Fathom vs. Fireflies: Which AI notetaker is best? [2026]

Watching someone take meeting minutes by hand feels like a portal into a bygone era, like rewinding a VHS tape or printing out MapQuest directions. I found a YouTube video called Mock Meeting for Minute Taking—recorded circa 2014—that was intended to train aspiring notetakers on the art of meeting minutes. A decade later, it all seems impossibly old-fashioned. AI handles everything: summaries, transcripts, action items, and conversational AI systems that let you ask questions about what was discussed. All this data is hoovered up and transformed into trends and insights, so you can understand what's happening—at scale—across your team's meetings.

But for popular AI notetaking apps like Fathom and Fireflies, even that isn't enough. There are now dozens of AI meeting assistants, and if you have a paid subscription to workplace apps like Teams, Zoom, or Calendly, you probably already have access to basic AI notetaking for free. As a result, Fathom and Fireflies have both expanded, and now offer features that go beyond summaries, transcripts, and action items.

You can't go wrong with either app if you're looking for basic AI meeting transcription. But differences crop up as you get into more advanced features. To help you choose between Fathom and Fireflies, I tested both apps to see how they stack up.

Table of contents:

• Fathom vs. Fireflies at a glance

• Both apps take a similar approach to recording and sharing meetings

• Fathom is simpler to use, but Fireflies feels more polished

• Fireflies has evolved into a broader AI assistant

• Fathom has a better free plan; Fireflies has cheaper paid plans, but its AI credits get pricey

• Fireflies connects with more apps, but both platforms connect to Zapier

• Fathom vs. Fireflies: Which should you choose?

Fathom vs. Fireflies at a glance

Both apps take a similar approach to recording, transcribing, and sharing meetings

Fireflies and Fathom both offer a classic "bot-based" meeting recording system, where an AI assistant joins meetings as a participant. There's also a newer "bot-free" version that works more subtly.

Here's how the classic experience often works: you start a meeting, participants jump in, and they're quickly followed by a troupe of AI meeting assistants—all of which visibly crowd your Zoom call with boxes labeled "Read AI" or "Fred." In cases where non-attendees send notetaking bots on their behalf, you might even have more AI assistants in your meeting than actual people.

There's been some backlash to this. As a result, apps like Fireflies and Fathom are moving toward bot-free notetaking, which allows recording to happen invisibly via a desktop app.

Both apps' recording features have converged in other ways, too. Fireflies has long offered a live meeting transcript, but Fathom now offers that on its bot-free experience. And while Fathom is known for recording both audio and video, you can get a similar experience on paid Fireflies tiers.

Both Fireflies and Fathom let you edit the transcript after the fact. That comes in handy because as good as these apps are, they don't always identify speakers correctly; they can also struggle with industry jargon, brand names, and acronyms. You can rename speakers, attribute sections to someone else, and trim sections you don't want to share.

Summaries and action items are built in, and you can also chat with AI to understand what was discussed during the call. Here's what that looks like using Fireflies' chatbot, AskFred.

What I especially like about this are the in-line timestamps, which link directly to the relevant part of the transcript so you can understand the information in context. (Fathom has a similar feature, but its citations are grouped together in a list at the bottom, which wasn't quite as intuitive.)

Both tools allow you to save noteworthy parts of the conversation and turn them into shareable clips, during or after the call. Fireflies' version of this, called Soundbites, is a bit more advanced: you can use AI to identify memorable moments and generate video or audio clips automatically.

During the initial setup of each app, you'll be able to choose how you want Fathom and Fireflies to share meeting summaries. By default, both tools automatically send a recording of the conversation to all participants. Fathom gives you a bit more control: you can push action items or specific parts of the meeting to productivity tools like Asana, Todoist, and Slack with one click. Fireflies can generate a brief follow-up email summarizing the conversation, though it requires using AI credits.

