Fireflies Alternatives in 2026: No Bot, No Credit Meter, or No New App

Fireflies.ai is a meeting assistant that sends a notetaker, named Fred, into your Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams calls, then writes the transcript, a summary and action items. Most people searching for a replacement aren't unhappy with the notes. They're unhappy with one specific thing: a bot showing up in calls, an AI credit balance that runs down, a free plan that fills up, or the feeling that the notes stop at a summary. Each of those leads to a different tool, so this page starts from the reason.

Where Fireflies is hard to beat

Fireflies covers more ground than most note takers. Its homepage lists transcription and summaries in 100+ languages, a mobile app and a desktop app, dialer recording through Aircall and RingCentral, file uploads (MP3, MP4, WAV, M4A), and connections to Gmail, Outlook, Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce, Notion, Greenhouse and Lever. It also has an MCP server, so other AI tools can read your meetings.

Fireflies' own plan guide (July 2026) says every plan, Free included, gets unlimited transcription and unlimited AI summaries. Paid plans add video recording and downloads, Business adds unlimited storage and team-level conversation intelligence, and Enterprise adds SSO and SCIM, custom data retention and HIPAA compliance. The same guide says Fireflies doesn't train AI on customer data and lists SOC 2 Type II and ISO/IEC 42001 for every plan.

If a sales or recruiting team needs every call recorded, searchable by the whole company and pushed into a CRM, Fireflies is built for that, and some of the alternatives below don't try to be.

Four reasons people look for a Fireflies alternative

The bot in the call

The Fireflies Notetaker joins your call and shows up in the participant list. Its auto-join settings offer "All meetings with web-conf link", "Only meetings that I own", "Only meetings with teammates" or "Only when I invite fred@fireflies.ai", so you can make it join less. Fireflies can also record without a bot from its desktop app for Windows and Mac, but that mode saves no audio or video, and speakers appear as Speaker 1 and Speaker 2 rather than by name, according to its bot versus no-bot guide. If you want bot-free capture with names attached, that's a trade-off.

AI credits that run out

Transcripts and standard summaries don't use credits, but AI Skills, soundbites, custom summary sections, AskFred on Live Assist, Sales Assist, CRM autofill and the Personal Assistant's prep features do. Fireflies' AI credits page says each account gets one-time credits (20 on Free and Pro, 30 on Business, 50 on Enterprise), shared across the team rather than per seat. Extra packs run from 50 credits for $5 a month to 10,000 for $600 a month. Credits auto-renew, and existing credit subscribers who run out are moved to the next higher tier automatically unless they turn that off. The plan guide adds that credits are charged per request based on its complexity, so a month's cost depends on how you use the AI.

A free plan that fills up

Fireflies' storage page counts storage as the total minutes of meetings you can keep, not a monthly allowance: 400 minutes on Free, 8,000 per user on Pro, and unlimited on Business and Enterprise. Four hundred minutes is under seven hours of calls. The plan guide also caps recording at two hours a meeting on Free and Pro, three on Business and four on Enterprise.

Per-seat pricing for a team

Per the plan guide, Pro costs $10 per seat each month when paid yearly, or $18 paid monthly, Business is $19 annually or $29 monthly, and Enterprise is $39 a seat a month, annual only. The pricing page notes that every teammate added to the workspace counts as a seat.

The alternatives, matched to the reason

Granola, if you want nothing to join the call

Granola runs on your computer and listens to your device's audio and microphone. Its Windows guide says plainly that "There is no meeting bot", that it runs on Windows 10 and later, and that audio is cached during the meeting and deleted once transcription finishes. The Mac app needs macOS 13 or later (setup guide). Who-said-what labels work in multi-person meetings when speaker tags are turned on for Zoom, Google Meet and Teams.

Granola's pricing page lists Basic at $0, Business at $14 per user a month and Enterprise at $35. Basic keeps only the last 30 days of meeting history and includes Slack; Business adds HubSpot, Notion, Attio, Affinity and Zapier, plus MCP and API access. Because audio is deleted, there's no recording to replay, and there's no video at all.

Fits: people whose main complaint is the visible notetaker, on Mac or Windows, who care about the written notes more than the recording.

Fathom, if you're tired of watching a meter

Fathom's pricing page lists its Free plan as "Unlimited recordings + transcriptions", with instant AI call summaries, clips and search across calls. Some AI features on Free, such as AI action items and Ask Fathom, are marked "Limited use" without a number. Fathom joins Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams (video conferencing page) as a bot, with a bot-free option in beta for Mac.

