Fireflies alternatives in 2026: meeting notes without a bot

Fireflies is a meeting bot. It joins your Zoom, Meet or Teams call as a participant named Fireflies Notetaker, records, and pushes the transcript into your CRM and Slack. People look for alternatives for one of two reasons: they do not want a bot in the participant list, or their meetings are not video calls at all.

TL;DR: For meetings in a room, or any recording you already have, AI Transcribe on iPhone is the bot-free alternative: record from the phone on the table, get a transcript with speakers, tap once for meeting notes and action items. For video calls you still want captured without a bot, record on the platform and import the file. If the CRM integrations were the point, the alternatives are other bots, not phone apps.

Why people leave Fireflies

• The bot. Clients and candidates notice "Fireflies Notetaker has joined". In some rooms that changes the conversation.
• In-person meetings. The bot cannot sit at a table. The mobile app can record in person, but the product is built around calls.
• Storage, not minutes. The free plan advertises unlimited transcription; the constraint is the storage cap, around 400 minutes per team, after which older transcripts make way for new ones (as of July 2026). There is also a 150-minute cap per uploaded file.
• Per-seat pricing when all one person wanted was notes.

The bot-free alternatives

AI Transcribe: for meetings in a room and recordings you already have

Record from the phone for up to two hours, or import any audio or video file up to three hours. Transcript with speaker labels and timestamps in 32 languages. Then Create meeting notes, Create a todo list, Extract dates, summaries, translation, export as text or PDF. Nothing joins a call and nothing is connected to a calendar.

• Cost: free to download; Pro subscription, weekly or annual
• Where Fireflies wins: automatic capture of scheduled calls, and the integrations

Record on the platform, then import

Zoom, Meet and Teams can all record a call natively, with the host's permission, and no third-party bot appears. Download the file, import it, run the same tools. This is the bot-free way to keep video calls in the same workflow as in-person ones.

Otter, Notta and the other bots

If you want the bot workflow but a different vendor, Otter and Notta both offer it. They are bots too, with the same participant-list presence. See AI Transcribe vs Otter and AI Transcribe vs Notta.

Side by side

	AI Transcribe	Fireflies
Joins calls as a bot	No	Yes
Records in the room	Yes, 2 h	Mobile app, secondary
Import a recording	Yes, up to 3 h	Yes, up to 150 min per file
Speaker labels	Yes	Yes
Meeting notes and action items	Yes, 20+ tools	Yes
CRM and Slack integrations	No, export text or PDF	Yes
Free tier	Free trial	Unlimited transcription, ~400 min storage

Frequently asked questions

Is there a Fireflies alternative that does not join the meeting? Yes. Record on the platform, or from a phone in the room, and use an app that works on the recording afterwards. AI Transcribe is built for that shape.

Can I get Fireflies-style summaries for an in-person meeting? Yes. The phone on the table is the microphone; the AI tools produce the same summary, action items and dates from the transcript.

Do I lose the integrations? The direct CRM and Slack connectors are Fireflies' strength. With a phone app you export the notes as text or PDF and paste or share them. For one person that is a few seconds; for a sales team pushing every call into Salesforce it is the reason to stay.

Check these for yourself

Limits and pricing in this category change often. These are the primary sources for every app named above, so you can check the numbers rather than take our word for them:

• Otter: App Store · official site
• Notta: App Store · official site
• Fireflies: App Store · official site
• AI Transcribe, App Store