With Fathom, sharing is simple: you can share your meeting recaps with anyone, even if you're on the free plan. With Fireflies, it's limited. If you're on the Business or Enterprise plans, you can generate a Public Meeting Access link and share your meeting recap with anyone. But if you're on the Free or Pro plan, only people who already have a Fireflies account can see your meeting recaps.

Fathom is simpler to use, but Fireflies feels more polished

After you get started on both apps—which is easy because onboarding is quick—you can refer to in-app feature walkthroughs and tip callouts to learn as you go. Fireflies has an overview on the dashboard and a dedicated help center with tips for getting started, while Fathom has an ever-present demo and test call for new users.

While both apps have a quick learning curve, I found Fathom easier to use. Its dashboard focuses on a few core activities: My Calls, Team Calls (with metrics), Playlists, Alerts, and Deals. Since there are just a handful of navigational options, it's easy to find what you're looking for, and the "Ask Fathom" AI assistant makes it easy to toggle between asking questions about your calls or your entire team's calls.

Fireflies is an impressively polished piece of software—more so than Fathom, which felt somewhat clunkier to me—and it also has more features. But it can be a bit overwhelming if you're looking for a straightforward AI notetaking assistant.

On the Home tab and navigation sidebar, there's a personal assistant and a dozen other options competing for your attention. And on Fireflies' call review page, you'll choose between scrolling through the transcript, viewing the AI summary, asking questions to AskFred, running a Smart Search, using AI Skills, creating a Soundbite, or leaving a comment. There's also an AI credit system to manage in Fireflies, unlike in Fathom.

Fireflies has evolved into a broader AI assistant

Both Fathom and Fireflies are positioning themselves as more than "just" an AI notetaker.

Fathom's approach has been to add in-depth features for specific customer-facing teams. For example, sales teams get a Deal View, integrations with CRMs like HubSpot, and AI Scorecards that grade your team's call performance against your sales methodology. (Their website currently has a banner courting customers migrating from Gong, a sales-focused conversation intelligence platform.)

Fathom has also fine-tuned its product for customer success (CS) teams and marketing teams. CS teams will appreciate Fathom's Customer View and its custom meeting summaries for different call types, like onboarding, quarterly business reviews, and renewals. And Fathom makes it easy for marketing teams to extract quotes and videos from calls to create marketing assets.

Fireflies offers many of these sales-specific and CS-specific features, too. But it's also aggressively repositioned itself as an all-purpose "AI assistant." (You can barely find a mention of the term "AI notetaker" on Fireflies' website these days). 

Fireflies now offers:

• Live Assist for real-time coaching during your call, including live suggestions, objection handling, and the ability to ask Fireflies' AI questions in the middle of the conversation.

• Voice Agents that emulate your voice and run entire calls on their own. They can handle screening interviews, sales discovery meetings, and lead qualification calls independently.

• Email Assistant to triage your inbox, draft replies in your voice, and follow up automatically.

• Personal Assistant for prepping for meetings, managing tasks, and bringing action items across your meetings, email, and Slack into one view.

• AI Skills to generate outputs from your meetings automatically based on templates. For example, the Customer Satisfaction Scorecard tracks customer sentiment based on what customers say across all their interactions.

• Slack Assistant to bring context from your team's calls into your Slack conversations by tagging @Fireflies.

Just keep in mind that most of these features consume AI credits. Some of them, like Personal Assistant, use AI credits even when you're not engaging with them: during my testing, Personal Assistant used one credit per day (to prepare a "Daily Brief") before I figured out what was happening and switched it off.

Fireflies' analytics offers a wider range of insights than Fathom's, including granular statistics like:

• Words spoken by minute

• Total number of filler words

• Average talk-to-listen ratio

• Total silence duration

You can also run sentiment analysis on your calls, track how often certain topics or keywords appear, and use AI filters to highlight specific parts of the conversation.

