AssemblyAI vs Fireflies.ai

AssemblyAI

Audio

Fireflies.ai

Audio

Tagline

AssemblyAI

Speech-to-text API with diarisation, summarisation, and topic detection.

Fireflies.ai

AI meeting assistant that joins calls, transcribes them, and turns the talk into searchable notes and action items.

Pricing

AssemblyAI

Freemium· Pre-recorded Speech-to-Text API: $0.21 /hr · Universal-2: $0.15 /hr · Realtime Speech-to-Text API: $0.45 /hr · Universal-Streaming: $0.15 /hr · Universal-Streaming Multilingual: $0.15 /hr

Fireflies.ai

Freemium· Basic: $10 · Pro: $20 · Enterprise: Contact sales

Lowest paid tier

AssemblyAI

$0.15 /hr · Universal-2

captured 2026-08-11

Fireflies.ai

$10 · Basic

captured 2026-08-09

Free trial

AssemblyAI

Not listed

Fireflies.ai

Yes

API

AssemblyAI

Not listed

Fireflies.ai

Yes

Platforms

AssemblyAI

web

Fireflies.ai

api

Company

AssemblyAI

AssemblyAI

Fireflies.ai

Fireflies AI, Inc.

Model used

AssemblyAI

Universal / Slam-1

Fireflies.ai

Multi-model (proprietary ASR + LLM layer)

Best for

AssemblyAI

Pick AssemblyAI when you need accurate streaming/batch ASR plus diarisation + summarisation without engineering it yourself.

Fireflies.ai

Pick Fireflies.ai if your team lives in Zoom/Meet/Teams and you want call notes, CRM updates, and searchable transcripts to happen without anyone typing.

Not for

AssemblyAI

Skip it at extreme volume — Whisper self-hosted is cheaper if engineering capacity is available.

Fireflies.ai

Skip it if you need an on-device or self-hosted transcriber, or if your meetings cover material where a third-party bot attendee is a non-starter.

Editorial score

AssemblyAI

8.7 / 10

Fireflies.ai

8.2 / 10

Use cases

AssemblyAI

transcriptiondiarisationpodcast indexing

Fireflies.ai

meeting transcriptioncall summariesaction item extractionsales call analysisrecruiting notesvoice search

Pros

AssemblyAI

• High accuracy
• Strong streaming API
• Lots of post-processing features
• Excellent SDKs and docs

Fireflies.ai

• Joins all major meeting platforms plus dialers and uploaded files with one workflow
• Strong CRM/ATS sync (Salesforce, HubSpot, Greenhouse) keeps notes out of inboxes
• AskFred chat and AI Apps make weeks of past calls actually searchable
• Free tier is genuinely usable for solo evaluators
• Public API for programmatic transcription and summary retrieval

Cons

AssemblyAI

• More expensive than Whisper for high volume
• Latency varies

Fireflies.ai

• Visible bot attendee can feel intrusive in client or candidate calls
• Conversation intelligence and unlimited storage are gated to Business+
• Summary quality drops on noisy multi-speaker calls in less-supported languages
• Closed-source, fully cloud-hosted - no self-hosted option

Website

AssemblyAI

www.assemblyai.com

Fireflies.ai

fireflies.ai

Editorial score: rule-based, 0–10, from AI-assisted profile inputs (see /methodology) — not a user rating; “—” means unscored. “Not listed” means we have no record of it, not that it is absent. GitHub figures and prices carry the date they were checked or captured; prices are shown as published, unconverted.