Fireflies vs Plaud: the three ceilings, and which one you hit first

On 20 August 2026 I pulled the raw payload behind fireflies.ai/pricing and parsed the feature table out of the JSON the page ships to the browser. There’s a row titled “Recording limit”. Its four values, left to right, read “2 Hours”, “2 Hours”, “3 Hours”, “4 Hours”, against Free, Pro, Business and Enterprise. I think that one row settles the fireflies vs plaud question for more buyers than anything else either vendor publishes, and it is doing so quietly, in the middle of a table nobody scrolls to.

So I went looking for who else mentions it. The same morning I opened the pages ranking for this query and searched the rendered text of the two I could fetch and quote, speakwiseapp.com (dated 26 June 2026) and eesel.ai (last edited 23 June 2026), for “recording limit”, “2-hour” and “120 minutes”. Nothing, either time. Both quote “800 minutes of storage” for the Fireflies free tier, where the pricing table I parsed says “400 mins/team”. A third, noctechnology.com, returned 403 to both a scripted fetch and a spoofed desktop-Chrome user agent.

Most of that writing spends its length arguing about whether Fireflies can record a room at all. The live question is which ceiling you run into first, and there are three of them, not two.

Can Fireflies record in-person meetings?

Yes. Fireflies records in-person conversations through its mobile app on every plan including Free. Its desktop app captures system audio with no bot in the call. The row “Fireflies mobile app (Android, iOS)” is a checkmark across Free, Pro, Business and Enterprise on the vendor’s own pricing table, with the tooltip “Unlimited in-person recording with Fireflies mobile app.”

The supporting evidence isn’t subtle. Fireflies runs a product page at fireflies.ai/mobile headlined “AI Assistant For Your In-Person Conversations”. Its KB article “How to Record Offline & In-Person Meetings on the Fireflies Mobile App” is stamped “Last updated 1 year ago”. The no-bot desktop article, updated 22 days before I checked, lists the cases: “Whether you’re on a phone call, a WhatsApp chat, FaceTime, Aircall, Discord, an in-person conversation, or any other supported application”.

Set that against what the ranking pages tell you. Plaud’s own alternatives post, published 23 July 2026, states: “Fireflies.ai only works inside a scheduled online meeting.” Speakwise writes: “Fireflies only joins online calls, so a hallway chat or a client lunch is invisible to it.” Both are wrong, and the second one is wrong in a way that would send a consultant to buy a $159.99 device they may not need. I’d rather people bought the device for the right reason.

Fireflies vs Plaud is three ceilings, not two

The structure survives price changes, which the numbers below will not. Fireflies caps the length of one recording, and on Free and Pro it caps how many minutes of recording you can keep: the same feature table that carries the “Recording limit” row carries a “Storage” row above it, reading “400 mins/team” on Free and “8,000 mins/seat” on Pro, against “Unlimited” on Business and Enterprise. Plaud lets one recording run as long as the battery does, then caps how many minutes you transcribe in a month. Two of those three ceilings are Fireflies’.

The Fireflies recording cap shows up twice in first-party sources, which is why I trust it. Once on the pricing table, and again in the API, where the bot-join mutation caps what you can ask for: the addToLive mutation’s duration field in the full docs export reads “Meeting duration in minutes. Defaults to 60 minutes if param is not provided” followed by “Minimum is 15 and maximum is 120.”

Plaud’s cap is a monthly meter. Plaud’s pricing page lists Starter as free with “300 Transcription Minutes/Month”, Pro at $17.99 a month or $8.33 billed annually with “1,200 Transcription Minutes/Month”, and Unlimited at $29.99 or $19.99 annually with “Unlimited Transcription Minutes (up to 24 hours/day)”. The hardware runs far past any single meeting: the Note Pro spec page claims “Enhance mode 30 hours continuous recording max” with “Four precision MEMS microphones extend pickup up to 16.4 ft”, and “Endurance mode 50 hours continuous recording max” at a shorter 9.8 ft pickup.

Three warnings on that table. The $159.99 is a sale price against a $189.00 strikethrough on the Note Pro product page, which also notes the device “Includes a free black magnetic case and 300 mins/mo AI transcription”. You get the free Starter meter in the box and nothing more. And Plaud’s Team plan carries a dated offer I’ve kept out of the table: “Offer ends August 31, 2026”, after which the annual rate moves from $20 to $25 per user per month. The storage cells are one-sided because plaud.ai/pages/plaud-ai-plan-pricing publishes no storage allowance at all, so there was nothing to put in the Plaud columns.

Where the crossover actually sits

This part is modelled from published quotas, not measured. I haven’t put a stopwatch on either product. What follows is arithmetic on numbers both vendors print themselves.

Take a recruiter running twelve 45-minute intake calls a month. That’s 540 minutes across twelve recordings, none longer than 45 minutes. On Fireflies Free the per-recording cap is never in play, so the 2-hour wall never shows up. The storage row does. Eight of those calls come to 360 minutes and the ninth crosses 400, which is the whole Free allowance, three calls before the month is out. Fireflies Pro has room for it at 8,000 mins/seat. The same recruiter blows through Plaud Starter’s 300 minutes somewhere in the third week, and then either stops recording or pays.

A consultant sits through one 6-hour discovery workshop plus a couple of hour-long check-ins, so 480 minutes. That overruns Plaud Starter, making it a Pro subscription at $8.33 a month, which is fine. What Fireflies Pro does with the workshop depends on how it was captured. If the “Recording limit” row governs, four hours of the most expensive meeting in that consultant’s quarter is gone.