Fathom has a better free plan; Fireflies has cheaper paid plans, but its AI credits get pricey

Fathom's free plan is comprehensive enough that you might never need to upgrade. You get unlimited recordings and call storage, unlimited transcriptions, unlimited call downloads and clips, and automated summaries. Fireflies gives you unlimited transcriptions and unlimited AI summaries on the free plan, plus 20 AI credits. However, recordings are capped at 400 minutes of storage, which means you can store roughly six hour-long meetings before you need to upgrade.

Once you're ready to upgrade, Fireflies has a pricing edge: it's around 20-30% cheaper than Fathom, depending on the plan. The Pro plan costs $10/month per user (billed annually) and adds 8,000 minutes of storage per seat, plus video recording and a suite of extras that includes Fireflies' personal assistant, email assistant, voice agents, AI skills, and action items. The Business plan, at $19/month per user, gives you 30 AI credits, unlimited storage, multi-language mode, team analytics, and conversation intelligence.

Fireflies' pricing advantage can erode quickly if you use its AI features, however. Credits are required for most of Fireflies' advanced features, including Live Assist, Voice Agents, AskFred, AI skills, and Personal Assistant. As a result, it's easy to burn through your free credit allocation quickly. Additional credits start at $5 for 50 credits per month.

Fathom's paid plans start at $16/month (billed annually) for the Premium plan, or $15/month per user for the Team plan. With Premium, you get AI action items, AI follow-up emails, and "Ask Fathom" conversational AI. The Team plan adds a team workspace plus highlight clips for team meetings, keyword alerts, and a Customer View that consolidates all meetings involving a single customer. There's also a $25/month per user Business plan for advanced features like coaching metrics, CRM field sync, AI scorecards, and a Deal View that shows all meetings involving a single deal.

It's worth noting that Fathom's Team and Business plans require a two-user minimum, whereas with Fireflies, you can sign up for any plan you want as a solo user. Realistically, you probably wouldn't upgrade to Fathom's Team or Business plans unless you have a small team. But there are some edge cases: if you're a solo consultant who wants to record client meetings and push those updates directly to your CRM, or you want access to Customer View or Deal View, you'd need to buy two seats with Fathom to get access to those features.

Fireflies connects with more video conferencing apps, but both platforms connect to Zapier

Fireflies integrates with 100+ apps, including a wide range of video conferencing platforms plus dialers like Zoom Phone and Salesloft. Fathom has a smaller selection of around 30 native integrations, though it does cover three of the biggest video conferencing tools (Zoom, Teams, and Meet—with Webex and GoTo Meeting notably lacking).

But with Zapier, Fireflies and Fathom integrate with thousands of other apps you use in your business. You can use your meetings as a starting point for all sorts of actions across your tech stack, like spinning up new Google Docs from transcripts or sending post-meeting tasks directly to your project management app. You can do all of this automatically, with pre-built automations, or you can access all your Fireflies and Fathom data directly from your AI assistant with Zapier MCP.

Learn more about how to automate Fathom and how to automate Fireflies.

Fireflies vs. Fathom: Which should you choose?

Not quite sure which AI notetaking app to go with? Here are some final thoughts to help you decide.

Choose Fathom if you're an individual or a small team looking for a straightforward AI notetaker with a generous free plan, and you don't mind sticking to Zoom, Teams, or Meet. Fathom is also a strong option for sales and customer success teams, and you can share meeting recaps with anyone regardless of the plan you're on.

Choose Fireflies if you're looking for an organization-wide AI assistant that helps with more than just notetaking. With real-time coaching, Voice Agents, and an email and Slack assistant, Fireflies is built to add value to large teams and offload actual work to AI. Just know that its most compelling features use AI credits, so you may need to budget more than you initially expect.

Related reading:

• Fathom features to make your meetings more productive

• The best AI productivity tools

• What is Otter.ai?

• What is Granola.ai?

This article was originally published in August 2024 by Juliet John. The most recent update was in August 2026.