Key findings
- 13 accounts, each from a different author, praise the transcripts, summaries, or action items.
- 12 accounts praise the searchable record and 8 praise the integrations, from Slack posts to agents that draft follow-ups from Fireflies transcripts. Three developers building on the API report a 50-request daily limit on Pro, webhooks that carry only a transcript ID, and schema and pagination changes that broke their tools.
- Bot control and privacy comes up in 23 accounts, and 18 raise it as a problem. Nine of those 18 are r/sysadmin posts, most describing the bot spreading through a Microsoft 365 or Teams tenant and outlasting an app block. Six are university IT pages, and one is a community college's faculty update.
- 5 accounts raise fit and reliability. They describe a bot that joins late or misses about 10% of meetings, calendars that will not sync, and an API that returned 24 of about 1,810 meetings on a bad run.
- Twelve accounts say the value comes when notes leave Fireflies for a ticket, Slack, a CRM, an Obsidian vault, or an AI agent. 6 say it grows when the whole team shares one record.
- 37 accounts speak for a team, a company, or an IT department, and they split 18 positive to 16 negative. Teams praise note quality, the record, and integrations, and IT raises the bot.
Lock Fireflies' join, recap, and sharing defaults before a team rollout. In public accounts published from January 2025 to October 2026, note quality draws the most praise. The notetaker spreading through calendars and Teams tenants draws the most concern, mostly from IT administrators and universities.
What people praise
Praise centers on the record. Kapil Amarnani's sales team at SoftwareSuggest records every sales call, builds a report on each agent from the transcripts, and estimates 2 to 3 hours saved per agent a week. EvaluCore Consulting's managing partner counted 156 meetings recorded in 2025. An executive coach prefers Fireflies' summaries to Zoom AI Companion's, and a seed-stage founder runs it on every call for a searchable transcript.
Integrations are the second reason. Career Pathway Institute posts summaries to Slack, and developers pull transcripts through the API into a sales follow-up agent and Obsidian notes. Karl Heinz Frankeser, a SaaS founder, has his agent read calls through MCP to track how the company's wording with customers changed. An r/sales commenter built a Claude skill that keeps a running to-do list from the recaps.
| Theme | Accounts | Share of accounts |
|---|---|---|
| Notes & action items | 13 of 63 | |
| Searchable record | 12 of 63 | |
| Integrations & API | 8 of 63 | |
| Automatic capture | 4 of 63 |
GILD's Fireflies record, n=63 public accounts, Jan 2025 to Oct 2026, opened Oct 12, 25, 26 and 28, 2026
What people raise
IT administrators raise the bot most. In an October 2025 r/sysadmin thread, admins describe Fireflies adding itself to every meeting on a user's calendar after one click, and recap emails recruiting the next user. Blocking the app in Teams did not stop it, and the bot kept joining until each user's Fireflies account was deleted. One admin traces the spread to tenants that let users consent to apps for the whole organization. In an August 2025 thread, another admin rejected Fireflies because it needed guest access opened. Morgan State University, Arizona State, CUSM, and UW-Madison restrict it in university meetings. Case Western Reserve blocked it across Zoom, Teams, and Meet from September 12, 2025, because it rejoins future meetings without other attendees' consent, and Virginia Tech bars it from university systems.
The other concerns are smaller. Five accounts report the bot joining late, missing about 10% of meetings, failing to sync calendars, or an API that returned a partial meeting list. Developers building on the API add a 50-request daily limit on Pro and webhooks that carry only a transcript ID. Two accounts report transcription trouble. One user says Fireflies misses 20 to 30% of what native English speakers say, and a sales team says it does not recognize Hindi.
| Theme | Discuss | Raise | Share of accounts that discuss it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bot control & privacy | 23 | 18 | |
| Fit & reliability | 6 | 5 | |
| Price & plan limits | 5 | 3 | |
| Transcript accuracy | 3 | 2 |
GILD's Fireflies record, n=63 public accounts, Jan 2025 to Oct 2026, opened Oct 12, 25, 26 and 28, 2026
Where the record goes next
Twelve accounts describe the record leaving Fireflies. One team turns remote meetings into tickets, and another feeds recordings to an account-analysis tool in place of Gong. Two Hacker News commenters run agents that pull transcripts to draft follow-ups or update Obsidian notes. Runlayer feeds customer calls from Fireflies into an agent pipeline that files issues and opens pull requests, and a Matix engineer proposed feeding his team's Fireflies transcripts into a CRM's agent. Fireflies documents HubSpot and Salesforce sync, Slack, Notion, and Zapier integrations, webhooks, a GraphQL API, and an MCP server.
Six accounts say the value grows when the team shares one record. Amarnani's sales team reviews any agent's call from one dashboard, and Career Pathway Institute stopped asking people to volunteer as notetaker because everyone gets the same summary.
Where the accounts come from, and what to check
18 Reddit posts and comments, 9 Product Hunt reviews and 6 Hacker News comments make up most of the record, and most are short. Of those, 13 come from r/sysadmin, most from administrators dealing with the bot's spread, so the team accounts lean toward IT. The other 23 are 6 TrustRadius reviews, 6 university IT pages, and a community college's faculty update. Developers building on the API wrote 3 GitHub issues and a pull request, and company builders wrote 3 X posts. The last 3 are newsletter posts.
