On-device: audio never leaves your machine. No bot, no cloud.
Teams look for Fireflies.ai alternatives for three concrete reasons: a bot that announces itself in every call, audio that uploads to Fireflies's cloud, and an 800-minute free cap that runs out mid-month. It's a cloud meeting-notes platform built for sales teams that want a searchable archive of every call and deep CRM sync, and in that lane it's strong.
A Fireflies bot joins every meeting, captures the audio, sends it to Fireflies's servers, and returns a transcript, a summary, action items, and a searchable entry in the team archive. The Salesforce and HubSpot integrations are the deepest in this comparison for sales workflows. Calls attach to the right records automatically, and the cross-meeting search is genuinely useful when you need to find a decision from three weeks ago. The summary and action-item layer is competent, speaker diarization works, and you can chat with past meetings to pull out specifics. For a revenue team that lives in Salesforce and doesn't mind the bot, Fireflies is a strong pick.
The bot is the first wall. On an internal standup nobody notices. On a customer call, the prospect sees "Fireflies bot" in the participant list and asks why you're recording, which shifts the tone before the call has started. For a revenue team that's a known trade-off they've decided to accept. For a coach, a lawyer, a researcher, or anyone on a confidential board call, a visible recording bot ends the conversation.
Audio is the second wall. Everything uploads to Fireflies's servers with no on-device path and no offline mode. For disclosed sales calls that's fine. For healthcare, legal, or regulated work it's a hard line, and the tool stalls on a flight or a locked-down network. Fireflies trains its AI on aggregated user data, and an enterprise tier exists for teams that need tighter security, but the base product is cloud-only. An account is required, and your recordings live in Fireflies's cloud.
The 800-minute cap is the third wall. The free tier limits storage to 800 minutes per seat per month, roughly 13 hours of meetings. A team running more than a few calls a week hits the paywall, and the upgrade is a per-seat subscription. Pro runs $10-18 a seat a month for unlimited AI summaries. Business runs $19-29 and adds video recording, team analytics, and CRM sync. The CRM integrations sit on the paid tiers, not the free one, so the free plan is a trial of the capture and the archive you came for is behind the subscription.
Fireflies transcribes in 69 languages and can import audio files, but it's a web platform with a bot, not a desktop app. It can't capture system audio, in-person meetings, or a browser tab directly; the bot has to join a supported meeting platform. A team whose audio doesn't come through a meeting platform can't use it.
Buyers who switch off Fireflies tend to fall into one of three camps. Some can't have a visible bot on external or confidential calls. Some are in regulated work and can't let audio leave the device. Some ran past 800 minutes a seat and found a local option with no cap. The list below speaks to each camp differently, which is why it isn't ranked on a single axis.
Ranked by fit for local, bot-free meeting notes. Clearminutes is the local-first anchor at the end.
Otter.ai puts a bot in every call and sends audio to its servers. Clearminutes runs on your machine.
Best for: sales teams that want CRM-synced cloud notes and a polished shared workspace. A bot joins every call and audio goes to Otter's servers. The free tier caps at 300 minutes a month, with no on-device or offline option.
Price: $0/forever
Otter.ai is best for sales teams who want CRM-synced cloud notes and a polished shared workspace. A bot joins every call and audio goes to Otter's servers, with a free tier capped at 300 minutes a month and no on-device or offline option. Strong on Zoom, Teams, Salesforce, and HubSpot integration, weak on privacy and native cross-platform apps. Pick it when team collaboration matters more than keeping audio on the device.
Fathom is a free Zoom-only cloud notetaker. Clearminutes works with any audio source, runs locally on Mac and Windows, and doesn't need Zoom.
Best for: teams on Zoom who want a free, simple cloud notetaker with unlimited recordings and 28-language support. A bot joins every call, coverage is Zoom-only, and audio is uploaded to Fathom's servers. There's no on-device transcription path and no offline option.
Price: $0/forever
Fathom is best for teams on Zoom who want a free, simple cloud notetaker with unlimited recordings and broad 28-language support. A bot joins every call, coverage is Zoom-only, and audio is uploaded to Fathom's servers with no on-device transcription path. Strong on free-tier generosity and language coverage, weak on platform breadth and privacy. Pick it when you live on Zoom and want free cloud notes.
