Fathom vs Fireflies: The Answer Flips at the CRM (2026)

TL;DR: Fathom vs Fireflies in 2026

1. Fathom has the best free plan in the category. Unlimited recording, transcription, and storage on every tier with no minute caps. One person who just wants free call notes can stop reading here.
2. For a sales team the price flips. Fireflies syncs calls into Salesforce or HubSpot from $10 a seat. Fathom charges $25 for the same job on its Business tier. That is more than double.
3. Fireflies has 100+ languages, iOS and Android apps, and the biggest integration catalog. Fathom has unlimited storage on every plan, a simpler product, and no AI credit meter.
4. Both tools work after the call ends, through a bot in the participant list, and neither helps while the deal is still being decided. That part is Convo's job. It coaches you live during the call and still writes the summary after.

Every Comparison Gives You the Same Answer

Search fathom vs fireflies and you will read the same conclusion over and over. Fathom is for individuals whereas Fireflies is for teams. One comparison I read while writing this blog post scored them identically at 4.4 stars each.

I don't think that's true. We ran Fireflies for months as our own notetaker while building Convo, and we put Fathom through the same calls for our comparison posts. The two barely compare in some functionalities. They answer different questions and happen to share a search results page. Without a clear winner, a sales team with budget has no obvious place to invest..

So here is my version that clearly picks sides. I re-checked every price on the vendors' own pricing pages this week, and two of the "facts" the other comparisons keep repeating are out of date. I flag both where they appear.

The Quick Comparison

My take. Fathom is the best free notetaker you can install today, and for a solo consultant that settles it. Once a sales team needs calls landing in the CRM, Fireflies wins on price and it is not close. But both tools start working after you hang up, and the deal was decided before that. Convo is in the third column because it helps you win the call while it is happening. That is a different job.

Fathom and Fireflies compete over who writes the better record of the call. Convo competes over how the call goes.

How I Compared Them

Convo is our product. It does not compete with these two on CRM documentation, but it does compete for the same budget, so weigh my read with that in mind. We used Fireflies as our daily notetaker for months and ran Fathom on the same calls. I re-checked both pricing pages this week (Fathom's and Fireflies') and pulled in independent test data where our own use was not enough. Where a claim comes from a vendor's marketing, I say so.

The Free Plan Is Fathom's, and It Is Not Close

Fathom's free tier gives you unlimited recordings, unlimited transcription, unlimited storage, and instant AI summaries. No minute caps anywhere. It works across Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, and you never enter a card number.

Here is the first stale fact. Most comparisons still say Fathom caps free users at five AI summaries a month. That cap is gone from Fathom's current pricing page. You now get a basic summary on every call for nothing, and Premium at $16 a seat annual is where the 15+ summary templates, AI action items, and the meeting assistant live.

Fireflies' free tier looks generous until you get to storage. Transcription and summaries are unlimited, but the plan stores 400 minutes per team, shared, with a two-hour cap per recording. One active rep fills 400 minutes inside two weeks and old calls start falling out of the archive. In practice it is a two-week trial.

Think of Fathom's free plan like a hotel breakfast. Nobody charges you for it because it is priced into the room they expect you to book. So let's look at the room rates.

The Price Flips at the CRM

Most fathom vs fireflies comparisons treat pricing as one row in a table. It makes more sense to price the jobs you are actually buying.

All prices annual billing. Monthly billing runs higher, $20 and $34 for Fathom's Premium and Business, $18 and $29 for Fireflies' Pro and Business.

The third row is the one that matters for a sales team. Getting calls into the CRM without anyone typing is the feature that makes a notetaker useful to a pipeline, and it costs $10 a seat at Fireflies and $25 at Fathom. A ten-seat team pays Fireflies $1,200 a year for it. The same team pays Fathom $3,000.

The second stale fact sits in the same tables. A well-ranked comparison currently lists SSO on Fathom's Team tier. Fathom's own page puts SSO and SCIM on Enterprise only, custom quote. If your IT department requires SSO before rollout, neither tool stays cheap, and Fireflies at least prints its number.

> "Fathom's free plan is the best deal in the category right up until your CRM enters the conversation. Then it becomes the most expensive path on the page."

None of this makes Fathom overpriced. Its Business tier includes coaching scorecards and deal views, and Fireflies holds those back for its own $19 Business plan. But the cheap-vs-paid framing is backwards for teams. Fathom stops being free right when a sales team starts needing it. Fireflies gets called the compromise in every comparison and ends up the cheapest serious way to run calls into a CRM.

