Fireflies.ai
Records, transcribes, and summarises meetings across Zoom, Teams, and Meet, with a genuinely usable free tier and CRM sync on paid plans.
Free · Pro from $10
/seat/mo (billed annually)
Category Review
Independent reviews of AI meeting-intelligence tools — transcription, notetakers, and conversation intelligence for sales, internal meetings, recruiting, and clinical documentation. Verified pricing, honest limitations, and no pay-to-rank placements.
The Short Version
"Meeting intelligence" covers everything from a simple bot that drops a transcript into your inbox to a platform that analyses thousands of sales calls to forecast your quarter. The right tool depends almost entirely on what kind of conversation you are trying to capture — a stand-up, a discovery call, a job interview, or a patient visit — and on how strict your privacy and compliance requirements are. Below are our current picks, grouped by the job they do best.
TL;DR — quick recommendations
Records, transcribes, and summarises meetings across Zoom, Teams, and Meet, with a genuinely usable free tier and CRM sync on paid plans.
A widely used transcription and notes app with live captions, an in-app AI chat, and deep Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet integration.
The reference platform for revenue intelligence — call analytics, coaching, and deal-risk signals across an entire sales organisation.
An AI notetaker built specifically for recruiters — structured interview notes, scorecard-ready summaries, and candidate context in one place.
An AI medical scribe that listens to the visit and drafts a clinical note in the clinician's style, with specialty templates and a BAA available.
A clinician-facing ambient AI assistant that generates structured notes from patient encounters, built for health systems and EHR workflows.
An AI medical scribe with a free tier offering unlimited transcription, plus paid plans that add advanced templates, coding, and team features.
Save time deciding
Use our comparison tool to weigh transcription depth, integrations, compliance, and price against how your team actually meets.
Quick Compare
Best-for, verified starting price, and the single limitation we think matters most. Prices are pulled from vendor pricing pages in July 2026 and change frequently — confirm current terms before purchase.
| Tool | Best for | Verified starting price | Main limitation to weigh |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fireflies.ai | All-round team notetaking & CRM sync | Free tier; Pro from $10/seat/mo (annual), Business $19, Enterprise $39 | AI features metered by credits; heavy users hit limits |
| Otter.ai | Individuals & small teams, live captions | Free (300 min/mo); Pro from $8.33/user/mo (annual); Business from ~$20 | Monthly minute and import caps on lower tiers |
| Gong | Revenue teams needing deal analytics | Custom quote — per-user licence plus a platform fee | No public pricing; priced for teams, not individuals |
| Metaview | Recruiting & interview documentation | Free tier; recruiting platform is Enterprise/custom | Full platform pricing requires a sales conversation |
| Freed | Individual clinicians who hate charting | 7-day free trial; Starter $39, Core $79, Premier $104/mo | Starter caps notes per month; groups are custom-quoted |
| Nabla | Health systems & EHR-integrated scribing | Free individual tier; custom pricing for organisations | Organisation pricing is quote-based, not published |
| Heidi Health | Clinicians wanting a free scribe to start | Free plan (unlimited transcription); paid Clinician plan; 14-day trial | Advanced templates, coding & teams are paid-only |
Buyer's Analysis
Most demos of these tools look identical: a bot joins a call, and a tidy transcript with a bullet-point summary appears afterwards. The differences that matter show up later — when the accent in the room defeats the transcriber, when the "action items" miss the one commitment that mattered, or when legal asks where the recordings are stored. Use the seven criteria below to pressure-test any shortlist before you commit budget or route sensitive conversations through a vendor.
Everything downstream — summaries, action items, analytics — is built on the raw transcript, so accuracy is the foundation. In clear, single-speaker English on a decent microphone, leading tools perform very well. The moment you add crosstalk, strong accents, poor audio, or specialist terminology, quality diverges sharply between products. Test on your real meetings, not the vendor's polished sample. Look for support for custom vocabulary and, ideally, the ability to capture separate per-speaker audio channels, both of which materially lift accuracy. Treat any transcript destined for a legal, financial, or clinical record as a draft to be reviewed, never as ground truth.
Diarisation is the tool's ability to answer "who said what." Good diarisation makes a transcript navigable and lets summaries attribute commitments to the right person; poor diarisation turns a multi-party call into an unreadable wall of misattributed text. Diarisation is hardest when several people share one room and one microphone, or when speakers talk over each other. If your meetings are conference-room-heavy rather than one-person-per-tile video calls, weigh this heavily and test it directly.
A notetaker only saves time if it shows up automatically and puts notes where you already work. Check three integration layers: calendar (does it auto-join scheduled Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet calls?), collaboration (can it post summaries to Slack, email, or your docs tool?), and system of record (does it log calls against the right contact or deal in Salesforce or HubSpot, or push a note into your EHR?). Integration depth is often gated by plan — basic sync on lower tiers, automated field mapping and governance on business or enterprise tiers.
