Fireflies.ai vs Zoom AI Companion: pricing, features and which to choose

Fireflies.ai was founded by Krish Ramineni and Sam Udotong, established in 2016, and launched as a product in 2018. TechCrunch reported a $14 million round led by Khosla Ventures in 2021, following an earlier $5 million seed round. The Hindu BusinessLine reported in 2025 that Fireflies had reached 500,000 companies, employed 120 people across more than 40 cities, and said it had achieved a $1 billion valuation through a tender offer. Those scale and valuation figures were company reported in that interview, not audited public company disclosures. Fireflies positions itself as a meeting memory layer, turning conversations into searchable records, analysis, tasks, and connections with business systems. Its breadth is aimed at organizational use rather than only personal note taking.

Fireflies supports a broad capture workflow. It can join Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and other conference calls, while mobile and desktop applications cover conversations outside scheduled meetings. Users can upload MP3, MP4, WAV, and M4A files, connect dialers including Aircall and RingCentral, or use the API. After capture, the service generates a transcript, summary, action items, and searchable meeting record. AskFred answers questions across stored conversations. Conversation intelligence adds speaker talk time, sentiment, questions, topic trackers, and team insights. Integrations send results into CRM, collaboration, and workflow tools. This supports sales reviews, recruiting interviews, customer conversations, and internal meetings, although broader capture also increases consent, retention, and permission responsibilities.

Fireflies is broad, but that breadth makes billing and administration more complex than a simple notetaker. AI Skills, AskFred, custom summaries, and soundbites can consume credits beyond the subscription. Fathom is easier for individuals wanting unlimited free recordings and a focused summary workflow. Otter.ai remains a straightforward live transcription alternative, while Gong and Avoma target revenue teams with deeper sales workflows. Fireflies does not offer self hosted deployment, so hosted service requirements matter. Pick Fireflies if your organization needs dialers, uploads, mobile capture, multilingual transcription, conversation analytics, an API, and administrative controls. Choose a simpler competitor if predictable individual use, minimal configuration, or uncomplicated billing is the priority.

Zoom AI Companion is Zoom’s integrated AI assistant, announced on September 5, 2023, for meeting and workplace tasks. Its initial tools included meeting summaries, in-meeting questions, recording highlights, Team Chat assistance, Whiteboard ideation, and Mail drafting. Zoom uses a federated model strategy combining its own models with third-party systems from Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic, while saying customer communications are not used to train those models. The product’s identity changed on June 24, 2026: the AI Companion name was retired, its core functions were folded into Zoom Workplace under functional labels, and ZoomMate became the newer agentic product built on Custom AI Companion. ZoomMate starts at $20 per user monthly, or $16.67 annually, with 2,200 credits per user each month. The original AI Companion therefore remains relevant as a feature history, not a current standalone offer.

Zoom AI Companion’s core value is turning meetings and conversations into follow-up work inside Zoom Workplace. During a meeting, it can answer in-meeting questions, transcribe discussion, produce a summary and capture notes through My Notes, including for supported third-party meetings and in-person conversations. Afterward, users can ask questions across Zoom content, draft messages or documents, create custom meeting-summary formats, and send results to connected services such as Salesforce, Jira, Google Drive and OneDrive. A practical workflow is straightforward: enable My Notes before a call, review the generated decisions and action items, then use ZoomMate to draft a status update, schedule follow-ups, update a record or create a deliverable. ZoomMate also supports custom agents, scheduled workflows and agentic search. The older AI Companion name was retired, but these functions remain under their specific feature names inside Zoom Workplace.

Zoom AI Companion was rebranded on June 24, 2026, with its former features folded into functional labels inside Zoom Workplace, while ZoomMate became the paid agentic successor. That creates a naming problem for buyers comparing it with Microsoft 365 Copilot, Google Workspace Gemini, and Slack AI, each of which remains a clearer product identity. ZoomMate Basic is limited to three hosted meeting summaries, three My Notes uses, 20 AI queries, 10 workflow runs, and 10 indexed files, while the paid plan costs $20 per user monthly or $16.67 annually and includes 2,200 credits. Zoom also says customer communications are not used to train its models, though connected content is processed to provide features. ZoomMate is best suited to Zoom Workplace teams that want meeting context turned into follow-up tasks, documents, and workflows without changing collaboration platforms.