There is a second number worth putting next to these prices, which is what one slipped call costs you. The meeting ROI calculator works it out in a minute, and Convo costs less than either tool's team tier.

What Fireflies Does That Fathom Cannot

The gap that surprised me most is mobile, and nobody on page one of the comparisons treats it as more than a footnote. Fireflies has iOS and Android apps. Fathom has none, and its help pages list mobile as unsupported. A rep who wants to log a call from the car park after an on-site cannot do it with Fathom.

Fireflies also transcribes 100+ languages. Fathom covers 38 and only summarizes in 6. That matters a lot if you sell across Europe. Half our own calls happen in German or Spanish, and a notetaker that only summarizes English calls would be furniture for us.

Then integrations. Fireflies pushes transcripts, action items, and contacts into Salesforce, HubSpot, or Pipedrive and lists 100+ native ones, where Fathom keeps a focused set of around 26 and leans on Zapier for the rest. Fireflies also transcribes uploaded audio and video files, up to 100MB even on the free plan. Fathom does not transcribe files at all.

Two cautions before you buy. Fireflies meters its AI extras through a shared credit pool, 20 credits on Free and Pro, 30 on Business, and its own docs price each query by "the complexity and effort required." So how much AI you actually get depends on how hard your team leans on it, and you find out mid-quarter. Calendar sync also auto-joins anything with a meeting link, including calls you do not host, so the Notetaker shows up in meetings nobody remembers inviting it to.

What Fathom Does That Fireflies Cannot

Storage first. Fathom is unlimited on every tier, free included. Fireflies caps Pro at 8,000 minutes per seat, which is about 133 hours. A rep doing three hours of calls a day hits that in nine weeks, and Fireflies only lifts the cap on its $19 Business tier.

Fathom is also the simpler product. You can hand it to a new hire with no walkthrough, the summary shows up seconds after the call ends, and clipping a highlight takes two clicks. Fireflies' dashboard carries AskFred, AI Skills, Voice Agents, a task manager, and a settings tree our team needed a real onboarding session for.

And Fathom has no credit meter anywhere. The plan price is the bill.

On transcription accuracy the honest answer is that both are good and neither leads the category. Fireflies' own blog claims 99% in English, which is marketing. Independent tests put Fireflies around 90 to 95 and Fathom around 85 to 90, and our experience matches. Both trail Otter in noisy audio. Take every accuracy number in this category as a rough guide, including those. And if accuracy is the thing you care about most, the tool you actually want is Otter.

The Bot in the Participant List

Both products join your meeting as a visible participant, "Fathom Notetaker" or "Fireflies.ai Notetaker," and everyone on the call sees it arrive.

For Fireflies the visibility question is now in court. Cruz v. Fireflies.AI Corp., filed December 2025, alleges it creates voiceprints without the written consent Illinois law requires, including from meeting guests who never made an account. Cornell blocks Fireflies from Zoom automatically, and Tufts, Oxford, and Cambridge have all moved against note-taking bots in their own ways. Twelve US states require all-party consent for recording, and the exposure belongs to whoever switched the bot on. The full picture is in our Fireflies review.

Fathom has had no lawsuit, and its pricing page now lists bot-free capture in beta for Mac.

> "When the category's best-known bot product starts building the botless version, the argument about which capture model wins is over."

Granola made that case first, and bot-free capture is how Convo has worked from day one on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

The Part of the Call Neither One Touches

Both tools treat the meeting as something that already happened. Fathom writes it up and Fireflies files it under the right contact. Neither one has anything for you while the prospect is saying the price feels high and the deal is tipping one way or the other.

A notetaker is CCTV for your meetings. It can show you how the deal died, but it was never going to step in and stop it.

That moment is the job Convo was built for. It listens locally on your machine, no bot in the room, and when the objection lands, the response you prepared for exactly that objection is already on screen, worded the way you would say it. It hears budget and timeline signals and marks them with a follow-up question. It remembers your history with the account, so when the buyer references "what we discussed in May," the context surfaces without you digging. Run discovery on BANT, SPICED, or MEDDPICC and the playbook fills itself in while the prospect talks. And when the call ends, the summary and follow-up draft are waiting. That is the part Fathom and Fireflies were doing anyway.