On October 25, 2026 GILD looked for accounts on the three things buyers ask peers about. Participant objections are on record. An account admin in a June 2025 Zoom Community thread wrote, "every meeting we have I have to kick several of these AI notetakers from our meetings," and the thread names Fireflies.ai. Case Western Reserve University began blocking third-party notetakers, Fireflies.ai among them, on September 12, 2025. Recap-email settings in a team rollout come up only in Fireflies' help pages and competitors' blogs, so measure them in your own pilot. On credits, a Reddit user wrote in September 2026 that "the credits drove me insane."
- Pilot with the join, recap, and sharing defaults locked, then count participant objections and time to follow-up.
- Check your tenant's app-consent setting before the pilot. Several administrators tie the spread to users being allowed to consent to apps for the whole organization.
- Turn off Daily Digest and Meeting Prep until someone owns the credit pool, because both start on and spend credits.
Methodology
GILD opened 43 accounts on October 12, 2026, 8 more on October 25, 2026, and 5 on October 26, 2026. These comprise 18 Reddit posts and comments, 9 dated Product Hunt reviews, 6 Hacker News comments, 6 TrustRadius reviews, and 3 newsletter posts. The rest are 6 university IT pages, a community college page, 3 GitHub issues, a GitHub pull request, and 3 X posts. Publication dates run from January 6, 2025 to October 13, 2026. Reddit threads were read on reddit.com because the Arctic Shift archive was rate-limited, and Hacker News comments were found through the Algolia API. GILD recorded each account's author, date, who it speaks for, sentiment, and positions, and counted at most 2 accounts per author. GILD left out nine Product Hunt reviews posted between June 20 and July 8, 2025 with near-identical wording, and Fireflies' own customer stories, which are vendor material. GILD checked product facts against Fireflies' site, help center, Privacy Policy, and Terms of Service on October 12, 2026. The Zoom Community and Reddit credit accounts were added on October 25, 2026 and sit outside the counts.
Products in this piece
Sources
- Official documentation
- 9
- Public source
- 25
- Fireflies pricing & plans
- Fireflies Knowledge Base: Learn about meeting storage limits
- Fireflies Knowledge Base: Auto-join and email recap settings
- Fireflies Knowledge Base: Learn about data storage and transfer
- Fireflies Knowledge Base: Fireflies API overview
- Fireflies Knowledge Base: Autofill CRM for HubSpot
- Fireflies Knowledge Base: How to set up the Fireflies Slack integration
- Fireflies Knowledge Base: Fireflies MCP server
- Kapil Amarnani, TrustRadius review of Fireflies.ai (Jan 2, 2026)
- Maria Sergeeva, TrustRadius review of Fireflies.ai (Jul 31, 2025)
- Stephanie Puryear Helling, TrustRadius review of Fireflies.ai (Jan 1, 2026)
- Reddit r/sysadmin: Teams meeting AI note taker virus (Oct 7, 2025)
- Reddit r/sysadmin: user consent settings behind the Fireflies spread (Oct 7, 2025)
- Reddit r/sysadmin: meeting AI for Teams without disabling security (Aug 12, 2025)
- Reddit r/productivity: Note-taking app that has supreme accuracy? (Aug 5, 2025)
- Scott Monday: How Fireflies.ai Changed the Way We Run Meetings (Apr 4, 2026)
- Morgan State University: AI Meeting Note-Taking Tools (Jun 10, 2026)
- CUSM Help Desk: Stopping AI note-taking bots from joining university Teams meetings (Apr 21, 2026)
- UW-Madison KnowledgeBase: Zoom third-party AI assistant bots (Mar 27, 2025)
- Hacker News comment on setting up Fireflies for a company under ISO audit (Mar 31, 2026)
- Hacker News: an AI agent that drafts sales follow-ups from Fireflies transcripts (Jan 7, 2026)
- Hacker News comment on an agent pulling Fireflies transcripts into Obsidian (Feb 28, 2026)
- Case Western Reserve University: Learn about upcoming third-party AI note-taker application block (Aug 27, 2025)
- Virginia Tech Division of Information Technology: Use of unauthorized AI meeting assistants (Mar 11, 2026)
- Alex Galey, GitHub issue on twentyhq/twenty: Fireflies integration guidance (Nov 4, 2025)
- Dzhuneyt, GitHub issue: Fireflies meeting list fetch silently truncates (Jun 12, 2026)
- Rafal Wilinski on X: Runlayer's software factory (Oct 13, 2026)
- Karl Heinz Frankeser on X: reviewing customer wording through Fireflies and MCP (Oct 7, 2026)
- Ujjwal Nambiar, Product Hunt review of Fireflies.ai (Jun 5, 2025)
- Charlie Crown, Product Hunt review of Fireflies.ai (Mar 7, 2026)
- Tejasvi Ravi, Product Hunt review of Fireflies.ai (Oct 6, 2025)
- Fireflies Knowledge Base: AI Credits Pricing and Overview
- Zoom Community: How do I disable AI notetakers (Otter.ai, Read.ai, Fireflies.ai, etc.) from joining our meetings? (durinien, Jun 12, 2025)
- Reddit r/ProductivityApps comment on Fireflies AI credits (Admirable_Celery_565, Sep 9, 2026)