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Fireflies.ai vs Plaud NotePin S

Fireflies is software that records and transcribes online meetings, usually by sending a notetaker bot into Zoom, Meet or Teams. The Plaud NotePin S is a $179 wearable recorder for conversations that happen in a room, with Plaud's app doing the transcription and summaries afterwards. If most of your meetings are video calls, Fireflies covers them without buying hardware. If they happen across a desk, in a clinic or on a site visit, the NotePin S is the better fit.

Where your conversations happen

Fireflies joins Zoom, Google Meet, Teams and about ten other platforms as a bot. Its pricing page also lists a Chrome extension that records without the bot, and the mobile app records in-person meetings from your phone.

The NotePin S is a pin you long-press to start recording, with a clip, lanyard, wristband and magnetic pin in the box. Plaud's own comparison table gives it two microphones, a pickup range of about 9.8 feet, up to 20 hours of continuous recording and 64 GB of storage. The same table lists it as in-person only: the phone-call recording mode belongs to the card-shaped Plaud Note and Note Pro, not the pin. For video calls, Plaud has a separate Plaud Desktop app (beta, Windows and macOS) that captures meeting audio without a bot.

First-year cost for one person

Plaud: the NotePin S is $179 once. The free Starter plan gives 300 transcription minutes a month, which is five hours. Pro is $17.99 a month or $99.99 a year for 1,200 minutes, and Unlimited is $29.99 a month or $239.99 a year. A pin plus a year of Pro comes to $278.99.

Fireflies: the Free plan transcribes without a cap but limits AI summaries and stores only 400 minutes per team. Pro is $18 a month, or $10 a month billed annually, with 8,000 minutes of storage per seat. Business is $29 ($19 annually) and Enterprise is $39 per seat, annual only. A year of Pro billed annually is $120, with nothing to wear or charge.

Regulated work

Plaud's plan page lists ISO 27001, ISO 27701, GDPR, SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliance. Fireflies puts HIPAA compliance, private storage and custom data retention on its Enterprise plan. Neither one can be self-hosted, so audio goes to the vendor's cloud either way.

Fireflies.ai: Pick Fireflies if your meetings are mostly on Zoom, Meet or Teams and you want every call transcribed and searchable without buying a device.

Plaud NotePin S: Pick the NotePin S if your important conversations are face to face and you want a wearable recorder that doesn't depend on your phone being out.

Facts checked Oct 18, 2026 against 7 sources

Which one should you try?

Fireflies.ai

Freemium

Best for Sales and customer-facing teams

Visit Fireflies.ai See full review

Plaud NotePin S

Paid

Best for Professionals in frequent meetings (executives, consultants, lawyers, doctors)

Visit Plaud NotePin S See full review

Pricing, capabilities and platforms side by side. Prices are as of the "Pricing checked" date in the table.

Fireflies.ai

Fireflies.ai

Fireflies joins meetings automatically as a bot participant, transcribes audio in real time, and generates summaries organized around topics, action items, and speaker breakdowns. The search layer is where it earns its place on sales and distributed teams: you can query across every recorded call in the workspace, not just the last one. The ceiling appears in compliance-heavy environments — Fireflies is cloud-only, so organizations with data residency mandates or on-premise requirements have no self-hosting path. Teams that hit that wall move to vendors with on-premise deployment options. For everyone else, the API lets you pull transcripts and metadata into your CRM or data warehouse.

Plaud NotePin S

Plaud NotePin S

Plaud ships as a credit-card-thin device that attaches to the back of a phone via magnet or sits on a desk, recording audio and sending it to Plaud's cloud for transcription and AI summarization. The workflow is one button: press record, pocket the device, review the structured summary later. This works cleanly for one-on-one meetings, calls, and lectures where a single audio source dominates. The ceiling appears in multi-speaker boardrooms and noisy environments — community reports flag speaker-diarization accuracy dropping when voices overlap or room acoustics are poor. Teams logging high call volumes exhaust the free tier's monthly minute cap quickly, at which point continued use requires a paid subscription.

