As of 6 Nov 2026, the panel rates Fireflies.ai 3/5 and tl;dv 3.5/5 in AI Meeting Assistants & Notetakers. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 1 of the 6 judges picks Fireflies.ai and 4 pick tl;dv, 1 calls it a tie. Fireflies.ai scores higher on 2 of 7 criteria (Consent, participant rights & works council and Retention, AI training & administration). tl;dv scores higher on 3 of 7 criteria (European sovereignty, Pricing transparency and Integrations, API & workflow). Provenance — Fireflies.ai: Rest of world; tl;dv: EU-Made. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
Neither product takes the page: the benches split by concern. Fireflies.ai is ahead on consent and co-determination, 6.2 to 4.0 with six judges leaning its way, and on data control and administration, 7.8 to 6.7 with five leaning and one tie; its verdict credits custom data retention, SSO with SCIM, an audit logs API and customer content excluded from model training by default. tl;dv is ahead on sovereignty, 7.7 to 4.0, and on pricing transparency, 6.3 to 4.2, with six judges leaning tl;dv on each; Fireflies.ai's verdict names a United States contracting entity and US-based subprocessors. Integrations and workflow goes to tl;dv, 7.8 to 7.5, but only two judges lean that way and four tie. Capture and transcription and summaries and knowledge sit level at 7.0 apiece, six ties each. Weighted, four judges put tl;dv ahead, one puts Fireflies.ai ahead 6.5 to 6.4, and one is level at 6.2.
Choose Fireflies.ai if
Your works council must clear consent handling and co-determination before rollout, the criterion where six judges lean Fireflies.ai, 6.2 to 4.0.
You need custom data retention, SSO with SCIM, an audit logs API and a super admin role, the admin controls named in Fireflies.ai's verdict, where five judges lean its way, 7.8 to 6.7.
Your legal review requires customer content excluded from model training by default and contractually at vendors, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 42001 stated, and named subprocessors under a zero-day retention policy.
Your priorities mirror the IT lead's weighting, the one judge whose total has Fireflies.ai ahead, 6.5 to 6.4.
Choose tl;dv if
You need published tier prices to compare before committing, the criterion where six judges lean tl;dv, 6.3 to 4.2.
Sovereignty leads your requirements: six judges lean tl;dv, 7.7 to 4.0, and its verdict names tldx Solutions GmbH of Aachen as the company.
You need a native HubSpot connector with per-field prompt mapping plus a documented REST API, webhooks and an MCP server, the integration set behind tl;dv's 7.8, where two judges lean its way and four tie.
Your buyer group matches the consultant, sales lead, data protection officer or skeptic weightings, whose totals put tl;dv ahead at 6.8 to 6.6, 6.8 to 6.3, 6.5 to 6.2 and 6.4 to 6.2.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The Management Consultant
Partner at a twelve-person management consultancy in Munich with six client calls a day, half in German, half in English, and workshops in the client's meeting room. Writes the minutes at night and wants that to stop. Wants accurate German transcripts with the right names, minutes by meeting type with decisions and action items, capture of in-person workshops without a laptop on the table, and a promise in writing that client conversations train nobody's model.
Fireflies.ai
tl;dv
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Recording, transcription & languages
Fireflies.ai
Bot and botless capture sit side by side: the desktop app records system audio with no bot in the room, auto-detects calls on Zoom, Meet, Teams, WhatsApp and phone calls, and the transcript is editable in the web dashboard afterwards, with mobile apps for in-person conversation and file upload on top. Multi-Language Mode (beta) covers meetings that switch language and a hundred-plus languages are claimed, but we found no public information naming German among them, botless recording labels speakers only as Speaker 1 and 2, and we found no public information on custom vocabulary for client names — accuracy is one overall 95% figure with nothing per language.
tl;dv
Botless capture is documented across Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Slack, WhatsApp and Discord, with a desktop app that records calls on any other platform and file import in nine audio and video formats; German is named among over thirty languages, transcription runs in real time with automatic speaker recognition and a stated accuracy above ninety percent, and the transcription providers appear in the published subprocessor list. For my practice the gaps matter: we found no public information on capturing an in-person workshop without a laptop on the table, on phone or dialer calls, or on accuracy stated per language, and the custom vocabulary I would need for client names and jargon sits behind the Business tier.
