Minutes vs Fireflies.ai: a team platform, or your own machine?

Not every meeting needs a bot in the participant list and a copy in someone's cloud. With Fireflies, a bot joins your calls, every recording lands in Fireflies' cloud, and the bill is per seat. We built Minutes for the person who would rather the recording never left their Mac, as a native app that does the transcription and the summary on the machine itself. Both turn meetings into notes, and almost nothing else about them is the same.

Last updated: 18 September 2026

Full disclosure: this page is published by the makers of Minutes. Fireflies.ai's prices and limits below are taken from Fireflies.ai's own pages, checked on 18 September 2026.

Side by side

The comparison table is at the top of this page.

Where Minutes is better

• Nothing is uploaded. Recording, transcription and the summary run on your Mac with the models inside macOS. No server is involved at any point, so there is nothing to trust and nothing to breach.
• No seats, no meter. Minutes is $9.99 once, with no per-seat bill and no storage cap, because the audio is on your own disk.
• The notes outlive the app. Every meeting is one Markdown file in a folder you chose, so there is nothing to cancel and nothing to export, because they are already yours.
• Both sides kept apart by channel. Your microphone and the audio your Mac plays are recorded as separate channels, so who said what is a fact rather than a guess.

The pricing math

Fireflies is free with unlimited transcription and 400 minutes of storage per team. Pro is $18 per seat per month, or $10 billed annually. Business is $29 and $19, and Enterprise is $39 annually. Minutes is $9.99 once.

One seat on Fireflies Pro paid monthly costs more in two months than owning Minutes outright, and a five person team passes it inside the first month on either billing. If you want good notes of your own calls, a per-seat team platform is rent that never stops, and Minutes replaces it with one payment.

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