Fathom vs Fireflies: Which Tool Should a Sales Team Buy?

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. Convo is the best alternative to Fathom and Fireflies. It helps you win more deals by helping you what to say next, identify buying signals, and ask the right questions while the conversation is happening.

Every Comparison Gives You the Same Answer

Search fathom vs fireflies and you will read the exact 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 agree at all with this equal rating. 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price on the vendors' own pricing pages this week, and two of the "facts" the other comparisons keep repeating are out of date.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. Convo is the best of the three for a sales team. Fathom and Fireflies are documentation tools that record the meeting and write it up after it is over. Convo works during the meeting itself. It helps you react to the difficult moments while the prospect is still speaking and after the meeting it writes up the summary like the other two.

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

How I Compared Them

Fireflies did our own meeting notes for several months, and Fathom ran next to it so we could see how much of the job its free plan really does. Every price below was re-checked on the vendors' own pricing pages in August 2026 (Fathom's and Fireflies'), with annual and monthly billing named separately since the two sit up to 44 percent apart.

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 with no minute caps anywhere. It works with all meeting platforms and you never enter a card number.

Here are the first bad news on this "free" offering. 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 no summary on every call, 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 with a two-hour cap per recording. If you're a sales person which fills 400 minutes easily you will upgrade soon. In practice it is a two-week trial.

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 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 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.

The integration list is longer too. Fireflies pushes transcripts, action items, and contacts into Salesforce, HubSpot, or Pipedrive and lists 100+ native ones, whereas 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 limits 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 is the first difference. Fathom is unlimited on every tier, free included, whereas 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, so the plan price is the whole 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.

Convo helps you win more deals by helping you in real-time what to say next. Think of the last deal you lost. I am sure in this call came one moment where you noticed exactly where the conversation went sideways and the transcript you read afterwards changed nothing about it. The prospect pushes back and the response is on your screen before they finish the sentence. They ask about pricing or scope and the answer comes straight from the documents you uploaded. The Playbook ticks off your BANT or MEDDPICC questions while the prospect answers them. You hang up and the summary and the follow-up draft are already there. Fathom and Fireflies charge for that last part and with Convo it is included.