Earkeep vs Fireflies.ai

If your job is running sales calls that must land in a CRM, Fireflies solves a problem Earkeep doesn't try to solve, and it has the most generous free tier in this market plus 40-plus integrations. If your job is knowledge work full of meetings you want captured without thinking about it, and kept as your own files, Earkeep is built for exactly that.

Earkeep runs continuously while your device is on, capturing mic and system audio in the background. You never hit a record button and no bot has to be invited: there's no meeting to "join" in the first place, because there's no meeting-platform integration to join through. You define a meeting after it happened by selecting the span on the timeline, or connect a calendar (Google, Apple, Outlook, or any ICS URL) so spans start and end automatically.

Fireflies works the opposite way: it needs to be added to a call on a supported platform before that call starts, and only what the bot captures gets transcribed. Miss adding it, and there's no record. It also can't capture in-person conversations or anything happening outside a joined video call, by design.

Fireflies is explicitly a meeting bot: it joins the call as a visible third-party participant to record. Reddit threads back this up directly, with users describing how "letting people know that you will be kicking note-taking bots… most people will remember to turn off the bots before joining the meeting as a matter of courtesy." That's a real social cost Fireflies users manage: bot fatigue is a recurring complaint, and some meetings simply can't have a bot in them.

Earkeep never joins anything. It captures system audio the same way it would capture any other sound playing on your device, so there's no bot avatar and nothing for other participants to notice, object to, or ask you to remove.

This is the core architectural difference. Fireflies transcribes and stores everything in its cloud: audio, transcripts, summaries, and analytics all live on Fireflies' infrastructure, governed by its own retention and privacy policy. Reviewers flag cloud-only processing as a privacy concern in regulated industries, a structural property the generous free tier mitigates rather than removes.

Earkeep processes audio only in memory, transcribes it on-device with Whisper or Parakeet models, hardware-accelerated on Apple Silicon, and never writes raw audio to disk or sends it to any server or API. There's no account required to use the app. What's left after transcription is plain text files on your own disk, not a cloud database.

Fireflies' free plan offers unlimited transcription with 800 minutes of storage and 3 public channels, genuinely the most generous free tier among the cloud notetakers. Paid tiers are $18/user/month ($10 billed annually) for Pro, $29/user/month ($19 annually) for Business, and custom Enterprise pricing from around $39/user/month for SSO and custom data retention. Per-user pricing means the bill scales with headcount, and usage creep is a common complaint: licenses assigned to infrequent users quietly waste money.

Earkeep is €39, one time, one device. No tiers, no per-seat math, no recurring bill. You keep the version you bought, including all updates to Earkeep 1.x; if a future paid major upgrade ever ships, your current version keeps working. There's a 14-day free trial with full functionality, no email or account needed, and a 14-day money-back guarantee.

Fireflies launched an MCP server in 2026 that lets external tools retrieve, search, filter, and summarize Fireflies' cloud meeting data. It's worth naming directly: this is real competition on a differentiator Earkeep has had from the start.

The difference is what the MCP server sits on top of. Fireflies' MCP server reaches into a cloud transcript store; Earkeep's MCP server and in-app ACP agents reach into transcripts that were never uploaded anywhere, on the same machine the agent is running on.

• Deep CRM auto-logging. If your job is back-to-back sales calls and you want each one auto-logged into Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, or Zoho with a summary and next steps, that's Fireflies' core strength and not something Earkeep does.
• Cross-platform video calls with a genuinely generous free tier. Unlimited transcription with 800 minutes of storage is a strong no-cost option if you mostly meet on Zoom, Teams, or Meet and don't mind a bot in the room.
• Conversation analytics for coaching teams. Talk-to-listen ratio, monologue detection, filler-word tracking, and sentiment scoring across a sales team's calls are Fireflies features Earkeep does not have.
• Team collaboration on shared calls. Comments, reactions, mentions, and shareable highlights are built for a shared cloud workspace, a different product shape than a single-device, local-first app.

Earkeep fits the "never miss anything" knowledge worker with 8-15 meetings a week across online and in-person settings, who wants everything captured without a bot in the room and wants that data available to their own agents, not a vendor's. That includes product managers, product owners, project managers, UX researchers, and engineering leads whose most important conversations aren't all on Zoom.

Fireflies fits a sales team lead or revenue-ops role who lives in a CRM, runs several customer calls a day on supported video platforms, and needs each one logged and analyzed automatically. Where it serves people less well is external or privacy-sensitive client calls, where users actively kick bots from meetings, in-person meetings, and teams on a tight budget where per-user pricing adds up.