AttributeFireflies.aiPlaud NotePin S
PricingFreemiumPaid
PriceFree; Pro $18/mo ($10/mo billed annually); Business $29/mo ($19/mo annually); Enterprise $39/mo annual only$179.00
Pricing checkedOct 19, 2026Nov 4, 2026
Free trialNot statedNot stated
Open sourceNoNo
Has APIYesYes
Self-hosted optionNoNo
PlatformsWeb, Chrome Extension, Desktop App (Windows/Mac), Mobile App (iOS/Android)iOS, Android, Mac, Windows (via Plaud Desktop); cloud-accessible via Web; onboard recording on hardware
Released—2023-06
Pros
  • Automatic bot-join across major conferencing platforms, so no one on the team manually starts a recording or remembers to take notes — missed action items from unrecorded calls drop to near zero.
  • Full-text search across the entire call library, which means a sales rep can pull up every time a specific competitor was mentioned across six months of calls instead of asking colleagues to dig through their memories.
  • Speaker-attributed transcripts with talk-time analytics, so managers can see participation imbalances and conversation patterns across the team without sitting in on every call.
  • Structured action-item extraction in the summary, so the post-meeting document is organized around what needs to happen next rather than requiring someone to manually distill an hour of conversation.
  • API access for pulling transcripts and metadata into external systems, so conversation data reaches your CRM or data warehouse without a manual export step that nobody remembers to do.
  • Hardware-based passive recording means you stay present in the conversation instead of managing an app, which matters in clinical, legal, or executive settings where phone interaction reads as distraction.
  • Summarization templates tuned to specific verticals — sales calls, medical notes, legal depositions — so the output maps to the document format your workflow already expects, rather than a generic bullet dump you reformat manually.
  • Phone-call capture via magnetic contact with the device's speaker picks up both sides of a call without a conference dial-in or app permission, so mobile sales reps get full call transcripts without changing how they make calls.
  • API access is available, so teams that want to pipe transcripts into their own CRM, note system, or data pipeline are not locked into the Plaud app as the final destination.
  • Support for over forty languages, so multilingual teams or professionals working across regions avoid running a separate transcription service for non-English sessions.
Cons
  • Cloud-only architecture means every call recording and transcript lives in Fireflies' infrastructure — teams under HIPAA, GDPR data residency requirements, or internal policies requiring on-premise storage hit an absolute wall and must evaluate self-hostable competitors instead.
  • The bot joining as a visible participant changes call dynamics with some customers or candidates who object to AI recording; there is no silent background capture option, so teams working with recording-averse contacts need an explicit opt-in conversation before every call.
  • Advanced analytics and longer transcript retention are paid-only features, which means the free tier works as a proof of concept but sales teams needing historical search depth beyond the storage cap will hit that limit quickly and face an upgrade decision before they have fully evaluated fit.
  • Speaker diarization in multi-participant settings — a five-person strategy meeting, a panel deposition — degrades when voices overlap; community reports indicate transcript accuracy in these conditions is unreliable enough that someone still has to manually attribute quotes, defeating the core time-saving proposition.
  • Transcripts are delivered after the session ends, not during it; any use case requiring live captions, real-time note access, or mid-call search — a support agent reading a knowledge base while on a call, a doctor checking prior notes mid-consultation — requires a different tool entirely.
  • The free tier's monthly minute cap is a hard ceiling that activates well before heavy professional use; a consultant running six one-hour client calls a week exhausts it inside a month, and continued use shifts to a paid subscription — at which point teams with no hardware attachment to the workflow benchmark against software-only services like Fireflies or Otter that charge per seat with no device cost.
  • Cloud-only architecture with no self-hosted option means all audio leaves the device for Plaud's servers; legal and healthcare teams operating under strict data-residency or sovereignty requirements will hit a compliance blocker that no configuration option resolves.

Made up your mind?

Fireflies.ai

Freemium

Best for Sales and customer-facing teams

Visit Fireflies.ai See full review

Plaud NotePin S

Paid

Best for Professionals in frequent meetings (executives, consultants, lawyers, doctors)

Visit Plaud NotePin S See full review

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Specs come from each tool's own site and docs (how we test). AIDiveForge is editorially independent.

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