Earshot vs Fireflies

The short answer

Pick Fireflies if you run a sales or customer team and the value is in shared, CRM-synced conversation data. Pick Earshot if you're an individual or a privacy-sensitive professional on Windows who wants the notes without the cloud archive — open source, local storage, your own AI keys if you want them.

At a glance

	Earshot	Fireflies
Bot joins the call	Never	Optional bot, plus bot-free desktop app
Where your data lives	Your PC only	Fireflies' cloud (AWS + GCP, US)
Open source	Yes — MIT	No
Self-host / own AI keys	Yes, incl. fully local models	No
Trains its own AI on your data	No	No — 0-day retention policy
CRM sync / team workspace	No — personal tool (Todoist, webhooks)	Yes — Salesforce, HubSpot, 40+ integrations
Platforms	Windows 10/11	Web, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android
Free tier	Full app, self-hosted, forever	Limited (~400 min stored per team)
Paid tier	US$9/mo flat, 40 h transcription	Pro US$10/seat/mo annual (US$18 monthly)

Verified against Fireflies' official pricing and security pages in July 2026. Plans and credit limits change often — check the live pages for current figures.

Where Fireflies wins, honestly

• Team and CRM workflows. Native sync to Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive and dozens more, shared channels, and conversation intelligence (talk time, topics, trackers). If meeting data is a team asset for you, this is the point of the product.
• A genuinely strong training policy for a cloud tool. Credit where due: Fireflies states a 0-day retention policy with its AI providers and that your data is never used for model training — better than most of its cloud peers.
• Everywhere. Web, desktop on Windows and Mac, iOS and Android — including in-person capture on mobile.

Where Earshot wins

• No archive to worry about. Fireflies' promise is a searchable cloud library of every conversation your team has. That's its feature — and its risk surface. Earshot keeps recordings and notes on your PC; there is no server-side copy to breach, subpoena or misconfigure.
• Open source. The whole Earshot app is auditable on GitHub (MIT). Fireflies is closed source — you're trusting the policy, not the code.
• Runs on your keys — or entirely offline. Self-hosted Earshot can use a local Whisper server and a local model, so nothing ever leaves your machine. No cloud notetaker can offer that.
• Simpler, cheaper for one person. Fireflies prices per seat and gates features by AI credits; Earshot is one flat US$9/month for Plus, or free self-hosted with no storage ceiling — your disk is the limit.
• Dual-channel speaker attribution. Your mic and the meeting are separate channels, so who-said-what is physical fact rather than a diarisation guess.

Which one should you pick?

If you manage a revenue team, Fireflies' CRM plumbing probably pays for itself and Earshot doesn't try to compete there. If you're one person who wants excellent notes from confidential calls — consulting, legal, finance, founder conversations — the searchable team cloud is exactly what you don't want, and Earshot gives you the same after-meeting output with none of the archive. Download it free or start the 7-day Plus trial. Also see Earshot vs Granola, Otter and Fathom, or the full comparison.