Fathom vs Fireflies.ai

These two compete on the same ground — a free plan generous enough that most individuals never pay — so the comparison is about where each one draws the line, and about a capture choice only one of them offers.

What the free plans actually include

Fathom gives away unlimited recordings, unlimited storage and unlimited transcription in thirty-eight languages, and says explicitly that you are under no obligation to upgrade when the premium preview ends. What it limits is advanced summaries: five calls a month, after which you get the general template.

Fireflies.ai gives away unlimited transcription and summaries, live notes, meeting search, its assistant and API access. Its cap is storage — four hundred minutes for the whole team, after which older meetings must be deleted. So Fathom caps the intelligence and Fireflies.ai caps the archive, and which hurts more depends on whether you revisit old meetings.

Bot or no bot

Fathom offers a choice: send a recorder into the meeting, or capture without one. The bot-free mode is currently marked as being in beta. That flexibility is worth real money if some of your meetings tolerate a visible recorder and others do not, because it means one tool covers both cases.

Fireflies.ai sends a recorder. It does that well and it can join automatically from your calendar, but there is no mode where nothing appears in the participant list.

Which should you choose?

Choose Fathom if you want unlimited free recording and sometimes need to capture a meeting without announcing it, and check whether the five-summary monthly limit binds before relying on it. Choose Fireflies.ai if you want the broadest language coverage, an API at no cost, and a recorder that turns up without being asked. For a team where CRM records need updating after calls, Fathom's business tier writes into record fields rather than linking back, which is the behaviour sales teams actually want.