The headline feature is also the easiest to oversell. Summaries vary from genuinely useful, decision-focused recaps to bland restatements of the agenda. Action-item extraction is harder still: the test is whether the tool captures the specific commitment ("Priya will send the revised SOW by Friday") rather than a vague topic ("discussed the SOW"). Many tools now let you customise summary templates per meeting type — a discovery call and a sprint retro want very different structures. Look for that flexibility, and for the ability to edit and correct the output easily.
This is where meeting tools create the most organisational risk. Every one of these products records people, and recording law varies by jurisdiction — some regions require all parties to consent, others only one. Beyond consent, ask: where is audio and transcript data stored, for how long, and who can access it? Is data used to train the vendor's models, and can you opt out? Are SSO, SCIM provisioning, and audit logs available? For healthcare, is a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) offered, and on which plan? Involve security and legal early — retrofitting compliance after a rollout is far more painful than scoping it up front. Nothing on this page is legal advice; confirm your obligations with qualified counsel.
Three billing patterns dominate. Per-seat subscriptions (Otter, Fireflies, the clinical scribes) are predictable and easy for finance to control. Credit or usage metering — common for the AI features layered on top of transcription — can surprise heavy users who exhaust their allotment mid-month. Custom enterprise quotes (Gong, and the enterprise tiers of most tools) bundle a platform fee with per-user licences and require a sales conversation. Map the pricing model to your usage pattern: a team running back-to-back calls all day should scrutinise any credit caps, while a small, predictable team may be fine on a flat per-seat plan.
If your meetings are not exclusively in English, language support becomes a gating requirement rather than a nice-to-have. Check not only which languages are transcribed, but whether summaries and action items are generated in that language, and whether multilingual meetings (code-switching mid-call) are handled. Language coverage is frequently tied to higher-priced tiers, so confirm it is available on the plan you actually intend to buy.
Weigh these seven against your own meeting reality. A distributed software team and a multi-clinician practice will rank them in completely different orders — which is exactly why there is no single "best" meeting-intelligence tool. See our review methodology for how we test and weight each factor.
The Reviews
Seven tools, grouped by the job they do best. Pricing below reflects each vendor's published pricing page as of July 2026; where a vendor does not publish prices, we say so rather than guess.
Fireflies is the tool we most often suggest as a starting point for a general team. It sends a bot into your Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams calls, transcribes and summarises them, and can sync notes into a CRM. The free tier is unusually capable — unlimited transcription with AI summaries — which makes it easy to trial across a team before paying. Its conversation-intelligence and analytics features, available on higher tiers, let managers review talk time and topics across many meetings.
The main thing to watch is that the AI features are metered by credits. Light and moderate users rarely notice; teams that lean heavily on AI summaries and skills across dozens of daily meetings can exhaust their allotment and should model usage before standardising on a lower tier.
Otter is one of the most recognisable names in transcription, and for good reason: its live-captioning experience is fast and readable, and its in-app AI chat lets you interrogate a meeting after the fact ("what did we decide about the budget?"). It integrates with the major meeting platforms and is a comfortable choice for individuals, students, and small teams who mainly want clean transcripts and quick recaps.
The trade-off is that Otter's lower tiers cap you on monthly transcription minutes and file imports, and meeting-length limits apply below the Business plan. Power users who record all day will feel those ceilings and should price the Business tier accordingly.
Gong is a different class of product from the notetakers above. Rather than optimising for the individual meeting, it is built to analyse an entire revenue organisation's conversations — calls, emails, and deals — to surface coaching opportunities, deal-risk signals, and forecasting insight. If your question is "which behaviours separate our winning reps from the rest," Gong is the category's reference point, and it is deeply embedded in many enterprise sales stacks.
That power comes with a commitment. Gong does not publish prices: its own pricing page states that licences are priced per user, with an additional platform fee based on the number of users supported, and directs prospects to request a custom proposal. It is priced and scoped for teams, not individuals, and is overkill for anyone who simply wants meeting notes.
Metaview is a notetaker tuned specifically for hiring. Where a general tool produces a generic summary, Metaview structures interview notes around what recruiters and hiring managers actually need — capturing candidate responses, mapping them to a scorecard, and reducing the "furious typing instead of listening" problem that plagues live interviews. It has since expanded into a broader AI recruiting platform spanning notetaking, reports, and candidate sourcing.
Because Metaview now positions its full recruiting suite as an enterprise platform, published pricing is limited. Its site lists per-user sourcing plans, while the complete agentic recruiting platform is custom-quoted through sales. Recruiting teams should treat it as a platform decision rather than a per-seat app purchase.
Freed is an AI medical scribe aimed squarely at individual clinicians drowning in documentation. It listens to the patient encounter and drafts a clinical note in the clinician's own style, with specialty-specific templates. For solo practitioners and small practices, its self-serve model — sign up, try it, and start reducing charting time the same day — is a big part of the appeal, and a BAA is available for compliant use.
The key limitation on the entry plan is a monthly note cap: the Starter tier is limited to a set number of notes, so higher-volume clinicians need the unlimited Core or Premier tiers. Multi-clinician groups move to custom-quoted plans with SSO and admin controls.
