A Fireflies alternative with no bot and no storage cap

Why people look for a Fireflies alternative

• The Fireflies Notetaker in every meeting. Fireflies usually records by sending its notetaker into Zoom, Google Meet or Teams. Some guests ask who the extra participant is, and some companies block bots. When auto-join is on, it can also turn up in meetings you did not mean to record.
• Free plan storage. As of October 2026, the Fireflies pricing page lists 400 minutes of storage per team on the free plan, and AI credits are limited. Regular users fill that quickly.
• Privacy and control. Recordings and transcripts live in Fireflies' cloud. People handling sensitive conversations sometimes want them on their own computer instead.
• Paying for features you do not use. Fireflies is built for teams and sales, with conversation intelligence and CRM sync. Solo users who just want good transcripts and notes may not need all that.

Fireflies.ai in brief: a fair summary

Fireflies is a cloud AI meeting assistant. Its notetaker joins Zoom, Google Meet, Teams and other platforms to record and transcribe, and it can also record through a Chrome extension without the bot, from a desktop app, from iPhone and Android apps, or from uploaded files. AskFred, its AI assistant, answers questions about your meetings.

What Fireflies does well: lots of integrations (CRMs, project tools, Slack), team search and analytics, and broad language support, with English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian plus many more in beta. For sales and customer teams that want every call logged in the CRM, it is a strong choice.

Hark vs Fireflies at a glance

Fireflies details from fireflies.ai and its help guides, checked October 2026. Check their pricing page for current limits.

How Hark is different

No bot, any meeting app

Hark records your microphone and your computer's audio on your own machine, so it works with Zoom, Teams, Meet, Webex, Slack huddles or any call that plays through your computer, and nobody sees a notetaker join. On a Mac, it records the microphone only for now, so the other side is picked up only through your speakers. Read our guide to AI note takers without a bot.

Local transcription, no minute counting

Speech recognition runs on your computer. Your audio is not uploaded to be transcribed, there are no storage tiers, and it keeps working offline after a one-time model download. You get a live transcript during the meeting and a more accurate one afterwards, with each word highlighted as it plays.

It remembers people

Name a voice once and Hark recognises it in future meetings, suggesting the name for you to confirm. Each person can have a job title, company, email and notes on the People page.

AI notes and Claude

The $12/month subscription adds Claude-written meeting notes, automatic titles and transcript proofreading (the transcript text is sent to Claude; the audio is not). Free for everyone: a local MCP server that lets Claude Desktop or Claude Code read your meetings with your own Claude subscription.

When to choose Hark

• You want no bot in your meetings, ever.
• You want recordings and transcripts kept on your own computer.
• You record a lot and do not want storage or credit limits.
• You are a solo user on Windows or Linux with English meetings.
• You want speakers you meet often named automatically.

When to stay with Fireflies

• You need call notes synced into Salesforce, HubSpot or other tools. Hark has no CRM integrations.
• Your team shares meetings and wants team analytics. Hark has no team workspace.
• Your meetings are not in English.
• You want video recordings of meetings. Hark records audio and screenshots, not video.
• You want recording to start automatically from your calendar.

Other Fireflies alternatives

• Otter.ai. Cloud transcription with good mobile apps and team sharing. See Otter vs Fireflies.
• Fathom. A bot-based note taker with unlimited free recordings. See Fireflies vs Fathom.
• tl;dv. Records video of Zoom, Meet and Teams calls, with a free plan and CRM features on paid tiers.

How to switch from Fireflies to Hark

1. Download the audio or video of the meetings you want to keep from Fireflies, along with any transcripts.
2. Turn off Fireflies auto-join in its settings so the bot stops joining your calendar meetings.
3. Download Hark free for Windows, Mac or Linux and sign in with your email.
4. Let Hark download its speech models once (about 730 MB).
5. Drag your downloaded files into Hark or use File > Import. Hark transcribes them and separates the voices.
6. Name the people in those meetings so Hark recognises them on your next call.

Recording laws vary, and some places require everyone's consent. Tell participants you are recording, bot or no bot.