So the fireflies vs plaud crossover sits roughly at the two-hour mark of your longest single conversation. Under it, Fireflies wins on cost by a distance and you never see that cap, though the storage row keeps counting. Over it, no Fireflies tier below Business helps, and Business is $19 a seat annually for a 3-hour cap that a full-day workshop still overruns.

Where I’m genuinely unsure, twice over. The pricing page carries both a “Recording limit” of 2 Hours and, on the mobile row, the tooltip “Unlimited in-person recording with Fireflies mobile app”, and I could not find a first-party page saying which of the two governs a phone recording a room. The 120-minute maximum in the API sits on the mutation that sends the bot into a scheduled online call, so it does not settle it either. Nor do I know what happens at minute 121: truncate silently, refuse the upload, split the recording. Test both with a long file before you bet a client workshop on it.

A third option worth naming before you pick

Both products are retrospective. They hand you the conversation after it’s over, which is right for compliance and handover notes, and wrong if what you needed was help during the call. That’s a different tool. Craqly is a live copilot rather than a note-taker: it listens while you’re in the meeting and puts suggested answers on screen while the other person is still talking. Its pricing page states the unit plainly, “1 credit = 1 minute of live session · credits reset every month”. Starter is free with 20 credits a month, Pro is $38 monthly or $19 yearly with 180 credits, and stealth mode is on every tier including the free one. If your problem is remembering what was said, buy a recorder. If your problem is what to say next, don’t.

Fireflies vs Plaud on languages: 112 marketed, 37 you can pin

Fireflies’ pricing page markets “Transcription in 100+ languages”. Plaud’s plan list markets “112+ Languages Supported”. Neither number is checkable, so I checked the one that is.

The Fireflies API publishes a finite list of the language codes you can pass to uploadAudio and addToLive to pin a transcription language. I fetched the docs export on 20 August 2026, extracted the JSON block under the Language codes section, and counted it. Thirty-seven entries. Thirty-three unique base languages, because four are regional variants of two languages already in the list: en-US, en-AU, en-GB and es-419. Three steps, reproducible in about a minute:

• curl the docs export at docs.fireflies.ai/llms-full.txt
• split on the “# Language codes” heading, grab the fenced JSON array
• json.loads it, len() the result, then split each code on the hyphen and count unique first halves

The honest reading is narrower than the fun one. Thirty-seven is the list you can explicitly pin. Auto-detection may reach further, and the pricing table does show “Auto-language detection” checked on all four tiers. But pinning is what you want for accented in-person audio, which is the exact situation this comparison is about. Plaud publishes no machine-readable list of its 112, so I couldn’t run the same count there, and I’d rather say that than guess.

One more thing on languages, since in-person meetings are where it bites. “Multi-language Mode”, the row for calls where more than one language is spoken, is blank on Free and Pro and checked on Business and Enterprise only.

Three things Fireflies Free won’t do

The free tier is unusually generous on transcript count and strict everywhere else. The strictness is what catches people out.

You can’t export. “Download transcripts & recordings” is blank on Free, checked on the three paid tiers. Record a client meeting in person for nothing, read the transcript in the browser, and have no way to get it out.

System-audio capture keeps no media. Straight from the no-bot article: “System audio mode does not save separate audio or video files.” Your transcript is the only artifact. Nothing to re-listen to when a summary looks wrong, which for in-person audio with cross-talk is when you most want the tape. The same page adds that in this mode, “Speakers appear as Speaker 1 / Speaker 2 instead of named participants.”

And the API upload path is paid-only, which surprised me, because the web UI upload is free on every tier. The uploadAudio reference prints the error verbatim: “Free plan users cannot upload audio files. Please upgrade to a paid plan to upload audio files.” Planning to pipe recordings in from a script? That’s a $10 a seat month you didn’t budget for.

So which one should you buy?

The short version of fireflies vs plaud: buy Fireflies if your meetings are mostly scheduled calls, nothing you record regularly runs past two hours, and you want zero hardware. Free covers a startling amount. Budget for Pro the moment you need to export anything.

Buy a Plaud recorder if you sit in long rooms. Workshops, depositions, all-day site visits, lectures. 300 free minutes a month is enough to try before committing to Pro. I haven’t held one of these devices, so treat the 30-hour battery and the 16.4 ft pickup as manufacturer figures rather than measurements. That asymmetry matters: I counted the Fireflies numbers myself and I’m repeating Plaud’s.

Then there’s the part neither vendor’s marketing wants to dwell on. A recorder on a table and a bot-free desktop capture both remove the visible participant that used to act as everyone’s disclosure. Fireflies’ own no-bot page describes this as a feature: “no visible participant (bot) appears in your meeting”. In all-party-consent states, recording a conversation without telling the other people in it can be unlawful. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press recording guide is the reference I use for the US state-by-state position. I’m not a lawyer and this isn’t advice. Say you’re recording. It takes four seconds and it’s the cheapest part of either product.

For the wider field, we’ve written up the note-taker category in Circleback alternatives and Grain alternatives, plus a piece on auditing recurring meetings that will probably save you more than either subscription costs.

Fireflies’ own listicle, “The 9 Best AI Note Takers for In-Person Meetings That Actually Work in 2026”, ranks Plaud second under “Best Hardware Approach” and sells Fireflies’ in-person capture hard. The strings “recording limit”, “2 hours” and “120 min” appear zero times on it. That’s the tell. Not that the two posts I quoted got Fireflies and rooms wrong, though they did. It’s that the number which would change your decision sits on the vendor’s own site, in plain text, two clicks from the page telling you to record in person.