Fireflies and Telmi both listen to your calls and both write notes. Past that, they’re built for different people. Fireflies is a meeting recorder and analytics tool that scales to whole organizations. Telmi is a live assistant for the person on the call, on their Mac.
That makes this less a head-to-head and more a question of which job you’re hiring a tool for.
The short version
- Pick Fireflies if you need meetings recorded, searchable, and analyzed across a team, synced into your CRM, and covered by compliance standards like SOC 2 Type II or HIPAA.
- Pick Telmi if you’re an individual who wants help answering questions during your own calls, without a bot in the meeting.
What Fireflies does well
Fireflies is a mature product with a long feature list. The parts that stand out:
- Coverage. The Fireflies Notetaker joins Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and more than ten other platforms. There’s also a Chrome extension that captures without the bot, plus mobile apps and a desktop app.
- Conversation analytics. Topic trackers, sentiment, and talk-time analytics across your meetings. Useful for managers who want to see patterns across many calls.
- AskFred. An AI assistant for asking questions about your meetings.
- Integrations. CRM integrations on paid tiers and an API.
- Compliance. SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, ISO 42001, HIPAA on Enterprise with private storage, SSO, SCIM, audit logs, and zero data retention. For a security review, that’s a strong list. Telmi has none of these certifications or admin features yet.
Fireflies also shows real-time notes and a live transcript during the meeting, so it isn’t purely an after-the-call tool.
What Telmi does differently
Telmi is built around the moment you’re asked something and need to answer. Instead of a transcript to read during the call, it shows you a short answer you can say:
- SAY cards with one or two sentences, in the first person, often on screen before the question ends. Telmi starts on a question while it’s still forming and predicts likely next questions ahead of time.
- Knowledge packs and answer cards, so suggestions use your facts. Saved answer cards are matched on your Mac without an AI request, and say exactly what you wrote.
- Rewrites in one tap: shorter, expand, simpler, more confident, rephrase.
- Nudges when you’ve talked for 90 seconds or left a question open.
After the call you get a summary, key points, decisions, action items, a follow-up email, and coaching with specific better lines. Questions you missed can become draft answer cards for next time. Before the call, Telmi reads your Google Calendar and gives each meeting a page for prep.
And no bot joins. Telmi listens to your microphone and your Mac’s audio, transcribes speech on the device, and sends text excerpts to the AI through our server. More on that in why Telmi has no meeting bot.
Side by side
| Feature | Telmi | Fireflies.ai |
|---|---|---|
| How it hears the call | On your Mac, no bot | Notetaker bot; Chrome extension without the bot |
| Live transcript and notes | Yes | Yes |
| Suggested answers during the call | Yes, SAY cards | Not its focus |
| Conversation analytics | Talk share and nudges for you | Topic trackers, sentiment, talk time |
| Coaching after the call | Yes, per call | Not its focus |
| Platforms | Mac (macOS 26 or later) | Desktop app, mobile apps, Chrome extension |
| CRM integrations | None yet | On paid tiers |
| Compliance | None yet | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, ISO 42001, HIPAA (Enterprise) |
| SSO, SCIM, audit logs | No | Yes |
| Plans | Free (5 calls), Pro $20/month | Free, Pro, Business, Enterprise, per seat |
Pricing
Fireflies offers Free, Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans, priced per seat. We weren’t able to confirm their current prices and free-plan limits, so we’d rather not guess. Check Fireflies’ pricing page for the latest.
Telmi is free for your first 5 calls. After that, Pro is $20 a month for unlimited calls, with a daily fair-use cap of 3,000 AI requests. There’s no annual plan or team plan yet.
Where Telmi falls short
- It’s Mac only, on macOS 26 or later. No Windows release and no mobile app yet.
- It’s for one person. No team workspace, shared libraries, or manager view.
- No CRM, Slack, or Notion integrations.
- No SOC 2, HIPAA, SSO, or SCIM.
- It hears the other side of the call as one voice, “Them”, rather than separating each speaker.
If your team needs any of these today, Fireflies is the more complete choice, and we’d rather say so than have you find out after you’ve set things up.
Who should pick which
Choose Fireflies if you’re setting up meeting recording for a team or company, you want analytics across many calls, you need CRM sync, or your security team needs certifications before approving a tool.
Choose Telmi if you take your own calls on a Mac and want help in the moment: answering a pricing question cleanly, getting a technical detail right, or noticing you’ve been talking too long. It suits founders doing their own sales, account executives, consultants, and job candidates.
Still deciding which category you’re in? Our guide to AI meeting copilots vs AI notetakers walks through it.