Fireflies.ai vs Fathom: Features, Pricing and Verdict

Fathom gives unlimited recording and transcription free, while Fireflies charges less for paid seats but meters AI features with credits. Fathom wins free.

By Galactic News Editorial · Published 2026-11-13T01:35:41+00:00 · Updated 2026-11-13T01:35:41+00:00

Fireflies.ai vs Fathom: Features, Pricing and Verdict

Fireflies.ai and Fathom both record your meetings, transcribe them, and write the summary. The difference is the deal they offer. Fathom gives away unlimited recording and transcription for free. Fireflies charges less for its paid plans but meters its AI features with credits. If you want a free notetaker, Fathom wins. If you want cheap paid seats with sales analytics, Fireflies wins. This comparison uses the vendors' own pricing pages, checked in November 2026. Confirm prices at checkout, because both vendors change them.

Fireflies.ai vs Fathom at a glance

Fireflies.ai is a meeting assistant built around a bot called Fred. The bot joins your Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams call. It records, transcribes in more than 100 languages, and produces a summary with action items. You can also record without a bot from the desktop app, the Chrome extension, or a phone. Fireflies adds conversation intelligence on its higher plans. That means analytics across the team's calls, topic trackers, and talk-time reports. Fathom is a meeting notetaker with a different pitch. It records the call you join from your own computer. It transcribes and summarizes when the call ends. Fathom offers both bot capture and a bot-free option, which is in beta on Mac. It works with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. Both tools keep a searchable library of past meetings. Both offer AI chat over your transcripts. Fireflies calls it AskFred. Fathom calls it Ask Fathom. The real difference sits in the pricing model, not the feature list.

Fireflies.ai pricing

Fireflies sells four plans, priced per seat per month. Free costs $0. It includes unlimited transcription, limited AI summaries, 400 minutes of storage per team, and 20 AI credits. Pro costs $18 a month, or $10 a month billed annually. It adds unlimited AI summaries, 8,000 minutes of storage per seat, video recording, downloads, and unlimited integrations. Business costs $29 a month, or $19 a month billed annually. It adds unlimited storage, 30 AI credits, conversation intelligence, team analytics, and multi-language mode. Enterprise costs $39 per seat per month, annual billing only. It adds 50 AI credits, single sign-on, SCIM, audit logs, HIPAA readiness, private storage, and custom data retention. Read the fine print on the free plan. The pricing page marks unlimited transcription with an asterisk. Independent checks in October 2026 found that accounts created after 1 September 2026 get only a few transcribed meetings unless Auto-join is switched on. Auto-join sends the bot to your calendar meetings with no cap. Recording length also has limits. Free and Pro stop each recording at 2 hours. Business stops at 3 hours. Enterprise stops at 4 hours. The AI credits are a second meter. Each plan includes a small one-time grant at signup: 20 credits on Free and Pro, 30 on Business, 50 on Enterprise. Advanced features such as AI Skills, voice agents, and CRM autofill draw from that pool. Extra credits cost extra, starting at $5 for 50. The headline seat price is low. The credits are the cost to watch.

Fathom pricing

Fathom sells five plans, priced per user per month. Free costs $0. It includes unlimited recordings and transcription, instant AI summaries, clips, playlists, and search. You can choose bot capture or bot-free capture, which is still in beta on Mac. Premium costs $20 a month, or $16 a month billed annually. It adds advanced summaries, AI-generated action items, the Ask Fathom assistant, and a custom meeting bot. Team costs $19 a month, or $15 a month billed annually, with a two-user minimum. It adds a shared workspace with folders, comments, and playlists, plus global search across team calls and keyword alerts. Business costs $34 a month, or $25 a month billed annually, with a two-user minimum. It adds CRM field sync, Deal View, coaching metrics, AI scorecards, and custom summaries. Enterprise is listed at $35 per user per month on annual billing, with hands-on implementation, custom summaries, enhanced security controls, and a dedicated success manager. Confirm the Enterprise figure with sales before you budget for it. Fathom's free plan has one limit worth knowing. Advanced AI summaries are limited to your first five calls a month, according to Fathom's help center. Basic summaries are unlimited. Paid plans carry a 90-day guarantee. Team and Business both include HIPAA compliance with a standard business associate agreement.

Features compared

Fathom's free plan is the most generous free notetaker on the market. Unlimited recording and transcription with no storage cap is hard to beat. Fireflies' free plan is tighter. Storage caps at 400 minutes per team, and new accounts face transcription limits unless Auto-join is on. Fireflies fights back on paid price. Pro at $10 a month billed annually undercuts Fathom Premium at $16. Business at $19 undercuts Fathom Business at $25. But Fireflies meters AI features with credits, and Fathom does not. A team that leans on AI Skills and voice agents can spend more on Fireflies than the seat price suggests. Fathom's pricing is simpler. The seat price is the price.

Which one should you choose

Choose Fathom if you want a free notetaker that stays useful. Individuals, freelancers, and small teams get unlimited recording without paying. It also fits teams that want simple pricing with no credit meter. Choose Premium if you need advanced summaries and action items for yourself. Choose Team if several people need to search and share calls. Choose Business only if you need CRM field sync, because that is the feature that justifies the jump. Choose Fireflies if you run sales calls and want conversation intelligence on a budget. Pro at $10 a month billed annually is the cheapest real paid seat in this comparison. Business at $19 adds team analytics and unlimited storage. Fireflies also fits teams that record from phones or need transcription in many languages. Avoid Fireflies free if you need more than a few transcribed meetings a month. Avoid Fathom if you need phone capture or a bot-free option on Windows. Fathom's bot-free capture is Mac-only and still in beta.

Bottom line

Fireflies.ai vs Fathom comes down to free versus paid. Fathom has the better free plan by a wide margin, with unlimited recording and transcription for $0. Fireflies has the cheaper paid plans, with Pro at $10 a month billed annually against Fathom Premium at $16. Pick Fathom if you want to pay nothing. Pick Fireflies if you will pay and want sales analytics at the lowest seat price. Either way, check the free plan limits before you commit your meeting history to one tool.