Notta vs Fireflies: Which AI Transcription Tool Deserves Your Attention in 2025?

Picture this: You’re frantically typing during a critical strategy meeting, desperately trying to capture every insight while simultaneously attempting to, you know, actually participate. Your fingers cramp, you miss half the discussion, and by the time you review your notes later, they read like a mysterious code that not even you can decipher.

Sound familiar? It happens to the best of us.

In a meeting-saturated work culture, the struggle to document conversations effectively is real. The average manager spends nearly 23 hours per week in meetings, yet studies show people retain only about 20% of what they hear. This disconnect leaves crucial action items falling through the cracks, brilliant ideas forgotten, and team members confused about their responsibilities.

That’s where AI transcription tools come to the rescue, transcribing your meetings, taking notes, and handling all the boring follow-up admin. 

Many AI meeting tools have joined the market in the past few years, but here we’re going to compare two of the big names: Notta vs Fireflies. After extensive testing across dozens of meetings and interview scenarios, this analysis provides key insights into which tool might work best for your specific needs.

Spoiler: We’ve found that for most business use cases, the best AI transcription tool in 2025 is Notta. With its remarkable accuracy, extensive multi-language support, and intuitive interface, Notta has established itself as the premier solution for turning spoken conversations into actionable text.

But Fireflies.ai is another strong contender, especially for personal users with simple needs. 

Both tools promise to free you from the tyranny of manual note-taking—but which one deserves your investment?

Let’s dive in and put these AI assistants through their paces.

Overview: Notta vs Fireflies at a Glance

Before getting into the nitty-gritty details, let’s take a bird’s-eye view of what each of these AI transcription powerhouses brings to the table.

What is Notta?

Notta is an AI-powered transcription and note-taking assistant that converts spoken language into text with impressive accuracy. Originally gaining popularity in Japan, Notta has expanded globally and now serves over a million users across 119 countries. The platform focuses on providing real-time transcription for meetings, interviews, lectures, and other spoken content.

What sets Notta apart is its comprehensive language support (transcription in 58 languages and translation between 42 languages) and its ability to join meetings automatically to capture and document conversations. The tool also offers advanced AI features like custom summaries, action item extraction, and a powerful search function that makes finding specific information in transcripts remarkably easy.

What is Fireflies?

Fireflies.ai positions itself as an AI meeting assistant that automatically records, transcribes, and searches across your voice conversations. It integrates with popular video conferencing platforms to capture meetings and generate searchable transcripts, allowing teams to collaborate more effectively.

Fireflies emphasizes its collaboration features, conversation intelligence, and integration capabilities. The platform offers a robust search function, automated topic detection, and custom vocabulary options to improve transcription accuracy for industry-specific terminology.

Core Functionality Comparison

While both tools excel at converting speech to text, they’ve each carved out their own niches. Notta shines with its language capabilities and flexible input options, making it ideal for international teams and content creators. On the other hand, Fireflies has positioned itself as more of a meeting intelligence platform, with stronger analytics and team collaboration features.

Notta feels more versatile and accessible for individual users and small teams, while Fireflies seems designed with larger organizations and extensive meeting ecosystems in mind. That said, both tools handle their core transcription functionality admirably – the difference comes down to the additional features and use cases that matter most to you.

Notta and Fireflies’ pricing plans also vary (and may influence your choice of tool), so we’ll examine these in more detail later.

Feature Comparison: Where Each Tool Excels

Now let’s dive deeper into some specific features and see how Fireflies and Notta stack up against each other where it really matters.

Transcription Capabilities

Accuracy

In testing across multiple scenarios, Notta consistently delivers on its claimed 98.86% accuracy rate, particularly for clear audio in quiet environments. It handles industry-specific terminology reasonably well, and any words it struggles with can be added to your custom vocabulary for future reference.

Fireflies doesn’t publicly advertise a specific accuracy percentage, but in tests, it performed slightly below Notta in technical conversations but showed comparable results for general business discussions. 

Both tools struggle similarly with heavy accents and poor audio quality, though Notta seems to handle accents better than Fireflies.

Neither tool is perfect – you’ll still need to review transcripts for errors – but Notta’s transcription engine seems slightly more refined overall.

Language Support

Notta is the clear winner here. With support for transcription in 58 languages and translation capabilities across 42 languages, Notta is the clear winner for international teams. Even more impressive is Notta’s bilingual transcription feature, which supports 11 language pairs, allowing you to speak in one language and generate a real-time transcript in another.

In contrast, Fireflies supports about 15+ languages for transcription but lacks Notta’s robust translation capabilities. If your team operates across multiple countries or frequently deals with content in various languages, this difference alone could tip the scales in Notta’s favor.

This functionality proves incredibly valuable when working with international partners; Notta can accurately capture conversations and simultaneously translate everything into your preferred language, saving hours of manual translation work and enabling fully bilingual meetings. That kind of functionality is simply unavailable with Fireflies and other alternatives like Otter.

File Format Support and Input Options

Both tools support common audio and video formats for upload and transcription. However, Notta offers a unique advantage with its ability to transcribe content directly from links. You can simply paste a YouTube URL, Dropbox link, or other shared media location, and Notta will process it without requiring you to download and re-upload the file.

This feature is particularly useful when analyzing webinars and podcast episodes; you can just grab the YouTube link and have a full transcript ready in minutes. Fireflies requires you to download these files first and then upload them to the platform, adding unnecessary steps to the workflow.

