Productivity · Head-to-head
Fireflies.ai vs Shortwave
Fireflies.ai (freemium, AI Score 8/10) vs Shortwave (freemium, AI Score 7.8/10). 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 Shortwave if…
- →your primary use case is google workspace power users — founders, recruiters, sales leads — who live in a 200-thread-a-day inbox and want retrieval across years of mail plus a keyboard-fast client, not just reply suggestions.
- →you need: agents
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | Fireflies.ai | Shortwave |
|---|---|---|
| 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 tier + paid plans — check website for current pricing |
| 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. | Yes — a free tier exists with capped AI usage; confirm the current cap and feature split on shortwave.com/pricing |
| AI Score | 8/10 | 7.8/10 |
| 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. | Google Workspace power users — founders, recruiters, sales leads — who live in a 200-thread-a-day inbox and want retrieval across years of mail plus a keyboard-fast client, not just reply suggestions. |
| Editor's pick | — | — |
| Use cases | productivity support research | productivity agents |
| Date added | 2026-04-30 | 2025-09-15 |
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
Shortwave
Productivity · freemium
Pros
- ✓Semantic retrieval over a long mail archive is the standout — it answers questions Gmail search structurally cannot
- ✓The assistant reasons across threads and calendar rather than only the open message
- ✓Genuinely fast keyboard-driven client underneath the AI, so it survives as a daily driver
- ✓Drafts are conditioned on your own past replies rather than a generic corporate voice
- ✓Real native apps across desktop, web and mobile rather than a browser extension
Cons
- ×Google-centric — the deep features assume Gmail/Google Workspace, and other mailboxes are a lesser experience
- ×You pay a per-seat subscription on top of a mailbox you already pay for, while Google and Microsoft bundle comparable basics into the default clients
- ×The free tier caps AI usage enough that the assistant is effectively a paid feature
- ×A small independent team competing against AI shipped by default inside Gmail and Outlook
Related comparisons
Updated 2026-08-10. Spec data sourced from official product pages and tracked in our public directory at /tools.