I gave Fireflies.ai three weeks of honest effort. This was last fall, right around the time I was testing every transcription tool I could find because the Sunday notes problem had gotten bad enough that I'd started dreading it. Fireflies was the third tool in the rotation, after Otter and before I landed on Fathom, and the three weeks told me a lot about what it's built for and who it's actually built for.
Short version: Fireflies is an impressive piece of software that solves problems most solo coaches don't have. If you're running a group practice or a consulting firm with a team, keep reading. If you're solo with a dozen clients and a Notion setup, I can probably save you some time.
What Fireflies actually does
Fireflies.ai is a meeting intelligence platform. It joins your calls (Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, and a few others), records audio, transcribes the conversation, generates AI summaries, and files everything into a searchable archive. So far, that sounds like every other transcription tool. Where Fireflies diverges is in what happens after the transcript exists.
The platform is built around the assumption that your meetings produce work: action items, decisions, follow-ups, things that need to get assigned and tracked. It integrates with CRMs (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, and others), project management tools (Asana, Trello, Monday), and communication platforms (Slack, Notion). It can automatically push meeting summaries, action items, and conversation highlights into those systems without you touching anything.
For a sales team running forty calls a week across six reps, that automation is genuinely valuable. Conversations produce data, data feeds the CRM, the CRM drives the pipeline. The whole system works because the meetings have a predictable structure: discovery, qualification, objection handling, next steps.
Coaching sessions don't have that structure. And that disconnect is where most of my experience with Fireflies got interesting.
The automation promise
The thing that drew me to Fireflies initially was the automation. I'd been clicking "record" manually in Fathom and Otter, and on a four-session Thursday that's four more things to remember. Fireflies offered to handle it: connect your calendar, and every scheduled call gets recorded and transcribed automatically. No clicking, no remembering, no missed first five minutes because you forgot to start the tool.
In theory, that's appealing. In practice, it created a problem I hadn't anticipated.
I have a client, a VP at a mid-size logistics company, who uses the first two minutes of every session to settle in. She walks in (virtually) still carrying the energy of whatever meeting she just left, and there's a transition that happens where she shifts from executive mode to something more open. That transition is part of the work. When Fireflies auto-joined the call and its bot appeared in the participant list, she noticed immediately. "Who's Fred?" (I'd renamed the bot, which Fireflies lets you do, but apparently "Fred" was not convincing.)
We had the consent conversation. She was fine with it. But the transition that session took longer, and the first ten minutes felt different. Not ruined. Different in a way I noticed because I pay attention to those things.
Two other clients commented on the bot during that three-week stretch. One laughed it off. One asked, quietly, whether they could opt out for certain sessions. I said of course, and then I was back to manually managing which sessions got recorded and which didn't, which defeated the automation that was the whole point of choosing Fireflies over something simpler.
The bot in the room
I want to stay on this because it's the thing that mattered most in my testing.
Fathom integrates into Zoom more quietly. There's a small indicator, but it doesn't appear as a separate participant. Fireflies joins as a visible bot participant with a name and a profile. You can rename it, you can change the avatar, but it's still a third presence in what's supposed to be a two-person conversation.
In a sales call or a team standup, nobody cares. In a coaching session, where the quality of the space between two people is the actual product, that third presence registers differently. Not always. Not with every client. But enough that I couldn't ignore it.
This isn't a flaw in the software. It's a design decision that makes perfect sense for Fireflies' core audience. It just happens to be a poor fit for what coaching sessions require.
Transcription and summary quality
The transcription accuracy is solid. Comparable to Fathom, noticeably better than what Otter was producing when I tested it. Conversational speech with pauses, half-sentences, and restarts gets handled well enough that the transcript is usable without heavy cleanup. I didn't encounter the kind of meaning-changing errors I described in my Otter review (the "waiting for permission" vs. "waiting for promotion" issue). Whether that's because the underlying model is better or because I was testing a smaller sample, I can't say definitively.
The AI summaries are roughly on par with Otter's and a step behind Fathom's. Same fundamental issue: they're structured around action items and decisions, which is the wrong frame for a coaching conversation. You get "Topics discussed: leadership challenges, relationship with board, upcoming restructuring." You don't get anything about the weight of what was said, the hesitation before a particular admission, the way a client's energy shifted when they started talking about something they'd been avoiding.