Nabla is an ambient clinical assistant designed to generate structured notes from patient conversations, with a focus on integrating into clinician workflows and EHR systems at organisational scale. It is a natural candidate when the buyer is a clinic, group, or health system standardising documentation across many providers rather than an individual signing up on a card.
Nabla offers a free tier for individual clinicians to try the product, but organisation-level pricing is quote-based rather than published, reflecting its enterprise-healthcare positioning. As with any clinical tool, confirm the BAA, data-handling terms, and EHR integration details with your compliance and IT teams before deployment.
Heidi Health rounds out the clinical group with an unusually generous free plan: unlimited transcription, standard note templates, and task management at no cost. That makes it an easy way for a clinician to test AI scribing against their real visits before spending anything. Paid tiers layer on advanced templates, patient/session linking, document sharing, coding support, and team collaboration.
The limitation is straightforward: the free plan deliberately withholds the more advanced features — advanced templates, personalisation, coding, and team tools live on the paid Clinician and Practice plans. Heidi shows exact paid prices during sign-up rather than on its public pricing table, and offers a 14-day trial on paid tiers, so confirm the current figure before committing.
Choose by Situation
The fastest route to a decision is to start from the conversation you most need to capture. Here is where we would point four common buyers.
If you want revenue intelligence across the whole team — coaching, deal risk, forecasting — Gong is the reference platform, priced for teams via custom quote. If you mainly need call transcripts and summaries synced to your CRM at a lower cost, start with Fireflies.ai on a Business plan.
For stand-ups, planning, and cross-functional syncs, a general notetaker is ideal. Fireflies.ai and Otter.ai both have free tiers to trial widely; choose based on which summary style and integrations fit your existing Slack, docs, and calendar setup.
Interviews need structured, scorecard-ready notes and a defensible record. Metaview is purpose-built for hiring, letting interviewers stay present instead of typing. Confirm platform pricing with their sales team for anything beyond the free tier.
Patient encounters demand purpose-built, BAA-backed tools — never a general notetaker by default. Individual clinicians can start with Freed or the free plan from Heidi Health; health systems standardising at scale should evaluate Nabla. Involve compliance before recording any visit.
Questions & Answers
An AI meeting assistant is software that joins or records your calls and turns the conversation into a searchable transcript, a summary, and a list of action items. Most tools connect to Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet, label who said what through speaker diarisation, and push notes into tools like Slack, a CRM, or an EHR. More advanced products add conversation intelligence — analysing patterns across many meetings to surface coaching, deal-risk, or clinical-documentation insights.
For clear English audio from a single speaker on a good microphone, leading tools transcribe with high accuracy. Accuracy drops with heavy accents, crosstalk, low-quality microphones, background noise, and specialised vocabulary. Custom vocabulary lists, dedicated per-speaker audio channels, and higher-tier plans all improve results. Always spot-check transcripts before relying on them for anything consequential, such as a clinical note or a contract discussion.
In many jurisdictions, yes. Consent requirements vary — some regions require only one party to consent, while others require all parties. Recording without required consent can be unlawful. As a practical policy, disclose that an AI notetaker is present, obtain consent where required, and check your organisation's legal and compliance guidance. This page is informational and is not legal advice.
A notetaker focuses on the individual meeting: transcript, summary, and action items. Conversation intelligence analyses many conversations together to find trends — for example, which talk tracks correlate with won deals, or how often a rep discusses pricing. Tools like Gong sit firmly in the conversation-intelligence camp for revenue teams, while Fireflies and Otter start as notetakers and layer analytics on top.
Some are, but you must verify. General-purpose notetakers may offer HIPAA support only on specific plans and under a signed Business Associate Agreement (BAA). Purpose-built clinical scribes such as Freed, Nabla, and Heidi are designed for healthcare documentation and offer BAAs. Never assume compliance from marketing language — request the BAA, confirm data-handling terms, and involve your compliance team before recording any patient encounter.
Yes. Fireflies and Otter both offer free tiers, and Heidi offers a free plan with unlimited transcription. Free plans typically cap monthly minutes, storage, or advanced features, and may limit integrations or admin controls. For an individual testing the workflow, free plans are genuinely useful; for a team that needs unlimited meetings, CRM sync, SSO, or compliance features, a paid tier is usually required.
For dedicated revenue intelligence — deal analytics, coaching, and forecasting signals across an entire sales org — Gong is the category reference point, though it is priced for teams and quoted individually. For smaller teams that mainly want call transcripts and summaries synced to a CRM at a lower cost, Fireflies is a common starting point.
Most can. Tools typically connect to your calendar to auto-join scheduled meetings and to CRMs such as Salesforce or HubSpot to log call notes against the right contact or deal. The depth of integration varies by plan — basic sync may be available on lower tiers, while automated field mapping, custom workflows, and admin governance are usually reserved for business or enterprise plans.
Keep Exploring
Meeting intelligence overlaps with several other categories we cover. If your use case sits at the edge of this list, these are the next places to look.
Ready to decide?
Filter by transcription depth, integrations, compliance needs, and price in our side-by-side comparison tool — no sign-up, no affiliate links.