Fireflies vs Grain: Which AI Notetaker Is Right for Your Team?

At first glance, Fireflies and Grain look pretty similar. Both record your meetings, create call notes, and let you capture conversations without putting a visible bot on the call.

But they put more attention on different things:

• Grain focuses more on reviewing customer calls and coaching sales reps.
• Fireflies gives you more ways to track information across meetings and send it to the other apps you use.

Say a customer mentions a competitor during a sales call. Grain gives a manager tools to review how the rep handled it, give feedback, or save that part of the call as a clip. Fireflies can track mentions of that competitor across your other meetings and send the information to your CRM or project tools.

So choosing between them has a lot to do with what you want to do with your meetings afterward. This guide looks at how both tools work day to day, what you get on their free plans, and which one makes more sense for your team.

Fireflies vs Grain at a Glance

What Is Grain AI?

Grain AI is a meeting notetaker that records, transcribes, and summarizes online meetings. It's built mainly for sales, customer success, and product teams that need to review customer conversations after the call.

A big part of Grain is video. You can turn important moments from a meeting into short clips, combine clips into Stories (short video summaries), and use its coaching tools to review how conversations went. This makes Grain useful for teams that want to learn from their calls rather than simply keep a written record of them.

What Does Grain Do Well?

Grain is at its best when you need to actually do something with a conversation after a meeting ends. Instead of just leaving you with a long recording, it helps you find the important parts, share them with your team, and use them for coaching or follow-up.

Video clips and Stories make it easier to share customer feedback. You can highlight a line in the transcript and turn that part of the conversation into a short video clip. If you're seeing the same thing come up across several calls, you can combine clips from different meetings into a Story. That gives your product or sales team a way to hear what customers actually said without sitting through the full calls.

If you manage a team, Grain gives you ways to coach reps without watching hours of calls. You can create custom scorecards to grade specific parts of a sales call and track things like talk time, pacing, and filler words. When you review a scorecard, you can go back to the relevant part of the call and see what happened. Grain can also track sales frameworks like MEDDICC and SPICED across multiple meetings.

It can take some of the work out of updating your CRM, too. Custom AI templates can capture specific details from a call, including customer objections, feature requests, and next steps. Grain can send that information to HubSpot or Salesforce and automatically update CRM fields.

How Much Does Grain Cost?

You can use Grain for free, but the 45-minute limit per meeting can hold you back if you regularly have longer calls. Grain has three paid plans if you need more:

• Free: $0 for unlimited meetings up to 45 minutes each, a 20-meeting bot cap for personal-email users, AI notes and action items, basic MCP access, and no file uploads.
• Starter: $15 per seat per month with annual billing for unlimited meeting duration and history, advanced AI notes, custom prompts, and 10 file uploads per month.
• Business: $29 per seat per month with annual billing for AI coaching, team metrics, HubSpot and Salesforce integrations, and unlimited file uploads.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing for larger teams that need additional security, admin controls, and support.

For most teams, the choice will come down to Starter or Business. Starter makes sense if you mainly want to remove the Free plan's meeting-length limit and add file uploads. Business is the step up if you need sales coaching and CRM integrations.

What Is Fireflies?

Fireflies is an AI meeting assistant that joins your online calls to record, transcribe, and summarize the conversation. It gives you a written record of what was said, along with notes and action items, so you don't have to write everything down yourself.

Once the call is over, you can search the transcript, jump back to specific moments, and share notes or follow-ups with your team. Sales, customer success, recruiting, and marketing teams can use it to keep track of what was discussed across their meetings.

What Does Fireflies Do Well?

Fireflies is useful when your calendar fills up with back-to-back calls. It turns those conversations into searchable text, so you can find what was said without going through old recordings.

If you need a detail from an earlier call, you can search your meeting history by keyword or topic. If you can't remember which meeting it came from, you can ask Fireflies' built-in AI assistant, AskFred. For example, you could ask it to list every deadline discussed this week rather than checking each meeting separately.

