to misleading and makes free evaluation genuinely difficult.
The $7 Team tier's 10 AI notes and 10 AI recordings per user per month is a light allowance that most buyers will exhaust within two weeks.
No published EU or regional data residency, which is a hard stop for European buyers regardless of how good the compliance tooling is.
The regulated-industry features that most distinguish Fellow all sit at Enterprise with a 10-user minimum, excluding the small advisory firms that need them.

Fireflies.ai

Strengths

The broadest capture coverage in the category: bots for the major platforms, email invitation, Chrome extension, mobile and desktop apps, dialer integrations, and file upload.
More than 100 transcription languages with auto-detection, plus a multi-language mode for calls that switch mid-conversation, which no competitor here matches.
Pro at $10 per seat annually is remarkable capability per dollar, including video recording, AI Skills, voice agents, and unlimited integrations.
AskFred and unlimited AI summaries are available on the free tier, so the assistant is not held hostage to an upgrade.

Limitations

Dual metering on storage minutes and AI credits makes real cost hard to forecast, and the free tier's 400-minute pool is shared across the entire team rather than per user.
Bot-based capture only; there is no silent local-capture mode, so client-facing teams who object to a visible participant have no option here.
Product sprawl is real: voice agents, an email assistant, a task manager, 200-plus AI Skills, and conversation intelligence in one subscription means an unavoidable navigation cost and inconsistent polish across surfaces.
Customer-count claims are inconsistent across the vendor's own pages, more than 1 million companies on the homepage against more than 500,000 on the about page, which is not a great signal for a data-driven buyer.

Pricing compared

Fellow

Freemium per-seat subscription metered by AI note and AI recording counts, with unlimited AI from the Business tier and a 10-user minimum on Enterprise.

Free$0
Team$7
Business$15
Enterprise$25

Fellow is priced sensibly if you buy the right tier and badly if you buy the cheap one. Model 20 meetings a week: roughly 80 a month, which blows past Team's 10-note ceiling on day three. That person needs Business at $15 per user per month annually, $180 a year per seat, with unlimited notes and recordings, org-wide templates, and real CRM integration. Against Granola Business at $14 and Tactiq Team at $16.67 that is competitively priced, and Fellow gives you an entire meeting workflow layer, both capture modes, mobile in-person recording, conference-room diarization, and 90-plus languages that neither competitor matches. Where the value gets genuinely strong is Enterprise at $25: zero-day retention, redaction, information barriers, and exam-ready audit export are worth several times that to a regulated firm, and the realistic alternative is not another notetaker but a bespoke compliance project. Just do not mistake the $7 tier for the product.

Fireflies.ai

Per-seat subscription across four tiers, metered on two axes: storage minutes and monthly AI credits. Annual billing is roughly 35 to 45 percent cheaper than monthly.

Free$0
Pro$18
Business$29
Enterprise$39

On sticker price Fireflies is the cheapest capable product here: $10 per seat annually for video recording, an email assistant, voice agents, AI Skills, a task manager, and unlimited integrations undercuts everything except Granola's Business tier, and it does considerably more. The complication is the metering. Storage minutes and AI credits are two forecasting problems most buyers will not do properly, the 400-minute free pool is team-wide rather than per seat, and unlimited storage costs $19 a seat. Model your actual meeting hours before comparing this to a flat-fee rival; if your usage is modest and multilingual, Fireflies is outstanding value, and if it is heavy, price Business rather than Pro.

Editorial verdict on each

Fellow

Fellow is the most complete product in this batch and the least fashionable, which is roughly the right description of a nine-year-old company selling to compliance officers. If your problem is meetings rather than transcripts, the agenda, one-on-one, and action item layer is worth more than any summarization improvement, and the per-meeting choice between bot and botless capture solves a problem the rest of the category makes you pick a side on. If you are a broker-dealer, an RIA, a law firm, or a healthcare provider, the zero-day retention, redaction, information barriers, and exam-ready audit export are genuinely unmatched here and make the $25 Enterprise tier a bargain against the alternative of doing it yourself. Two warnings. The free plan is a lifetime-capped trial and should not influence your evaluation, and the $7 Team tier's 10-note ceiling means the real price for a busy person is $15. And if you need EU data residency, Fellow cannot help you no matter how good its compliance tooling is.

Read the full Fellow profile

Fireflies.ai

Category Leader

Fireflies is the most capable product in this category and the hardest to price. Nothing else here captures from as many sources, transcribes as many languages, or ships as much adjacent machinery, and Pro at $10 a seat annually is genuinely startling value if your usage fits inside 8,000 minutes. But the twin meters on storage and AI credits, the team-wide 400-minute free pool, and the concentration of the analytics story on Business mean the headline price is not the price. Buy it for multilingual coverage, capture breadth, and one-vendor consolidation across sales, recruiting, and support, and do the usage arithmetic before you sign. Teams who want a small, elegant, unmetered tool will be happier with Granola, and teams who object to bots in customer calls should not shortlist Fireflies at all.

Read the full Fireflies.ai profile

Fellow profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Fireflies.ai last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.