Meeting Integration

Platform Support

Both tools integrate impressively with major video conferencing platforms:

• Notta: Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Webex
• Fireflies: Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and several additional platforms

Fireflies has a slight edge here with a few additional integrations, but both cover the major platforms that most businesses use.

Both tools can sync with your Google or Outlook calendar to automatically join scheduled meetings.

User Experience

Interface and Navigation

Notta presents a clean, minimalist interface that prioritizes simplicity. The dashboard clearly displays your recordings, and the transcript view offers intuitive playback controls alongside the text. It’s particularly convenient how Notta makes it easy to navigate to specific points in a recording by clicking on text passages or timestamps.

Fireflies offers a more feature-rich interface that provides additional context around meetings, including analytics and topic breakdowns.

Mobile Accessibility

Both tools offer mobile apps for iOS and Android, allowing you to record and access transcripts on the go. Notta’s mobile app closely mirrors the web experience, maintaining the same clean design and core functionality.

Fireflies’ mobile app is comprehensive but doesn’t quite match the full capabilities of its web version.

Search Functionality

Both tools excel at making your transcripts searchable:

• Notta offers powerful search capabilities with timestamp linking, making it easy to jump to exactly where a topic was discussed
• Fireflies provides advanced search with filters for speakers, topics, and custom tags, along with a “topic tracker” that automatically identifies and categorizes discussion points

Fireflies has a slight advantage for teams that need to analyze large volumes of meeting data across multiple sessions. However, for individual use and smaller teams, Notta’s search functionality is more than sufficient and extremely user-friendly.

AI Features

Smart Summaries

Both tools offer AI-generated summaries of your recordings:

• Notta’s AI Notes provides concise overviews of key points discussed, focusing on the most important information
• Fireflies’ Smart Search and Topic Tracker automatically identify and summarize main discussion points and organize them by theme

In testing, Notta’s summaries tend to be more concise and readable, while Fireflies offers more detailed breakdowns that include topic categorization.

Action Item Extraction

Tracking action items from meetings is crucial for productivity:

• Notta can identify action items in transcripts, though this feature isn’t as prominently featured as in Fireflies
• Fireflies excels at automatically detecting and compiling action items, assignments, and deadlines mentioned during meetings

Fireflies has the edge here with its focus on actionable insights. Its ability to compile a clear list of who’s responsible for what and by when is more robust than Notta’s offering – but of course, both tools depend on this information being clearly stated in the meeting itself.

Additional AI Capabilities

Both tools continue to develop their AI features:

• Notta offers AI-powered translation, custom templates for meeting summaries, and a ChatGPT-like interface for querying your transcripts
• Fireflies provides sentiment analysis, topic clustering, and engagement metrics that analyze speaker participation

Notta’s AI feels more focused on practical transcription and language capabilities, while Fireflies leans toward analytical insights about conversational patterns. Your preference will depend on whether you value language flexibility or conversation intelligence more highly.

Notta vs Fireflies Pricing Comparison

Now for the all-important question: how do these tools compare in terms of cost? Let’s break down their pricing structures to see which offers better value for different types of users.

In terms of pure minutes-per-dollar, Fireflies offers more transcription time on its free and Pro tiers, while Notta is slightly better value on the Business plan. However, Notta provides more value in terms of additional features like translation services, which would require separate tools or services if you went with Fireflies.

If you just need simple transcription for a single user and you don’t need to download the transcripts, Fireflies’ free plan is probably sufficient.

For most other users, and especially those who will benefit from multi-lingual transcription and translation, Notta is probably the better choice.

Final Analysis

AI note-takers are one of many tools that can help with productivity at work, but one thing’s for sure: once you’ve tried them, you won’t want to take manual notes ever again.

After extensive testing and analysis, it’s clear that both Notta and Fireflies are excellent AI transcription tools with distinct strengths that appeal to different use cases.

Notta stands out with its intuitive interface, superior language capabilities, and link-based transcription. It’s the better choice for international teams, content creators, and users who prioritize simplicity and efficiency. Its ability to transcribe content directly from links and translate between multiple languages offers functionality that Fireflies simply doesn’t match.

Fireflies’ analytics features make it ideal for organizations that need to analyze conversation patterns, track action items, and manage large volumes of meeting content.

Both tools offer a free plan so you can test them out and get a feel for how they perform before committing. Try our top choice for free here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Notta better than Fireflies?

Notta is better for users who need multilingual support, intuitive interface, and direct link transcription. It offers transcription in 58 languages and translation between 42 languages, making it ideal for international teams. Fireflies performs better with meeting analytics and team collaboration features.

Can Notta and Fireflies transcribe recordings in multiple languages?

Yes, but with significant differences. Notta supports transcription in 58 languages and translation between 42 languages, including bilingual transcription in 11 language pairs. Fireflies supports transcription in 15+ languages but lacks Notta’s robust translation capabilities. For multilingual environments, Notta offers substantially better language support.

How do Notta and Fireflies integrate with video conferencing tools?

Both tools integrate well with major video conferencing platforms. Notta supports Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Webex. Fireflies supports these platforms plus several additional ones. Both can automatically join scheduled meetings through calendar integration.

Are there any free alternatives to Notta and Fireflies?

Yes, there are several free alternatives with varying capabilities. Otter.ai offers a free plan with 300 minutes per month and a 30-minute meeting limit. Microsoft 365 subscribers can access Microsoft Teams’ built-in transcription. Google Meet also offers basic transcription for certain account levels. However, these alternatives typically have more limited features compared to Notta and Fireflies, particularly regarding language support, meeting analytics, and integration options.