Fred — Fireflies’ bot — joins your call, the transcript lives in their cloud, and the useful AI sits behind $18–29/seat tiers. Quietly captures audio on your Mac, writes plain Markdown your AI already reads, and costs $49 once.
Plain .md. Front-matter has attendees, calendar, duration. Body is clean, LLM-polished Whisper output.
“Fred has joined the meeting.” Fireflies' notetaker bot announces itself in every Zoom, Meet, and Teams call you take.
All audio in Fireflies' cloud. Recordings, transcripts, summaries — stored, indexed, and analyzed server-side. Privacy-sensitive teams hate this.
$18/seat Pro, $29/seat Business. A 5-person team is $1,080–$1,740/year. Forever, just to keep your own notes.
AskFred lives in Fireflies. Your transcripts can't natively flow to Cursor, Codex CLI, or Claude Desktop.
| Quietly | Fireflies | |
|---|---|---|
| No bot joins the call | “Fred” joins every call | |
| Where audio lives | Your Mac | Fireflies' cloud |
| Search across meetings | Your editor + MCP | Smart Search (Pro+) |
| Ask AI about meetings | Claude / Cursor / Codex (MCP shipping next) | AskFred (Pro+) |
| CRM push | Markdown → your script | Business tier |
| Open in VS Code / any editor | ||
| Works offline (after activation) | ||
| Pricing | $49 once | $18–29/seat/mo |
Honest list. If you need these, stay on Fireflies.
Fireflies' Conversation Intelligence (talk ratio, sentiment, topic tracker) is mature. Quietly gives you the transcript; coaching analytics are out of scope.
Fireflies pushes into Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Slack, Notion natively. Quietly hands you Markdown — you wire it.
Fireflies works anywhere there's a browser. Quietly is macOS-only today.
No third-party participant in your meeting. Quietly captures system + mic audio locally; the call has no extra “attendee” to explain.
Fireflies records and stores everything in their cloud. Quietly transcribes locally with Whisper, cleans it up with an on-device LLM, and writes Markdown to disk — nothing leaves your machine.
Fireflies Pro = $216/seat/year, billed forever. Quietly = $49 once per person. Even a single seat pays for itself in about three months.
An MCP server for Claude Desktop, Cursor, and Codex CLI is shipping next — until then, your editor reads the plain Markdown directly. Either way you ask “what did we decide about Q3?” running on your model, on your transcripts.
Open Quietly and hit ⌘R for mic capture. Pick Transcribe a file… to convert any .m4a, .wav, .mp3. Fireflies needs a calendar event with a meeting URL.
Notes are .md in your iCloud folder, your repo, any folder you pick. No proprietary database, no migration if Fireflies pivots.
Export from Fireflies. Settings → Data Export. You get transcripts and summaries as a download.
Disable Fred for upcoming calendar events. Fireflies → Meetings → toggle off auto-join. Then remove Fred from any pending invites.
Drop the export into your Quietly folder. Cursor, Codex CLI, and Claude Desktop pick it up. New meetings save next to old ones.
Need help with the Business-tier export? Email support@meetquietly.com.
Free 7-day trial · No account, no card. 7-day refund. $49 once, no subscription.