Productivity · Head-to-head
Fireflies.ai vs n8n
Fireflies.ai (freemium, AI Score 8/10) vs n8n (freemium, AI Score 8.7/10). Side-by-side pricing, features, pros and cons, and which to pick.
The verdict
Pick Fireflies.ai if…
- →your primary use case is sales and customer-success teams on salesforce or hubspot who want every call transcribed, summarized, and logged to the crm without anyone taking notes.
- →you need: support, research
Pick n8n if…
- →overall capability matters more than price (AI Score 8.7 vs 8)
- →your primary use case is developer-adjacent ops and engineering teams who want ai agents and internal integrations running on infrastructure they control, with server costs instead of a per-task meter.
- →you need: agents, development
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | Fireflies.ai | n8n |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Productivity | Productivity |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Headline pricing | Freemium — Pro $10/user/mo, Business $19/user/mo, Enterprise $39/user/mo (annual billing) | Free self-hosted + Cloud from ~$20/mo |
| Free tier | Meeting transcription with limited AI summary credits and 800 minutes of storage per seat. Prices shown are annual billing; monthly billing costs more. Check fireflies.ai/pricing for current rates. | Community edition is free and self-hosted with unlimited workflows and executions; you pay only for the server. Cloud plans have a time-limited trial. Cloud tier prices and execution allowances change periodically — check n8n.io/pricing before quoting them. |
| AI Score | 8/10 | 8.7/10 |
| Best for | Sales and customer-success teams on Salesforce or HubSpot who want every call transcribed, summarized, and logged to the CRM without anyone taking notes. | Developer-adjacent ops and engineering teams who want AI agents and internal integrations running on infrastructure they control, with server costs instead of a per-task meter. |
| Editor's pick | — | — |
| Use cases | productivity support research | productivity agents development |
| Date added | 2026-04-30 | 2025-08-01 |
Pros and cons
Fireflies.ai
Productivity · freemium
Pros
- ✓Joins calls automatically from your calendar across Zoom, Meet, Teams and Webex, with no manual recording step
- ✓Mobile apps record in-person meetings, which bot-only competitors cannot cover
- ✓Transcription across 100+ languages, among the widest language ranges in the category
- ✓Public API, webhooks and an MCP server make meeting data portable into other systems
- ✓SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliance available for regulated buyers
Cons
- ×Bot-based recording shows up as a visible participant; Granola captures audio locally with nothing appearing in the call
- ×Free tier is thin next to Fathom, which offers unlimited free recording and summaries
- ×Conversation intelligence and CRM sync are gated behind the $19/user/mo Business tier
- ×Bundled recaps in Microsoft Teams Copilot, Google Meet and Zoom AI Companion now cover the basics at no extra cost for teams already on those suites
n8n
Productivity · freemium
Pros
- ✓Self-hosted community edition runs unlimited workflows and executions for infrastructure cost only, with no per-task meter
- ✓Model-agnostic AI nodes span OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, Groq and xAI plus local models via Ollama, so an agent can run with zero external API calls
- ✓MCP support works both ways — consume external MCP servers as agent tools, or expose a workflow as an MCP server to outside assistants
- ✓Code node runs JavaScript or Python inline, so a missing connector is solvable rather than blocking
- ✓Large public template library and an unusually active community, which shortens the path from idea to working workflow
Cons
- ×Fair-code, not open source — the Sustainable Use License bars offering it as a service, and SSO, RBAC, environments and log streaming are gated behind the enterprise license
- ×Running it seriously means queue mode with Redis and worker containers; the one-container Docker demo does not survive real agent load
- ×Cloud plans meter by execution, and an agent that retries and branches burns through an allowance far faster than the old two-step automations those tiers were sized for
- ×Steeper than Zapier or Make for non-developers — expression syntax and n8n's item-array data model are where most newcomers get stuck
Related comparisons
Updated 2026-08-10. Spec data sourced from official product pages and tracked in our public directory at /tools.