Summaries, action items & meeting knowledge
Fireflies.ai
Custom summary templates with my own instructions or sample notes, workspace defaults, per-group templates and meeting rules by title, host, participant or meeting type give me minutes shaped per client engagement, and action items can be pushed to Asana, Jira or Trello. Search across all meetings, questions to the assistant over the archive, soundbites and downloadable summaries are documented. We found no public information on summaries generated in a selectable language, on decisions extracted as their own field, or on answers that cite and link the transcript passage they rest on.
tl;dv
The minutes work roughly as I need them: built-in and custom templates applied per meeting or automated by rules, decisions, objections and next steps captured with action items assignable to named colleagues, everything organized by topic and fully searchable, an assistant that answers questions over the entire transcript library, a one-prompt summary of a whole week, and minutes auto-sent to participants when the call ends; the generative-AI partner is named. We found no public information on answers citing the transcript passage they rest on, on team libraries with permissions, or on export of the minutes to Word or PDF.
Integrations, API & workflow
Fireflies.ai
Over a hundred apps including HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive and Microsoft Dynamics 365, Slack channels, Zapier, a documented GraphQL API with rate limits per plan, webhooks with signing, and an MCP server for Claude and ChatGPT — the notes reach the systems where the work happens. Meeting and template rules can be set by meeting conditions, and an admin rules engine controls meeting access and privacy. We found no public information on SharePoint or Confluence export or on CRM field mapping per meeting type.
tl;dv
The notes reach where the work happens: a documented REST API with a downloadable OpenAPI specification, webhooks at user, team and organization level, an MCP server for AI assistants, Zapier, and native connectors into HubSpot, Salesforce and Pipedrive with field mapping driven by a prompt per field; recording follows rules, with auto-join from Google or Outlook calendar, an internal-versus-external meeting filter, and conditions that keep internal calls out of the CRM. We found no public information on SharePoint or Confluence export, and the HubSpot mapping is documented as covering only text and multi-select fields at the moment.
Consent, participant rights & works council
Fireflies.ai
The consent machinery is unusually well documented: on Google Meet, Zoom and Teams every participant must approve before the bot joins, external guests get an email an hour ahead with a decline link, anyone can pause with a chat or voice command or remove the bot with no rejoin, participants can request deletion, and botless capture carries three notice signals including a spoken message and a visible camera watermark. That gives me something concrete to show clients. We found no public information on a works-agreement template or works-council information pack, on DPIA support, on an EU AI Act classification, or on whether the talk-time and sentiment analytics sold on higher tiers are off by default or switchable per organisation.
tl;dv
The terms place the duty of collecting participant consent squarely on the recording user, while an enterprise governance page promises automated consent collection under the GDPR and other regimes without describing what a participant actually sees or how an external guest could opt out; admin rules for when the assistant auto-joins, configurable per user or per team, and the full set of GDPR rights including erasure are documented. For a German rollout I found no public information on the notice method for botless capture, on per-person analytics and their defaults, on a works-agreement template, DPIA support, or an EU AI Act classification.
Retention, AI training & administration
Fireflies.ai
The written promise I want from every vendor is in the terms: user content is not used to train generative AI models, vendors are contractually barred from training on it, and a zero-day retention policy with all AI vendors and partners covers audio, video, transcripts and summaries. Custom data retention, a transcript-only mode for organisations that cannot store audio, SSO with SCIM, audit logs through the API, a Super Admin role, AES-256 at rest and TLS in transit, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 42001 round out governance a client's legal team can work with. Certification reports are provided on request rather than with published scope, and we found no public information on legal hold.
tl;dv
The promise I need in writing is there at contract level: customer content including meeting recordings, transcripts and notes is not used to train or fine-tune any models, metadata shared with the AI partner is anonymized beforehand, data is AES-256 encrypted at rest and in transit, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001-certified data centers are stated, and SSO, SCIM provisioning and organization activity logs arrive at the top tier. Retention is published — three months for free users, until account deletion for paying users — but we found no public information on admin-configurable retention policies, discarding audio after transcription, or granular roles beyond the super admin.
