Fireflies.ai vs tl;dv
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
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The short answer
Both sides assessedFireflies.ai compared with tl;dv
Both are bot-based platforms with sales ambitions, but they diverge on breadth versus coaching: Fireflies transcribes 100-plus languages, captures dialer calls and uploaded files, and starts at $10 a seat annually while metering storage minutes and AI credits; tl;dv covers 30-plus languages with no meters and adds playbook adherence scoring, coaching clips, and scheduled multi-meeting reports, billed in euros. Take Fireflies for capture and language breadth; take tl;dv for a European sales team that wants coaching depth and predictable per-seat pricing.
tl;dv compared with Fireflies.ai
Fireflies covers far more languages (100-plus against 30-plus), captures from dialers and uploaded files, and starts at $10 a seat annually, but meters storage minutes and AI credits and spreads itself across voice agents and email assistants. tl;dv is narrower and more opinionated, with better sales coaching and no usage meters. Pick Fireflies for capture breadth and language coverage; pick tl;dv for coaching depth and predictable per-seat pricing.
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 tl;dv if
European sales teams of roughly 3 to 50 people that want call recording, CRM logging, and genuine coaching analytics from a euro-billing vendor, plus product and marketing teams who want recurring reports mined from the whole call archive rather than one meeting at a time.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Fireflies.ai | tl;dv |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Meeting Notes | Meeting Notes |
| Starting price | $0 (Free), then $10 per user per month billed annually (Pro; $18 monthly) | EUR 0 (Free), then EUR 216 per seat per year for Pro (EUR 18 per month equivalent; EUR 29 billed monthly) |
| 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. | Freemium per-seat subscription, quoted in euros on the vendor's pricing page, with substantial annual discounts and a promoted 40 percent off annual plans. |
| Free plan | Free forever with unlimited transcription and limited 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 forever with unlimited video recording and transcription for Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, email and calendar integrations, and the mobile app, with AI usage capped at 10 meetings with AI notes and 10 Ask AI queries. |
| Free trial | No fixed trial period published; the free-forever tier is the evaluation path | Paid-plan trials are offered (length not published); the free plan needs no credit card |
| 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. | European sales teams of roughly 3 to 50 people that want call recording, CRM logging, and genuine coaching analytics from a euro-billing vendor, plus product and marketing teams who want recurring reports mined from the whole call archive rather than one meeting at a time. |
| 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. | Under fifteen minutes to start recording: sign up, connect a calendar, authorize the meeting platforms, and confirm which meetings to capture. Configuring summary templates, CRM field mapping, and playbook criteria takes a further half day if you want the coaching layer to be meaningful. |
| 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 recording and reviewing, moderate for the coaching and reporting layer. Playbook adherence only works if someone first writes down what the playbook is, which is a sales-management task rather than a software one. |
| 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 app, Browser extension, iOS and Android apps, Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA (Enterprise tier), Zero data retention for AI training | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, EU AI Act compliant, No model training on customer calls |
| Founded | 2016 | 2020 |
| Headquarters | Miami, Florida, United States (previously Pleasanton, California), with a distributed team across 20 countries and 47 cities | Aachen, Germany (tldx Solutions GmbH; fully remote team) |
| Ownership | Venture-backed | Venture-backed |
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 AI summaries are available on the free tier, so the assistant is not held hostage to an upgrade, though summaries are limited until you pay.
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.
- The product is built around the meeting bot; bot-free recording exists through the Chrome extension and desktop app, but the bot remains the default workflow.
- 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.
tl;dv
Strengths
- Genuine sales coaching depth (playbook adherence, AI-selected clips, per-rep performance metrics) that the note-quality-focused competitors in this category do not attempt.
- Multi-meeting reporting is a real product rather than a search box: recurring custom AI reports, feature request tracking, and quote extraction across the whole archive.
- Strong multilingual handling for European teams, with 30-plus transcription languages plus translation of transcripts and summaries between them.
- Video and audio are retained as first-class artifacts, which makes tl;dv usable for onboarding and demo review in a way transcript-only tools cannot be.
Limitations
- Free-plan limits are documented inconsistently: the vendor's own feature pages imply unlimited recordings, transcriptions, and summaries while third-party reviews report a monthly AI summary cap, and that ambiguity is a poor look for a tool asking for calendar access.
- Monthly pricing is the highest in this comparison set at EUR 29 and EUR 39 per seat, so the product only reads as good value if you commit for a year.
- Bot-based recording only, with no silent local-capture mode, which rules it out for teams whose clients react badly to a visible notetaker.
