Choose Audionotes if you want a more flexible notes tool that is not built around a meeting bot. Choose Fireflies if your workflow starts and ends with recorded meetings, searchable transcripts, and post-call follow-up.
Fact-checked August 29, 2026
Review methodology: We collected the most recent App Store reviews available for each product (March 2026) and independently coded every review by theme: accuracy, reliability, pricing, and usability. The summary above reflects aggregate patterns across the full set. The quoted reviews were selected as the most representative of each product's top-cited praise and top-cited complaint, chosen for typicality, not extremity.
Audionotes has built a loyal following among professionals who spend a lot of time in meetings and want reliable summaries without babysitting a recording. Users consistently praise the transcription accuracy, the summary quality, and how well it holds up with multiple speakers in noisy environments. Reliability comes up often: the app works consistently across mobile and desktop, and the dev team's responsiveness to issues has earned trust over time. The main friction some users mention is wanting more control over when the AI kicks in, rather than it processing automatically every time.
"Great transcription and good features like mind map, summary and meeting minutes. It is better than a lot of other apps in this domain!!"
Source: Audionotes on the App Store
"Want to love this more but I don't want it to use AI until I choose, that option isn't there. The simple summary made up a lot of 'informational' text I don't need, and it creates a delay."
Source: Audionotes on the App Store
Fireflies earns strong praise for its transcription accuracy, speaker identification by name, and the ability to generate detailed meeting summaries that let users stay present in conversations. Its free plan includes unlimited transcription and AI summaries with 400 minutes of storage per team. On the flip side, some users report the app failing to actually record meetings while appearing to work, which raises concerns for a transcription-focused product. Privacy questions around meeting-bot participation, required Google/Microsoft login, and the cancellation process are also noted in reviews.
"Recently had issues with a competitor stopping recordings within 10-15 min of meetings. My trust was gone & gave Fireflies a chance. WOW, totally new level of detail."
Source: Fireflies on the App Store
"The app says it's still processing the meeting. After waiting for DAYS, their support just tells me that nothing was recorded. Lost Meeting. Lost Revenue. Lost Respect. Lost Trust."
Source: Fireflies on the App Store
30-minute two-speaker English conversation with moderate background noise, tested March 2026 by the Audionotes team. Transcription accuracy scored by a human evaluator; summary quality scored by an LLM judge against a fixed rubric; recording reliability derived from App Store review patterns. Full methodology and scoring rubrics.
| Max Recording 360 minAudionotes 2h Free/Pro 3h Business 4h EnterpriseFireflies | Transcription 9/10Audionotes 7/10Fireflies | Summary Quality 9/10Audionotes 7/10Fireflies | Offline Capture YesAudionotes NoFireflies | Speaker Diarization YesAudionotes YesFireflies | Reliability 8/10Audionotes 4/10Fireflies |
Audionotes delivered more consistent transcription accuracy; Fireflies showed more reliability variability in recording quality.
Fireflies supports several capture routes: meeting bot, Chrome extension, desktop and mobile apps, audio/video uploads, and API. The bot can join eligible live meetings, while the mobile app is documented for in-person conversations and the desktop app for calls. Audionotes also works across voice memos, text, photos, YouTube links, and uploaded files, making it the stronger fit when capture needs to extend beyond Fireflies' meeting and call workflows. Winner: Depends on workflow
Fireflies uses proprietary transcription with speaker diarization by name, pulling participant names from your calendar or meeting context. Its free plan lists unlimited transcription and AI summaries with 400 minutes of storage per team; Pro lists 8,000 minutes of storage per seat. Audionotes is positioned as a broader notes product rather than a dedicated meeting transcription platform. Winner: Fireflies for meetings; Audionotes for general workflows
Fireflies generates structured meeting summaries with chapters, action items, topic timestamps, and a Soundbite feature for clipping shareable moments from calls. Audionotes summaries are more flexible across input types (voice memos, images, YouTube) and include mind maps and document-style outputs, but Fireflies' meeting-specific format is more detailed for post-call handoffs to teammates or CRM fields. Winner: Depends on use case
Fireflies includes Fred AI, a chatbot that lets you ask questions across your entire meeting history, useful for finding who committed to what on a past call. Audionotes offers broader AI chat across mixed note types including voice memos, images, and YouTube, not just meeting transcripts, giving it more utility outside meeting-heavy workflows. Winner: Depends on workflow
Fireflies organises around meetings first, with a searchable transcript library, speaker-specific search, and team-wide meeting repositories. Audionotes provides folders, tags, and a more general-purpose knowledge library that works across all note types beyond meetings, making it the stronger choice for mixed personal and professional capture. Winner: Audionotes
