Is Fireflies.ai or Spinach AI cheaper?

Fireflies.ai starts at $0 (Free), then $10 per user per month billed annually (Pro; $18 monthly) (free plan available). Spinach AI starts at $0 (Starter), then $2.90 per meeting hour (Pro) (free plan available).

Fireflies.ai vs Spinach 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

Spinach AI compared with Fireflies.ai

Fireflies is the broader platform: comparable language coverage, a far larger integration catalogue, conversation intelligence, and per-seat pricing metered by storage and AI credits. Spinach is narrower but better at turning a standup into Jira tickets and offers the hourly meter Fireflies does not. Fireflies for a team that wants one notetaker wired into everything; Spinach for engineering ceremonies and consumption-based billing.

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.

Choose Spinach AI if

Engineering and project teams who want standups, retros, and planning meetings turned into tickets automatically, and small teams with a modest number of important meetings a week who would rather pay by the hour than per seat.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Fireflies.ai	Spinach AI
Category	Meeting Notes	Meeting Notes
Starting price	$0 (Free), then $10 per user per month billed annually (Pro; $18 monthly) (free plan available)	$0 (Starter), then $2.90 per meeting hour (Pro) (free plan available)
Pricing model	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.	Three self-serve structures in one table: a free company-wide plan, a pay-as-you-go tier billed at $2.90 per meeting hour with unlimited users and no seat minimum, and a per-seat Business tier with a 50-seat minimum. Enterprise is quoted.
Free plan	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.	Starter is free and company-wide: recordings, transcripts, basic AI summaries, 100-plus languages, Google or Microsoft Calendar and Slack integration, and seven days of recording retention.
Free trial	No fixed trial period published; the free-forever tier is the evaluation path	No fixed-length trial; the free Starter plan is company-wide and serves as the evaluation
Best for	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.	Engineering and project teams who want standups, retros, and planning meetings turned into tickets automatically, and small teams with a modest number of important meetings a week who would rather pay by the hour than per seat.
Setup time	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.	Ten minutes. Sign in with Google or Microsoft, connect the calendar, add Slack, and choose which meetings the bot attends. Configuring the project management and CRM connectors takes another half hour and is where the product's actual value is unlocked.
Learning curve	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.	Low for capture. The part that takes deliberate work is deciding which meetings should create tickets and where, because an over-eager integration will fill a Jira board with noise faster than a human ever could.
Platforms	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	Web, Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and Slack Huddles (beta), In-person capture
Compliance	SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA (Enterprise tier), Zero data retention for AI training	SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA (BAA available on Enterprise)
Founded	2016	2021
Headquarters	Miami, Florida, United States (previously Pleasanton, California), with a distributed team across 20 countries and 47 cities	Remote-first; the operating company is StayIn, Inc., incorporated in the United States
Ownership	Venture-backed	Venture-backed, Y Combinator alumnus

Strengths and limitations

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.

Spinach AI

Strengths

The pay-per-meeting-hour tier with unlimited users and no seat minimum is unique here and is the right shape for a small team that records selectively.
The free Starter plan is company-wide rather than single-user, so a whole team can evaluate or even operate on it if seven-day retention is enough.
Ticket creation into Jira, Monday, Asana, Linear, ClickUp, and Trello is deeper than any other notetaker on this list, reflecting the product's agile origins.
Slack Huddles support, even in beta, covers a conversation surface almost nobody else in this category captures.

Limitations

The $19 Business tier carries a 50-seat minimum, which reads as a small-business plan and is not one. This is the most misleading thing in the pricing table.
At $2.90 per meeting hour, Pro becomes expensive quickly; a single heavy calendar can cost more than three seats of a flat-rate competitor.
Bot-based capture only, with a vendor-named participant visible in every call and no local silent path for client-facing work.
Free-plan recordings are deleted after seven days, and there is no cheap middle tier between that and hourly billing.

Pricing compared

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.

Spinach AI

Three self-serve structures in one table: a free company-wide plan, a pay-as-you-go tier billed at $2.90 per meeting hour with unlimited users and no seat minimum, and a per-seat Business tier with a 50-seat minimum. Enterprise is quoted.

Starter$0
Pro$2.90
Business$19
EnterpriseCustom

The hourly meter is the whole story and it cuts both ways. Someone in 20 meetings a week averaging 45 minutes consumes about 65 meeting hours a month, which at $2.90 an hour is roughly $190 a month for that one person's calendar. That is more than three seats of Granola Business, or nine seats of Krisp Core. Pro is therefore a bad deal for a busy calendar and an excellent one for a team with, say, six recorded hours a week: about $75 a month covering unlimited users, with advanced summaries, MCP connectors, CRM and Jira integration, and a year of retention. Because the meter counts meeting hours rather than people, a ten-person agency that only records client calls can cover everybody for less than the cost of two seats elsewhere. The free Starter plan is also unusually good for a whole company to sit on if seven-day retention is acceptable. Just do the multiplication before you sign up, because $2.90 an hour compounds fast.

Editorial verdict on each

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

Spinach AI

Spinach is worth shortlisting for one of two reasons and dismissing for everything else. The first reason is agile ceremonies: nothing else on this list turns a standup into Jira, Linear, or Asana tickets as directly, and if your meetings are engineering rituals that should produce work items, that is a real advantage. The second is the pricing shape: a free company-wide plan and a $2.90 per meeting hour tier with unlimited users lets a small firm cover everybody for the price of a couple of seats elsewhere, provided you record selectively. Do the multiplication first, though, because a full calendar costs about $190 a month on that meter, and the $19 Business plan that looks like the sensible answer carries a 50-seat minimum that puts it out of reach. Add a visible bot in every call, Enterprise-gated API and SSO, and a company that has not announced funding since 2022, and Spinach becomes a good fit for a narrow set of teams rather than a general recommendation.

Read the full Spinach AI profile

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