I started testing Fireflies for a boring reason: I kept leaving calls with a head full of decisions and no written record of who promised what. My team switches between Google Meet and Zoom, and I wanted a notetaker that would join meetings on its own, capture everything, and hand me the follow-ups without me asking. Fireflies has been around long enough that I expected it to feel mature. Mostly it does. But there are a few things worth knowing before you put it on your calendar.
What Fireflies actually did in my meetings
The setup is simple: connect your calendar, and a notetaker bot named Fred joins when you invite it. On most calls it appeared in Google Meet within a few seconds and started transcribing live. That part felt genuinely smooth. After a 45-minute product discussion, the summary separated action items from decisions cleanly, and it caught small but important lines like "Lena will share the spec by Friday." That alone saved me from digging through the chat log the next day.
Search is the other standout. I pulled up a pricing conversation from two weeks earlier, and the exact line appeared instantly. If you sit through a lot of customer calls or sales reviews, that kind of recall is worth something by itself.
Where it gets in its own way
Transcription quality depends heavily on how people talk. On one call with strong accents and some cross-talk, the transcript got messy and the summary misattributed a couple of names. It also joined late once and missed the first two minutes, which mattered because that's where the context was.
The free tier is where I got most annoyed. Fireflies gives you a limited number of transcription minutes, and they evaporate fast if you take five or six calls a week. If you searched for an ai meeting summary app free option and landed here, know that Fireflies' free tier is more of a trial than a permanent arrangement. If you came looking for free ai meeting transcription and summary 2026, Fireflies is worth evaluating, just not as a permanent free setup. Once I hit my limit, I was either waiting for the cycle to reset or staring at upgrade prompts.
Where Fireflies earns its price
Fireflies makes the most sense for teams that need a searchable archive of conversations. Sales teams, account managers, anyone who regularly has to recall what was said on a client call. The CRM integrations are clearly built for that crowd.
It's probably overkill if you just want clean summaries and don't want another bot entering your meetings. I've also been testing meetly for the same job, and a meetly ai meeting summary reads more like a brief — shorter, more digestible, easier to scan. The tradeoff is that Fireflies has deeper integrations and years of polish behind its search, while meetly feels lighter but still unproven to me. I need a few more calls with it before I'd fully trust it.
There's also a practical catch with the bot approach: on external or guest-hosted meetings, the host can block or remove the bot. That happened to me once on a client call — exactly the conversation where I needed good notes. Not really Fireflies' fault, but the limitation is real.
After a few weeks of mixed use, here's where I land. If you live in meetings and want everything recorded, transcribed, and searchable, Fireflies is worth the money. If you want minimal, readable summaries without a bot in every room, try meetly first. Both have free tiers, but go in knowing the credits don't stretch as far as the marketing suggests.
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