Fireflies supports audio and video file uploads, useful for processing recordings that were not captured live. Audionotes accepts audio uploads plus images, text, and YouTube links, giving it a broader ingestion surface for content that did not originate from a scheduled meeting. Winner: Depends on input type
Fireflies exports transcripts as PDF, DOCX, SRT, CSV, and JSON, with direct integration pushes to Notion, Slack, and Salesforce. Audionotes exports to Markdown, Text, PDF, and Word, and can publish notes as a shareable webpage, more flexible for content creation, but less targeted for CRM or subtitle workflows. Winner: Fireflies
Fireflies can use a meeting bot for calendar-connected calls and also documents capture through its Chrome extension, desktop app, mobile app, uploads, and API. Audionotes is available on Mac and mobile and has no meeting bot; capture is user-started or begins from an uploaded file, trading automation for control over what is recorded. Winner: Fireflies
Fireflies integrates natively with Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Slack, Notion, Zapier, Google Calendar, and Outlook, a deep CRM and team-workflow integration layer. Audionotes covers Notion, Zapier, and WhatsApp, which works well for personal note routing but does not match Fireflies' CRM depth for sales or team use cases. Winner: Depends on workflow
Fireflies documents AES-256 at rest, TLS in transit, SOC 2 Type II, and GDPR. HIPAA with a BAA is available on Enterprise only. When its meeting bot is used, a third-party participant joins the call, something worth considering for confidential discussions. Audionotes offers GDPR compliance and encryption in transit and at rest without needing a participant in the room. Winner: Depends on requirements
Find your workflow, find your tool.
Choose : Fireflies
Why? : Fireflies pushes call summaries directly into Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive. Audionotes has no CRM sync.
Choose : Fireflies
Why? : The shared team workspace, searchable meeting history, and speaker-named transcripts make it better for team-wide meeting ops.
Choose : Audionotes
Why? : No bot joins the call, so no awkward disclosure moment. You record manually and get a clean summary without needing the other party to consent to an AI participant.
Choose : Audionotes
Why? : Audionotes captures YouTube, images, voice memos, and text alongside audio. Fireflies also supports uploads, but its documented capture options focus on meetings, calls, and audio/video files.
Choose : Audionotes
Why? : Audionotes works for lectures, voice memos, and mixed media. Fireflies also documents mobile recording for in-person conversations and audio/video uploads, but its product positioning is centered on meeting and call workflows.
Choose : Audionotes
Why? : When used, Fireflies' meeting bot appears as a named participant in the call, which some clients or jurisdictions flag. Audionotes has no bot and processes user-started recordings or uploads.
Billed Annually: $129.99/year
Monthly: $18 per seat/month. Annual billing: $10 per seat/month ($120/year). Pro includes 8,000 minutes of storage per seat; Business includes unlimited storage.
Pricing checked August 2026
No tool is perfect. Here's what to expect.
Key takeaway: Fireflies lives inside your calendar; Audionotes lives outside it, which makes it more flexible but less automatic.
People usually move from Fireflies to Audionotes when they want less meeting-bot overhead and a product that also handles ideas, personal notes, and non-meeting content well.
Switch if you feel boxed into Fireflies's narrower workflow and want one tool to handle ideas, meetings, lectures, personal notes, and mixed-media note creation too. See also: how to record and transcribe meeting minutes . Also evaluating Audionotes vs Granola or Audionotes vs Notta? Those comparisons cover similar trade-offs.
Choose Audionotes if your note-taking extends beyond meeting rooms. If you capture ideas on a commute, process YouTube research, record in-person conversations, or want one product for voice, images, and text alongside meetings, Audionotes is the broader tool.
Choose Fireflies if your workday is structured around meeting and call workflows and you value Fireflies' bot, desktop/mobile recording, uploads, Chrome extension, API, and CRM-oriented integrations.
Final recommendation: Pick Audionotes if meetings are one part of your note-taking, not the whole thing. Pick Fireflies if CRM-ready meeting summaries and its meeting/call capture options are the specific problems you are solving.
We evaluated each product using a mix of official product documentation, pricing pages, privacy and security materials, app store listings, public review data, and hands-on testing where available. We prioritized directly verifiable claims and avoided filling gaps with assumptions.
Where possible, we compared products across the same criteria, including pricing, feature depth, export options, integrations, platform coverage, privacy controls, and review sentiment. If a detail was unclear or not publicly documented, we marked it as unspecified rather than guessing.
Let ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity help you to choose.
Click a button and see what your favourite AI says about Audionotes.app.