You can use AI Skills to choose what information you want to capture from your calls:

• Sales teams can capture customer objections, budget limits, or next steps.
• Product teams can keep track of feature requests and bugs.
• Fireflies can send those details to your CRM and update the relevant fields.

That leaves you with less to sort out after each meeting.

If you have meetings in different languages, Fireflies supports more than 100 and can detect which one is being spoken. Multilingual mode can follow the conversation when people switch languages during the same call. Fireflies delivers 99% transcription accuracy for English and 95% for other languages.

How Much Does Fireflies Cost?

Fireflies has four plans, including a free option with unlimited transcription, 3 AI summaries a month, and 800 minutes of storage per seat, pooled across the team. The paid plans give you more storage and features for people who use Fireflies regularly or across a team.

Here are the details:

• Free: $0 with unlimited transcription, 3 AI summaries a month, 800 minutes of storage per seat, pooled across the team, meeting search, AskFred, and support for more than 100 languages.
• Pro: $10 per seat per month with annual billing and adds video recording, file downloads, AI Skills, and unlimited integrations.
• Business: $19 per seat per month with annual billing and adds unlimited storage, multilingual mode, and team analytics.
• Enterprise: $39 per seat per month with annual billing and adds SSO, private storage, custom data retention, and dedicated support.

The Free plan gives you plenty to start with if you mainly want transcripts and meeting summaries. Pro is a better fit if you use Fireflies regularly and want to do more with your recordings. Business makes sense for teams that want more insight into their meetings, and Enterprise adds the security and admin features larger companies often need.

Fireflies vs Grain: How Do They Compare?

On paper, Fireflies and Grain look pretty similar. They both join your calls, take notes, and summarize the conversation. But once you start using them day to day, the differences become easier to spot. Let’s look at how they compare where it matters.

Meetings and Recording

Both Fireflies and Grain can record the usual Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams calls, either with a meeting bot or without one. Grain has a desktop app for Mac and Windows that can also capture Slack Huddles and in-person conversations right from your computer.

Fireflies gives you more options when you’re away from your computer. Its mobile apps for iPhone and Android let you record in-person meetings, interviews, or voice notes straight from your phone. You can also upload existing audio and video files on the Free plan, while Grain requires a paid seat for uploads.

Grain supports over 130 transcription languages, compared with 100+ for Fireflies. Fireflies does have a useful edge for multilingual conversations. Its multi-language mode can recognize 60+ languages within the same meeting, even when someone switches languages in the middle of a sentence.

There’s a difference in how the free plans limit usage, too. Fireflies includes 800 minutes of storage per seat, pooled across the team, while Grain limits individual meetings to 45 minutes.

AI Notes and Summaries

Both Fireflies and Grain give you a meeting summary, action items, and timestamped notes after your call. Grain also has ready-made templates for different types of meetings, such as sales discovery or customer feedback.

Fireflies gives you more ways to use those notes afterward. AskFred can answer questions about the meeting, find specific details, or write a follow-up email. Grain has a similar tool called Ask Grain AI, which lets you ask questions about a meeting and find the information you need.

Fireflies also has more than 200 AI Skills for pulling specific information from your calls. You can use them for things like BANT and MEDDIC or tracking competitor mentions. If you want to use your meeting notes for different tasks instead of getting the same kind of recap each time, Fireflies gives you more to work with.

Integrations and Workflows

Fireflies connects with more of the tools you may already use after a meeting. You can send notes to your CRM, post meeting summaries in Slack, or create tasks from the action items Fireflies finds.

For example, those action items can become:

• Asana tasks
• Jira or Linear issues
• HubSpot or Salesforce tasks

So if someone agrees to do something during a call, you don't have to copy it from the meeting notes and create the task yourself. Fireflies can create it in the connected app for you.

Grain connects with HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack, and Zapier as well. It also has MCP support for ChatGPT and Claude. This lets you ask about your Grain meetings from either tool, search previous calls, find action items, or create clips and Stories.

