Prices checked November 2026 on official vendor pages. No sponsored listings — rankings on merit. How we review: https://smartrisehq.com/how-we-review-ai-tools/
60-second pick: Team, CRM, and searchable calls? Fireflies. Solo live notes? Otter instead.
Research-based: no hands-on testing is claimed for this tool.
Fireflies.ai records and transcribes meetings, then turns them into something a team can search: summaries with action items, AskFred (an assistant you can question across meetings), and conversation intelligence such as talk-time ratios and sentiment on higher plans. Its integration catalog runs past 100 tools, including HubSpot and Salesforce, so notes land on contact records without manual copying.
Price
Free: $0. Pro: $18/seat/month, or $10 billed annually. Business: $29/seat/month, or $19 billed annually. Enterprise: $39/seat/month, billed annually only.
Free limit
400 minutes of team storage, limited AI summaries, 20 AI credits, recordings up to 2 hours, and 3 public channels. Transcription itself is unlimited on the free plan — the binding limits are storage and credits, not minutes transcribed.
Best for
Teams and sales workflows: managers coaching calls, reps whose notes must reach the CRM, and anyone searching across months of meetings. Pro adds video recording and 8,000 minutes of storage per seat; Business adds unlimited storage, conversation intelligence, and team analytics.
The one dealbreaker
The AI credits meter. Summaries, action items, and AskFred queries consume credits (20 on Free and Pro, 30 on Business, 50 on Enterprise), and AI features pause when credits run out until you buy more. The subscription price is not the whole price — credits are a second meter hiding inside the first.
Verdict
Fireflies is the best meeting notetaker for a team that shares, searches, and acts on calls — and a worse pick than Otter for a solo user who just wants live notes. If your calls feed a CRM and more than one person needs the notes, start here. If you only need one transcript at a time and hate metered extras, Otter’s simpler minutes model fits better.
How we compare
All tools are evaluated against the same criteria — capabilities, ease of use, pricing and value, and limitations — using official documentation and pricing pages. No hands-on testing was performed for this tool; every claim traces to the vendor’s official pages, verified in November 2026. If we test a tool ourselves in the future, the page will say so and include our screenshots, test tasks, and observations. This verdict is editorial opinion based on publicly available information, not sponsored, and not influenced by affiliate relationships. SmartRiseHQ currently uses no affiliate or referral links.
A note on pricing
Tool pricing, plan names, and limits change frequently. Prices above were verified on the official Fireflies.ai pricing page in November 2026. Fireflies’ free storage figure has appeared as both 400 minutes per team and 800 minutes per seat on different pages — the 400-minute team figure is used here, matching the most recent November 2026 reads; confirm the live figure on the official pricing page before signing up. Always confirm current plans on the vendor’s official pricing page before buying.