I ran the same session through Fireflies' summary and then pasted the transcript into Margaret with my usual prompts. The difference was significant enough that I stopped looking at Fireflies' built-in summaries after the first week.
The features you probably don't need
Here's where I'll be direct about what most solo coaches will encounter.
Fireflies has a conversation intelligence dashboard. It tracks talk-to-listen ratios, sentiment analysis, question frequency, topic trends over time. If you're managing a team of coaches or consultants and you want to analyze patterns across dozens or hundreds of conversations, that's a real capability. For a solo practice, I opened the dashboard once, thought "huh, interesting," and never went back.
The CRM integrations are the headline feature for sales teams. Fireflies can push call data directly into your pipeline. I don't use a CRM. I use a Notion database with about forty people in it. The CRM integration does nothing for me, and based on conversations with other solo coaches, it does nothing for most of them either.
The team collaboration features, shared workspaces, comment threads on transcripts, collaborative playlist of key moments, are built for organizations. Five people reviewing the same call, tagging sections, building a shared knowledge base. Again, real value in the right context. That context is not a solo practice.
What you're paying for with Fireflies, especially on the paid plans ($19 to $39 per month depending on the tier), includes a lot of infrastructure you'll never touch. The transcription itself, which is the part most coaches actually need, is available from tools that cost the same or less and don't come bundled with team features that clutter the experience.
Privacy, same conversation as always
Everything I said in my Fathom and Otter reviews applies here with the same weight. Fireflies stores recordings and transcripts on their servers. Their data handling policies are standard for a SaaS company. Standard for a SaaS company is not the same as appropriate for coaching sessions where clients are sharing things they haven't told anyone else.
Fireflies does offer an option to automatically delete recordings after processing, which is better than tools that store everything indefinitely by default. They also have a business plan with more granular retention controls. These are positive design decisions. They don't change the fundamental question of whether your client's most vulnerable disclosures should live on a third-party server, and that question still deserves more thought than "the terms of service say it's fine."
My approach hasn't changed: cloud transcription tools for discovery calls, intake conversations, and specific situations where there's explicit agreement. Not as a default for paid coaching sessions.
Who Fireflies is actually for
If you run a group practice with multiple coaches and you want a centralized system for capturing, organizing, and analyzing conversations across the team, Fireflies is probably the most capable option in this category. The team features aren't decoration. They're well-built, and if your operation has the scale to use them, the investment makes sense.
If you're a consultant who splits time between coaching and facilitation and you're doing fifteen to twenty calls a week across multiple clients and projects, the automation and CRM integration solve real problems at that volume.
If you're a solo coach seeing twelve to fifteen clients a week on Zoom, with a Notion setup and no CRM, Fireflies is more tool than you need. The automation isn't worth the bot-in-the-room tradeoff. The team features don't apply. The CRM integrations connect to systems you're not using.
What I use instead
I've written about this in enough detail elsewhere that I'll keep it brief here. Fathom handles transcription on discovery calls and the occasional session where recording is agreed upon. The free tier covers what I need. The transcript feeds into Margaret, where my session prep prompts produce something actually useful for coaching. For everything else, it's the voice memo workflow: a few minutes talking to my phone on my walk between sessions, transcribed and processed.
The whole system costs me nothing beyond the Claude subscription I'm already paying for. That's not the reason I chose it over Fireflies, but it's a pleasant side effect.
The honest comparison
If you're deciding between transcription tools and Fireflies is on your list, here's how I'd frame it.
Choose Fireflies if you run a team, need CRM integration, or do enough volume that automatic recording is a real time save (and your clients are comfortable with a visible bot participant). The platform is well-built and the team features justify the pricing at scale.
Choose Fathom if you're solo, want clean transcription with minimal session intrusion, and plan to do your real processing in a separate AI tool anyway. The free tier is genuinely functional and the highlight feature is useful in ways I didn't expect.
Choose neither if your practice is small enough that voice memos and a good AI layer handle everything. Sometimes the simplest workflow is the right one, and the fifteen minutes you'd spend evaluating and configuring a new tool are better spent preparing for your next client.
The thing I keep returning to with all of these tools: the transcription is an input, not an output. It gives you raw material. What you do with that material, the questions you ask, the patterns you notice, the way you hold what a client said against what they meant, that's still the part that makes your notes worth writing and your next session worth having. No tool, regardless of how many features it bundles in, is doing that part for you.