I started testing Fireflies because my team's meeting notes were a mess. We'd finish a call, someone would paste half-remembered bullets into Slack, and the next week nobody could agree on what we'd actually decided. I wanted a tool that could sit in on calls and give me a record I could search later. So I ran Fireflies on real meetings for a couple of weeks — status updates, client calls, one-ones.
What Fireflies actually captured
The transcript on a two-person Google Meet call was genuinely clean. Speaker labels held up, timestamps aligned, and when I checked a sentence from 20 minutes into the recording, it matched what I remembered. On a busier call with overlapping voices, though, it swapped two speakers in the middle of a paragraph — words right, attribution wrong. Fine for skimming, but not something you quote without checking.
The AI summary is structured and readable, but it over-generates. In a weekly status meeting it turned "I'll check the dashboard" into a formal action item, even though it was a passing remark about someone else's work. I ended up editing every summary before forwarding it. That's a small habit, but it rules out treating the tool as set-and-forget.
The searchable archive is the part that surprised me most. Two weeks in, I asked the assistant (AskFred) to find a requirement a client had mentioned on an earlier call, and it surfaced the exact passage within seconds. That's the feature that made me see Fireflies less as a note-taker and more as a meeting database.
Free tier, and where the limits bite
The free plan is usable enough for real calls, but the monthly transcription limit runs out fast. A week with a couple of hour-long meetings burned through mine, and I had to either wait or upgrade. If you're looking for a free AI meeting transcription and summary tool in 2026, that cap is the first thing to check.
Compared with something like meetly, which takes a lighter approach to AI meeting summaries, Fireflies is the heavier option. meetly gives you a concise recap; Fireflies keeps every word and makes it searchable. That depth is the main draw, but it also means more to sort through — the summaries are wordier than the marketing implies.
Where I'd hesitate
I trust the transcript more than the summary. After a few calls I stopped reading the AI summary first and started skimming the transcript, because the model has no real sense of what your team considers important. It picks out real decisions, but it also picks up noise. The action items need a human pass before they go anywhere.
Platform coverage matters too. The bot joined Google Meet and Zoom without trouble, but on a Webex call it had to be invited manually and showed up a few minutes late, missing the opening. I learned to double-check that it's actually in the meeting before I start talking.
Who pays for Fireflies — and who doesn't
If your meetings are where decisions actually happen and you need to revisit them, the paid tier makes sense — the search alone saved me from at least one awkward follow-up. But if you just want a clean recap of each call, a free AI meeting summary app is probably enough, and you'd be paying for features you don't use.
After the test period, I'm keeping Fireflies installed, with the caveat that it changes how follow-ups get done rather than eliminating them. You still grant it access to every meeting, you still correct its action items, and sometimes you still have to tell it who was talking. What it removes — the effort of remembering and searching — is worth it to me. Just don't treat the summaries as the final word.
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