- 30-plus languages is respectable but well behind Fireflies and Circleback, both of which advertise more than 100.
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.
tl;dv
Freemium per-seat subscription, quoted in euros on the vendor's pricing page, with substantial annual discounts and a promoted 40 percent off annual plans.
- FreeEUR 0
- ProEUR 29
- BusinessEUR 39
- EnterpriseCustom
On annual billing tl;dv is fairly priced: about EUR 18 a seat for custom AI prompts and CRM logging, and about EUR 29 a seat for coaching analytics and SSO, which is broadly in line with Fathom Business and cheaper than most dedicated revenue intelligence tools. On monthly billing it is the most expensive option in this set, which is a deliberate squeeze toward annual commitment and worth naming as such. The clearest value case is a European sales team that wants coaching plus euro billing in one purchase; the weakest is a solo user or a small non-sales team, who will find Granola or Fathom cheaper and simpler for the same core notes.
Editorial verdict on each
Fireflies.ai
Category LeaderFireflies 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 profiletl;dv
tl;dv is the best answer in this category for a European sales team that wants recorded calls, CRM logging, and real coaching analytics without buying a revenue intelligence platform. Playbook adherence scoring and the multi-meeting reporting layer are meaningfully more than any pure notetaker offers, the euro billing and German entity remove procurement friction for EU buyers, and video retention makes it usable for rep onboarding. Two things hold it back: monthly pricing is the highest in this set, so the value case depends on an annual commitment, and the free-tier limits are documented inconsistently enough that you have to test them yourself. If you are not running a sales team, Granola and Fathom will give you better notes for less money.
Read the full tl;dv profileFireflies.ai profile last reviewed 2026-09-27; tl;dv last reviewed 2026-09-27. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
The best in AI Meeting Note Takers
23 trackedAI meeting note takers join calls to record, transcribe, and summarize them, turning conversations into searchable notes, action items, and CRM updates without anyone typing.
The broadest platform in meeting AI: transcription, search, AI apps, and integrations that reach every corner of the small-business stack.
A free plan with unlimited recording and transcription that forced every paid notetaker in the category to justify its price.
A ten-person team out-writing the funded competition on note quality, then automating what the notes say.
Abandoned the meeting bot entirely for a local notepad that finishes what you type, a mechanism the rest of the category is now copying.
A five minute Chrome extension install with no bot to whitelist, and notes open automatically in a post-call tab the moment you hang up.
Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between Fireflies.ai and tl;dv?
Both are bot-based platforms with sales ambitions, but they diverge on breadth versus coaching: Fireflies transcribes 100-plus languages, captures dialer calls and uploaded files, and starts at $10 a seat annually while metering storage minutes and AI credits; tl;dv covers 30-plus languages with no meters and adds playbook adherence scoring, coaching clips, and scheduled multi-meeting reports, billed in euros. Take Fireflies for capture and language breadth; take tl;dv for a European sales team that wants coaching depth and predictable per-seat pricing.
Is Fireflies.ai or tl;dv cheaper?
Fireflies.ai starts at $0 (Free), then $10 per user per month billed annually (Pro; $18 monthly). tl;dv starts at EUR 0 (Free), then EUR 216 per seat per year for Pro (EUR 18 per month equivalent; EUR 29 billed monthly). The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. Fireflies.ai 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. tl;dv pricing model: Freemium per-seat subscription, quoted in euros on the vendor's pricing page, with substantial annual discounts and a promoted 40 percent off annual plans.
Does Fireflies.ai or tl;dv have a free plan?
Fireflies.ai has a free plan. Free forever with unlimited transcription and limited 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. Trial terms: No fixed trial period published; the free-forever tier is the evaluation path. tl;dv has a free plan. Free forever with unlimited video recording and transcription for Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, email and calendar integrations, and the mobile app, with AI usage capped at 10 meetings with AI notes and 10 Ask AI queries. Trial terms: Paid-plan trials are offered (length not published); the free plan needs no credit card.
Who should choose Fireflies.ai?
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.
Who should choose tl;dv?
European sales teams of roughly 3 to 50 people that want call recording, CRM logging, and genuine coaching analytics from a euro-billing vendor, plus product and marketing teams who want recurring reports mined from the whole call archive rather than one meeting at a time.
What are the best alternatives to Fireflies.ai and tl;dv?
SaaSTracker profiles 23 products in AI Meeting Note Takers. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Fathom (Best Value), Circleback (Momentum), Granola (Innovation). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
