Fireflies keeps the transcript. Read AI grades the room.

On 20 August 2026 I had the Fireflies pricing page open in one tab and the Read AI pricing page in another, because a sales lead I talk to kept flipping between the two and couldn’t tell me why. The Fireflies vs Read AI decision usually gets filed as a notetaker bake-off. I don’t think that’s what it is. One of these products is built so you can find a sentence somebody said back in March. The other is built to tell you how the meeting itself went.

Both write summaries. Both join Zoom, Teams and Meet. Past that they pull apart further than the category name suggests, and you can see the split by reading what each company decided to put behind a paywall.

Fireflies vs Read AI: searchable notes against engagement scores

The short version: Fireflies sells retrieval and Read AI sells measurement. Fireflies puts search on all four of its plans, and the pricing page describes its Meeting Search feature as a way to “Remember what was discussed on calls several months ago down to the specific sentence and timestamp.” Read AI puts a coaching report inside each meeting report, with metrics it lists as “talking speed, filler words, bias, and charisma.”

That’s the whole thing. If your problem is that somebody quoted a discount on a call in March and nobody can find it now, Fireflies is aimed at you. If your problem is that two reps talk through 80% of a discovery call and you can’t prove it in a one-on-one, Read AI is aimed at you.

Most teams have both problems. They pick based on whichever one hurt them most recently, which is a bad way to buy software and an accurate description of how the decision actually gets made.

What each one costs, as listed on 20 August 2026

These came off the vendors’ own pricing pages, not a review site, on 20 August 2026. Both charge per seat. Both discount annual billing, so compare the monthly column if you aren’t ready to sign for a year.

Fireflies charges for storage, not for talking

Transcription is listed as unlimited on all four Fireflies plans, free one included. Storage is where the meter runs. The free tier gets “400 mins of storage/team”, and that word team is doing a lot of work: it’s a shared pool, not 400 minutes each. One 30 minute standup a day gets you to the ceiling in about 13 working days.

Pro moves you to “8,000 mins of storage/seat” and Business moves you to “Unlimited storage”. If you’re evaluating Fireflies as a searchable archive, and that’s the reason most people evaluate it, the archive is the thing being sold and Business at $19 per seat annually is the first tier where the archive doesn’t expire on you.

The analysis features are staged the same way. “Question detection”, “Speaker talk-time analytics” and “Create topic trackers” are all blank on Free and checked from Pro upward. “Conversation intelligence” is blank on Free and Pro, and appears on Business and Enterprise. The AI credits column moves the same way: 20 on Free and Pro, 30 on Business, 50 on Enterprise. Global search carries a NEW badge and sits on every tier, with a tooltip reading “Search across all your meetings and transcription in one go.”

One thing to watch on the way in: Enterprise is marked “ANNUAL ONLY” at $39 per seat per month. There’s no month-to-month escape hatch at the top tier, so a pilot has to happen lower down. We wrote up how this stacks against a live assistant in our Craqly vs Fireflies comparison, which covers the recording-bot question in more detail.

Read AI charges for playback and for long meetings

Read AI’s free tier is a trial in everything but name. You get “5 meeting transcripts per month” and a one hour cap on meeting length. Pro at $19.75 monthly lifts transcripts to unlimited and the cap to four hours. The eight hour cap only shows up on Enterprise+, which the page marks “REQUIRES 5+ LICENSES”, so a solo consultant running all-day workshops has nowhere useful to land.

Playback is the other gate, and it’s the one that surprised me. “Audio & video playback” is blank on both Free and Pro, and only turns on at Enterprise, $29.75 monthly or $22.50 per user per month annually. You can read what was said on Pro. You can’t watch it back.

Now the part Read AI is actually built around. The transcription row describes the dialogue as “augmented with listener sentiment and engagement”. For You Insights is defined as “Ranked topics across meetings based on your engagement.” Meeting Policy gives you “Individual and team meeting benchmarks such as timeliness and level of engagement by meeting size”, and Coaching Trends rolls the personal metrics up across meetings. Nothing in the Fireflies table maps onto that, and nothing in the Read AI table maps onto a sentence-level archive search that runs back a year.

Here’s my honest hesitation, and I could be wrong about it. Engagement scoring reads as more useful to the manager than to the person holding the score, and rolling it onto a team that didn’t agree to be graded on charisma is a conversation I’d want to have first. If what you’re after is the talk ratio number specifically, that’s measurable in cheaper ways, and we broke down the benchmarks in our piece on talk-to-listen ratio on sales calls. If Read AI is close but the pricing shape is wrong, there’s a wider list in our Read AI alternatives roundup.

Two smaller things I noticed while reading the page side by side. Read AI’s integrations row is split into Basic on Free and Premium on the paid tiers, with the Pro card naming the premium set as Notion, Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, Confluence, Zapier and webhooks, so a free account plugged into Salesforce isn’t a thing you can test. And the language coverage is quoted two different ways in two places: the free plan card says “20+ languages supported”, while the comparison table row lower down reads “Support for 16+ Languages” and lists sixteen. Neither number is wrong, exactly. They just aren’t the same claim, and if language coverage is why you’re buying, that’s the sort of gap worth an email.

Ask sales before you sign anything at volume. Read AI does publish volume discounts on annual license counts, at 10% for 100 or more, 15% for 500 or more, and 20% for 1,000 or more.

Neither of them is in the room while you’re still talking

Both tools work after the fact. That’s a design choice, not a flaw, but it leaves a gap: the moment you needed help was 40 seconds ago, when the prospect asked about SOC 2 and you blanked. Craqly sits in that gap instead, feeding suggestions during the live call rather than a report afterward.

Checked on 20 August 2026, Craqly runs a free Starter at 20 credits a month, Pro at $38 monthly or $19 monthly on yearly billing with 180 credits, Pro Max at $59 or $39 yearly with 420 credits, and Ultra at $99 or $69 yearly with 780 credits. The pricing page defines the unit plainly: “1 credit = 1 minute of live session · credits reset every month”. Stealth mode is on all plans, free Starter included. Different job, different bill, and worth pricing alongside the other two rather than instead of them.

So which one do you buy?

Buy Fireflies if the artifact you want is a searchable corpus. Buy Read AI if the artifact you want is a scorecard. That’s a blunt rule and it holds up better than a feature-count comparison, because the feature counts are close and the philosophies aren’t.

On budget, the Fireflies vs Read AI gap is real but small at the entry paid tier: $18 against $19.75 monthly, $10 against $15 annually. It widens as you climb. Fireflies tops out at $39 per seat annually with unlimited storage. Read AI tops out at $29.75 per user annually but requires five licenses to get there, which is $148.75 a month minimum before anyone has spoken a word.

The awkward answer, and the one I’d give the sales lead who started this, is that a lot of teams want the Fireflies archive and the Read AI coaching layer, and running both at Pro is about $38 per person per month monthly billed. That’s more than either vendor’s mid tier, which is roughly the point at which somebody should sit down and decide which problem is actually costing money.

Prices and feature rows here came off the Fireflies pricing page and the Read AI pricing page on 20 August 2026. Both change often enough that I’d re-check before you buy, and if you find a row that’s moved, I’d rather hear about it than have it sit here wrong.