The difference mostly comes down to what you want to do after the meeting. Fireflies has more integrations for sending notes and action items to other apps. Grain gives you another option with ChatGPT and Claude if you want to access your meeting information from there.

Clips and Meeting Highlights

You may also want to share part of the actual conversation after a meeting. A short clip can be easier to send around than the full recording.

Grain lets you highlight part of the transcript and turn it into a Clip. You can also put several clips into a Story, including clips from different meetings. If three customers bring up the same problem on separate calls, for example, you could put those moments in one video for your product team.

Fireflies calls its meeting clips Soundbites. They can include audio or video, and you can choose the part of the meeting you want to save. Fireflies also has Magic Soundbites, an AI feature that automatically finds important moments and turns them into clips. You can share individual Soundbites or put several of them into a playlist.

Grain's Stories are useful when you have clips from several calls that you want to bring together. With Fireflies, Magic Soundbites can find the moments worth saving without you having to pick them out yourself.

Coaching and Conversation Analytics

Grain has a coaching area where managers can review sales calls and score how reps handled them. It tracks things like talk time, speaking speed, filler words, and patience. Managers can also use scorecards to grade specific parts of a sales conversation.

Fireflies can keep an eye on subjects you care about across your calls. You choose the words, phrases, or topics you want it to watch for, such as a competitor's name or a common pricing objection. Fireflies calls these Topic Trackers.

You can then use Topic Insights to see which meetings mentioned that subject and jump to the relevant parts of those conversations. This is useful when you want to spot patterns across a lot of calls rather than opening each meeting and searching through it yourself.

Fireflies vs Grain: Which One Should You Choose?

Grain is a great choice if you spend a lot of time reviewing customer calls. It helps sales managers see how reps handle conversations, and its Stories feature lets you put video clips from different meetings together and share customer feedback with your team.

Fireflies is the better fit if you want to use your meeting notes after the call. It can track topics across your meetings, create action items, and send tasks to other apps so you don't have to copy everything over yourself. It also connects with more than 100 tools, including CRMs and project management tools.

For most teams, Fireflies gives you more to work with. Grain is a good choice if sales coaching and customer clips are what you care about most. Fireflies is the better choice if you want to record meetings, find information from your calls, and send notes and tasks to the other tools you use.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Fireflies better than Grain?

For most teams, Fireflies is the better choice. It connects with more than 100 tools and gives you plenty of options for using your notes and action items after a meeting. Grain is worth considering if sales coaching and putting customer clips together into Stories matter more to you.

Is Grain or Fireflies better for sales teams?

It depends on what your sales team actually needs the tool to do. Grain is the better pick if you want to focus on sales training, since it gives you a dedicated coaching area and scorecards to review how reps handle their calls.

Fireflies is the better fit if your team wants to use meeting information right away. It can sync notes with CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce, turn action items into tasks, and track topics like competitor mentions across your calls.

Does Fireflies have a free plan?

Yes. Fireflies has a free plan with 3 AI summaries a month and 800 minutes of storage per seat, pooled across the team. You can also upload existing audio or video files for free. The plan includes unlimited transcription.

Does Grain have a free plan?

Yes. Grain's Free plan gives you one Notetaker seat and lets you record meetings up to 45 minutes long. There is no general limit on how many meetings you can keep, although Free users with personal email addresses can only record 20 meetings with Grain's bot. You also can't upload existing recordings unless you upgrade.

Can Fireflies and Grain record meetings without a bot?

Yes. Fireflies can record without a bot through its desktop app or Chrome extension for Google Meet. It also has iOS and Android apps for recording from your phone. Grain's desktop option can record calls on platforms such as Slack Huddles as well.

Which Meeting Assistant Fits Your Team?

By now, you probably have a good idea of which tool fits the way your team works. Grain gives sales teams some useful tools for reviewing calls and sharing customer moments. Fireflies gives you more ways to use your notes, action items, and other meeting details across the tools you already work with.