European sovereignty
Fireflies.ai
The contracting entity is Fireflies.ai Corp. of Miami, hosting is stated as servers in the United States and other countries, and every named subprocessor — Google Cloud Platform and MongoDB Atlas for infrastructure, OpenAI for the language model, Assembly.ai for transcription — is US-based. A self-service GDPR data processing agreement, EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework certification and zero-retention terms are the safeguards on offer, and Enterprise private storage speaks of storing data at a preferred location, but we found no public information on an EU hosting option. For client conversations in Munich, that is a chain every procurement department will want to discuss.
tl;dv
The contracting entity is a German GmbH in Aachen under German law with the BfDI named as supervisory authority; personal data is processed primarily in the EEA on named infrastructure — Google Cloud and Wasabi in Germany, Hetzner in Germany and Finland — and a subprocessor list naming the AI and transcription providers is published alongside a data processing agreement, standard contractual clauses and a selectable EU region for AI processing. The transcription providers' own regions are not stated and the top level of European-run models is not shown, so the chain is unusually well documented but not sovereign end to end.
Pricing transparency
Fireflies.ai
The tier comparison is public and detailed — a free tier with 400 minutes of team storage and 20 AI credits, Pro with 8,000 minutes per seat, per-plan recording limits, video quality, channel types and API rate limits, plus up to 44% saved with annual billing — and additional custom summary templates are priced in AI credits with the first one free. We found no public information on the monetary seat price, what counts as a seat, VAT treatment, minimum term or overage costs, so I cannot compute a year's cost for twelve consultants from the captured pages alone.
tl;dv
A buyer gets most of the way there: Free at €0, Pro at €18 per seat per month billed annually, Business at €29 per seat per month billed annually with no usage-based AI fees, annual billing advertised at up to 40% off, and the scaling rules published per tier — weekly recording caps of 40, 80 and 120, simultaneous-recording limits, the free tier's ten AI-note meetings and ten Ask AI queries, and a single-user account defining the seat. Enterprise is contact-us with optional usage-based pricing, and we found no public information on monthly billing figures, storage limits, VAT treatment or minimum term.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
Fireflies.ai
tl;dv
Legal entity
Not determined
Not determined
Hosting location
Not determined
Not determined
Hosting options
Not determined
Not determined
Open source
Not determined
Not determined
Data processing agreement
Not determined
Not determined
Transfer impact assessment
Not determined
Not determined
Facts, side by side
Only facts both products carry under the same definition — anything else would not be a fair row.
As of 6 Nov 2026, the panel rates tl;dv higher: 3.5/5 against 3/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 1 of the 6 judges picks Fireflies.ai and 4 pick tl;dv, 1 calls it a tie. Which one fits depends on the criteria that matter to you; the table on this page shows both side by side, and each judge’s reading has its own page. Both were scored by the same AI bench under the same rubric, from public evidence only, as the methodology describes.
Is Fireflies.ai or tl;dv European?
Fireflies.ai is not European by provenance (Rest of world). tl;dv is European (EU-Made). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.
Where do Fireflies.ai and tl;dv store customer data?
Per the vendors’ own pages as captured — Fireflies.ai: its pages as captured do not say. tl;dv: Default not stated; pages mention the EU and Europe.
Do Fireflies.ai and tl;dv have a free plan?
As of 6 Nov 2026, tl;dv’s own pages state a free plan; Fireflies.ai’s pages as captured do not. Each product page links the pricing page it was read from.