Fred, the Fireflies bot, joins your call. Your transcript lives in their cloud, and the useful AI sits behind $18 to $29 per-seat tiers. Quietly captures audio on your Mac, writes plain Markdown your AI can read, 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 each Zoom, Meet, and Teams call you take.
All of your audio sits in Fireflies' cloud. Fireflies stores, indexes, and analyzes recordings, transcripts, and summaries on its servers. Privacy-sensitive teams can't accept that.
$18 per seat on Pro, $29 on Business. A five-person team pays $1,080 to $1,740 a year, every year, to keep its own notes.
AskFred lives inside Fireflies. Your transcripts don't 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 |
If you need these, stay on Fireflies.
Fireflies' Conversation Intelligence (talk ratio, sentiment, topic tracker) is mature. Quietly gives you the transcript and leaves coaching analytics out of scope.
Fireflies pushes into Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Slack, and Notion on its own. Quietly hands you Markdown, and you wire it up.
Fireflies works anywhere there's a browser. Quietly is macOS-only today.
No third-party participant joins your meeting. Quietly captures system and mic audio on your Mac, so there is no extra attendee to explain.
Fireflies records and stores everything in its cloud. Quietly transcribes on your Mac with Whisper, cleans the text up with an on-device LLM, and writes Markdown to disk. Nothing leaves your machine.
Fireflies Pro costs $216 per seat per year, with no end date. Quietly costs $49 once per person. A single seat pays for itself in under three months.
An MCP server for Claude Desktop, Cursor, and Codex CLI ships next. Until then, your editor reads the plain Markdown as files. Either way you ask “what did we decide about Q3?” on your model, against your transcripts.
Open Quietly and press ⌘R for mic capture. Pick Transcribe a file… to convert any .m4a, .wav, or .mp3. Fireflies needs a calendar event with a meeting URL.
Notes are .md files in your iCloud folder, your repo, any folder you pick. There is no proprietary database and no migration if a vendor 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.
For 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.