Jamie is bot-free but summarises in the cloud on Mac and Windows. Clearminutes keeps the summary on-device too, with a real free tier and Linux support.
Best for: individuals who want a free, bot-free local summary on Mac and Windows with export to Notion, Slack, and HubSpot. The free tier is limited and the paid plan is £25/month for fuller features. The feature set is lighter than the cloud incumbents.
Price: £0/forever
Jamie is best for individuals who want a free, bot-free local summary on Mac and Windows with Notion, Slack, and HubSpot export. Processing is partial — offline is available but summaries are not fully on-device. The free tier is limited and the paid plan is £25 a month. Strong on bot-free capture and export, weak on Linux, a real free tier, and a local LLM. Pick it for solo Mac or Windows use.
Granola is a polished Mac-only drafting app that processes audio in the cloud. Clearminutes runs on-device, on Mac and Windows, with a one-off Pro price.
Best for: Mac users who want a polished meeting summary app that drafts notes and exports to Notion, Slack, and HubSpot. It's Mac-only with cloud-only audio processing, a limited free tier, and a £14–35/month subscription. The integration surface is smaller than the cloud incumbents.
Price: £0/forever
Granola is best for Mac-only users who want a polished cloud-native drafting workflow with custom templates, chat-with-meetings, action items, cross-meeting search, and speaker diarization, plus Notion, Slack, and HubSpot export. Audio is processed on Granola's servers with no local option, and the paid plans run £14–35 a month. Strong on the Mac drafting experience, weak on Windows, Linux, offline, and a real free tier. Pick it for Mac-only work in those three tools.
Krisp pioneered noise cancellation. Clearminutes is a complete AI meeting assistant: transcription, summaries, action items, and task sync.
Best for: teams that need noise cancellation first and a meeting assistant second. Transcription is a cloud add-on, not the core product. There's a 14-day trial then a limited free tier, 16-language support, and an $8–15/month paid plan for full features.
Price: $0/forever
Krisp is best for teams who need noise cancellation first and a meeting assistant second. Transcription is a cloud add-on rather than the core product; noise cancellation runs locally but transcription does not. A 14-day trial gives way to a limited free tier, with a paid plan at $8–15 a month for full features across 16 languages. Strong on noise removal, weak on on-device transcription and offline notes. Pick it when call audio is noisy.
tl;dv records Google Meet, Zoom, and Teams in the cloud with a bot in the call. Clearminutes keeps the recording on your machine and works offline.
Best for: teams on Google Meet, Zoom, and Teams who want a free-tier cloud recorder with 30+ language transcripts and Chrome-based capture. A bot joins every call and audio is uploaded to tl-dv's servers. The paid plan is $20–25/month, with no on-device transcription option.
Price: $0/forever
tl;dv is best for teams on Google Meet, Zoom, and Teams who want a free-tier cloud recorder with 30+ language transcripts and Chrome-based capture. A bot joins every call and audio is uploaded to tl;dv's servers, with a $20–25 a month paid plan and no on-device transcription option. Strong on multi-platform recording and language coverage, weak on privacy and offline use. Pick it for free cloud recording across meeting platforms.
Avoma is a cloud sales-intelligence platform for revenue teams. Clearminutes is a local-first desktop app with no bots, no uploads, and on-device AI.
Best for: revenue teams that want conversation intelligence, CRM auto-entry, and AI coaching scorecards on top of meeting notes. A bot or integration joins every call and audio is uploaded to Avoma's cloud on AWS. There's no free tier, just a 14-day trial, and no on-device transcription.
Price: $19/seat/mo/annual
Avoma is best for revenue and customer-success teams who want conversation intelligence, CRM auto-entry, and AI coaching scorecards on top of meeting notes. A bot or integration joins every call and audio is uploaded to Avoma's cloud on AWS, with no free tier beyond a 14-day trial and no on-device transcription. Strong on Salesforce, HubSpot, and coaching analytics, weak on privacy and any offline or no-bot workflow. Pick it when revenue analytics matter more than keeping audio on the device.
Two local-first Tauri apps built on similar technology. Meetily is open source with a new Pro tier. Clearminutes adds speaker diarization, integrations, guided onboarding, and active commercial development.