Paid plans are a flat price per user: Premium at $16 a month on annual billing or $20 monthly, Team at $15 or $19 (two-user minimum), and Business at $25 or $34, which adds CRM field sync. If what you liked about Fireflies was a reliable recording of every call, and what you disliked was rationing AI requests, Fathom keeps the first and drops the second.

Fits: individuals who want a free recorder without a storage ceiling, and small sales teams that want CRM sync at a fixed seat price.

Gemini in Google Meet, if you'd rather not add another app

If your calls happen in Google Meet on a Google Workspace subscription, Meet can take notes itself. Google's help page describes "Take notes for me" saving notes to a Google Doc in the organizer's Drive, attaching it to the Calendar event, and emailing it to the guests the organizer chooses. Late joiners get a "Summary so far".

The limits: it works only in Google Meet, it supports eight languages (English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish, one per meeting), and the organizer needs an eligible plan. Google's pricing page lists Gemini in Meet on Business Standard, Plus and Enterprise, not Business Starter. There's no way to ask questions across past meetings (Fireflies calls its version AskFred) and no CRM sync.

Fits: Google Workspace teams who mostly meet in Meet and want notes without another subscription or another participant.

Merlin, if the notes should turn into follow-ups

Merlin, a Mac app, captures meetings from the computer itself, so no notetaker appears in the participant list. When it notices Zoom or another call app starting a call, or a calendar event with guests is about to begin, it offers to record. Audio is saved on your Mac; transcripts and notes are kept with your Merlin account. Paid plans add a transcript with speaker labels, and Merlin turns the transcript, plus anything you typed, into structured notes using templates such as Standup, 1:1, Sales call and Interview, or your own.

What sets Merlin apart is what happens around the meeting. Once your Google account is connected, a Meeting Brief lands roughly 10 minutes ahead of a call, with attendee backgrounds, earlier discussions and open commitments. After a recorded meeting it may message you the to-dos: what you promised, what others promised you. Ask it to send the recap to attendees once the transcript is ready, and the draft sits in chat until you approve it, change it or throw it away. You can also ask questions across all your meetings in chat.

Be clear on the limits. Merlin is Mac-only, with no Windows, iPhone or Android app. It works with Google accounts, not Microsoft 365. There's no video recording, no sharing of meetings with teammates, no export beyond copying the transcript, no CRM sync built in, and no language setting (the spoken language is detected automatically). On the free plan Merlin records and plays back meetings and can turn notes you typed yourself into structured ones; transcripts, and notes written from the conversation, need a paid plan, which starts at $29 a month.

Fits: someone on a Mac with Google Workspace or Gmail, who records their own calls and wants the email, prep and to-dos after them handled in one place.

Fireflies and its alternatives side by side

How to choose

• Guests keep asking who Fred is: Granola, or Merlin if you're on a Mac. Or keep Fireflies and set it to "Only when I invite fred@fireflies.ai".
• You keep running out of AI credits: Fathom, whose paid plans are a flat price per user.
• The free plan's 400 minutes filled up: Fathom's free plan lists unlimited recordings; Granola's keeps 30 days of history.
• Your company is on Google Workspace and meets in Meet: try Meet's own note-taking before paying for another tool.
• You need dialer calls, uploads, 100+ languages or HIPAA: stay on Fireflies; none of the alternatives here lists all of those.
• You want meetings to lead straight into email and prep on your Mac: Merlin.

Switching without losing your meeting history

Before you cancel, save what you'll want later. Downloads are a paid-plan feature in Fireflies' plan guide, so do this while your subscription is active.

1. List the meetings you'd actually go back to, such as client calls, interviews and decisions, and download their transcripts or recordings.
2. Note any AI Skills, summary templates and integrations you rely on, so you can rebuild them in the new tool.
3. Turn off Auto-join calendar meetings in Fireflies' Settings so two notetakers don't record the same call while you try the replacement.
4. Run the new tool for a week of real meetings before cancelling.
5. Cancel the paid plan and check whether any AI credit subscription is still set to renew.

You don't have to give up Fireflies to use Merlin. Connect your Fireflies account in Merlin under Settings → Integrations → Apps, and you can ask questions about your Fireflies transcripts, summaries and action items in Merlin's chat. If you're still weighing note takers in general, our roundup of AI note-taking tools covers more options, and free transcription software helps with recordings you already have.