tl;dv vs Fireflies.ai

Both of these put a bot in the call and both have a free tier you can work from. What separates them is where the processing happens and how much you can do before paying, and those pull in opposite directions.

Where the processing happens

tl;dv lets you choose EU or US hosting for the AI processing, and no customer data is used to train the models. tl;dv scores 5 for privacy, the highest in this directory, and that combination is why.

Fireflies.ai scores 4 for privacy, which is strong but arrives differently: SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and HIPAA with a signed agreement on the enterprise tier. It excludes your data from training too. What it does not offer is a choice about which continent the processing happens on.

If you are handling client conversations under a European contract, that choice is not a preference — it is the thing your data protection officer will ask about first, and only one of these has an answer.

What the free tier stores, and for how long

Fireflies.ai gives you unlimited transcription and summaries before you pay anything, with API access on the free plan rather than held back as an enterprise upsell. Fireflies.ai scores 5 for value and 5 for ease.

The catch is storage rather than volume: the free plan is capped at four hundred minutes of stored audio for the whole team, and custom data retention waits for the advanced tiers. So you can record everything and keep very little.

tl;dv also gives unlimited transcription free, and deletes free-plan recordings after three months. Search across the whole archive is held back to a paid tier, which matters more than it sounds once you have a few hundred meetings in there. tl;dv scores 4 for value.

On the notes themselves Fireflies.ai is ahead. Fireflies.ai scores 5 for workflow fit and 4 for output depth, against tl;dv's 4 and 3, and it has CRM sync, chat delivery and cross-meeting questions where tl;dv does not.

Which should you choose?

Choose tl;dv if European hosting is a requirement rather than a preference, and you can live with a shallower set of notes and a three-month deletion clock on the free plan.

Choose Fireflies.ai if you want the deeper product and the more generous free tier, and United States processing is acceptable — which for most teams it is, right up until a client asks.