Best for: developers who want an open-source local notes tool that runs Whisper on-device with unlimited free use. There are no integrations and no diarization polish. The split is Free Community / $10 Pro, and on Linux it's buildable from source rather than a packaged app.
Price: £0/forever
Meetily is best for developers who want a fully auditable, MIT-licensed local notes tool that runs Whisper on-device with unlimited free use. There are no integrations, diarization is only coming soon on Pro, and there's no commercial support, just the community. On Linux it's buildable from source rather than a packaged app. Strong on openness and local processing, weak on polish, integrations, and support. Pick it when an auditable open-source codebase matters more than a finished product.
Notion AI Meeting Notes lives in your Notion workspace and sends audio to cloud sub-processors. Clearminutes keeps audio on your machine with no account and no uploads.
Best for: teams already living in Notion who want meeting notes inline in their workspace. Audio goes to OpenAI, Anthropic, and other third-party LLMs, with no on-device transcription. Speaker identification is English-only and 1:1-best, and a Notion account is required.
Price: £0/forever
Notion AI Meeting Notes is best for teams already living in Notion who want meeting notes inline in their workspace. Audio goes to OpenAI, Anthropic, and other third-party LLMs, with no on-device transcription, and a Notion account is required. Speaker identification is English-only and works best 1:1. Strong on in-workspace notes and custom templates, weak on privacy, offline, and any no-account workflow. Pick it when workspace notes matter more than keeping audio off third-party servers.
Speechmark is a Mac menu-bar app that processes on-device after the call. Clearminutes adds Windows and Linux, a live transcript during the call, and a network monitor.
Best for: UK teams on macOS who want a local-first, no-bot meeting notes tool with one-time pricing (free during beta) and a Claude Desktop connector. It's Mac-only, with no live transcript and no privacy network monitor. Summaries are processed after you stop recording.
Price: Free/during beta
Speechmark is best for UK teams on macOS who want a local-first, no-bot meeting notes tool with one-time pricing, free during beta then a single purchase, and a Claude Desktop connector. It's Mac-only on Apple silicon, with no live transcript because it processes after you stop, and no privacy network monitor. Strong on local audio and no-account simplicity, weak on cross-platform and live capture. Pick it when a one-time Mac tool matters more than Windows, Linux, or a live transcript.
Trilla is a free local-first Mac app on Apple Silicon. Clearminutes adds Windows, task sync, and a Pro tier.
Best for: Mac users on Apple Silicon who want a free, local, no-bot transcriber running Whisper and Ollama on-device, with local voice prints and no account. It's macOS-only, with no Windows or Linux build. The integration surface is smaller and the feature set is lighter than the cross-platform options.
Price: £0/forever
Trilla is best for Mac users on Apple Silicon who want a free, local, no-bot transcriber that runs Whisper and Ollama on-device with local voice prints and no account. Every feature is free with no subscription and no gating. It's macOS-only, with no Windows or Linux build, and it relies on Ollama for local summaries rather than shipping a built-in LLM. Strong on free local capture, weak on cross-platform and integrations. Pick it when free and local on Mac matters more than Windows or Pro integrations.
On-device, no bot, no cloud audio.
Best for: privacy-first teams who want meeting notes without uploading audio to the cloud.
Price: £0/forever
Clearminutes is best for teams who need meeting audio to stay on the device. Transcription runs on local Whisper and summaries on a built-in local LLM, with no cloud upload at any step. It works offline, ships for Windows alongside macOS, and shows zero outbound audio connections in its in-app network monitor. A real free tier and bring-your-own API keys make it the local-first pick when every other tool on this list sends audio to the cloud.
| Feature | Granola | Avoma | Jamie | Speechmark | Krisp | tl;dv | Trilla | Otter.ai | Fathom | Meetily | Notion AI Meeting Notes | Clearminutes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meeting bots | No | Yes (bot or integration joins call) | No | No | No (bot-free option) | Yes (bot joins call) | No | Bot joins call | Yes (bot joins call) | No | No | No |
| Local processing | No (cloud-only) | No (cloud-only) | Partial (offline available) | — | Partial (noise cancellation local, transcription cloud) | No (cloud-only) | Yes (Whisper + Ollama) | No (cloud-only) | No (cloud-only) | Yes (Whisper) | No | Yes (on-device models) |
| Speaker identification | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes (confirm-name flow) | Yes | Yes | Yes (local voice prints) | Yes | Yes | — | Yes (English only, 1:1 best) | Yes (Pro) |
| Works offline | — | No | — | — | Partial (noise cancellation offline) | No | — | No | No | — | No | Yes (local models) |
| Free tier | Yes (limited history) | No (14-day trial only; viewers free on paid plans) | Yes (limited) | — | Yes (14-day trial, then limited) | Yes (limited recordings) | Yes (unlimited) | Yes (300 min/month) | Yes (unlimited recordings) | Yes (unlimited, open source) | Limited AI trial (Free/Plus) | Yes |
| Language support | — | 40+ languages (translation on Organization tier+) | — | — | 16 languages | 30+ languages | — | English, French, Spanish | 28 languages | — | 16 languages | 6+ languages |
These aren't bugs. They're the shape of a cloud-native, bot-attended, CRM-heavy platform, and each one bites a specific kind of buyer.
If you live in Salesforce, don't mind the bot, and stay under 800 minutes a seat, none of this bites. Fireflies's archive and CRM workflow is worth the subscription. The question is which of these is your hard line.
Two products, two shapes. Fireflies optimises the sales-archive and CRM workflow, and accepts a bot, cloud audio, and an 800-minute cap. Clearminutes optimises where the audio goes, and accepts a lighter CRM workflow.
Your hard requirement is that meeting audio never leaves the device, or that no bot joins the call. Transcription and summarisation run locally on Whisper and a built-in LLM, with no cloud upload at any step. Clearminutes captures microphone and system audio on the machine, works with any audio source, runs offline, and shows zero outbound audio connections in its in-app network monitor. No bot, bring-your-own API keys, no monthly subscription. For healthcare, legal, regulated work, or anyone whose calls can't show a recording bot, that's the structural difference. The trade is the CRM workflow: Clearminutes doesn't write to Salesforce or HubSpot and doesn't give you a searchable team archive. That's the right trade when the constraint is the audio path or the bot, not the sales pipeline.
You want a searchable archive of every call, deep Salesforce and HubSpot CRM sync, and you're fine with a bot in the participant list, audio stored on Fireflies's servers, and an 800-minute free cap with a per-seat subscription on the upgrade. Fireflies is the right call for a revenue team that lives in Salesforce, runs under 800 minutes a seat, and has decided the bot is acceptable on customer calls. The cross-meeting search, the 69-language transcription, the video recording and team analytics on the Business tier, those are real value for a team that lives in the CRM.
Do the maths for your team before you commit. A 10-person team on Pro pays $1,200-2,160 a year; on Business, $2,280-3,480. A one-off local Pro price doesn't compound. The shared archive and CRM sync are worth that delta for a team that lives in Salesforce. For a solo user or small team that just wants meeting notes without a bot and a cloud upload, they're not, and the local-first shape is the cheaper pick on top of the privacy one.
No. Fireflies.ai uploads audio to its servers for transcription with no on-device path and no offline mode. The recording pipeline needs an internet connection.
Yes. A Fireflies.ai bot joins every call as a visible participant. There's no bot-free option, so on customer or confidential calls the bot is in the participant list.
The free tier limits storage to 800 minutes per seat per month. The paid plans add AI summaries, CRM sync, and team features on a per-seat subscription.
No. Summaries run on Fireflies.ai's cloud AI only. There's no bring-your-own-API-key option and no on-device summarisation path.
Entirely in Fireflies.ai's cloud. Transcription, search, and summarisation run server-side — there's no local processing step, and the audio is stored in the team archive.
Yes. Salesforce and HubSpot CRM integrations are a core strength — calls attach to the right records automatically. They're a paid-tier feature, not on the free plan.
Last updated: 2026-04-01. Compared from each tool's public pricing and feature data (see sources), as of the last-updated date.
Sources: Fireflies.ai official site (2026-06-21), Fireflies.ai pricing page (2026-06-21), Fireflies.ai privacy page (2026-06-21).
Clearminutes is our own product; we've kept the comparison fair.
Local transcription, live transcript view, AI summaries, and a verifiable privacy network monitor. No cloud uploads, no bots, runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux.