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 Data Protection Officer
Data protection officer of a private bank in Frankfurt that falls under DORA. Has to write the data protection impact assessment before the first recording. Reads the subprocessor list before the feature page, because the language model that reads the transcript is a processor too, and wants its name and region, contractual exclusion from training, retention and deletion by policy, voice profiles explained, and a DPA that matches what the security page claims.
Fireflies.ai
tl;dv
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Recording, transcription & languages
Fireflies.ai
A named bot and a botless system-audio mode are both documented, covering the major conferencing platforms, phone and dialer calls and file upload, with live transcription, auto-detect, a beta multi-language mode within a claimed 100+ languages, an editable transcript and speaker recognition. We found no public information on custom vocabulary, per-language accuracy or speaker names learned across meetings, German is not named explicitly, and the botless mode labels speakers only as Speaker 1 and 2.
tl;dv
Bot-free recording across Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams is documented, with a desktop app for any other platform, real-time transcription with speaker recognition, custom vocabulary on the Business tier, audio and video import and German among more than thirty languages; the subprocessor list names AssemblyAI and ElevenLabs for transcription and the vendor states over 90 percent accuracy overall. We found no public information on Webex or phone capture, mixed-language meetings, or accuracy broken down per language.
Summaries, action items & meeting knowledge
Fireflies.ai
Custom templates down to user-group and rule-based assignment, action items pushed to task tools, smart search with playback synced to the recording, soundbites, channels, and the LLM provider named in the trust centre give real meeting knowledge. We found no public information on answers that cite and link the transcript passage they rest on, on hallucination handling and human review, or on choosing the summary language.
tl;dv
Structured minutes with summaries, action items, objections and decisions grouped by topic, built-in and custom templates, action items assigned and pushed to Jira, Asana and ClickUp, custom topic trackers, week-wide multi-meeting summaries, searchable minutes and an Ask-AI agent over the transcript library are all documented, and Anthropic is named as the generative provider. We found no public information on answers that cite and link the source transcript passage, on summary quality by language, or on export of the minutes to Word, PDF or a wiki.
Integrations, API & workflow
Fireflies.ai
Over twenty CRMs including Dynamics 365 and Pipedrive, Slack and Teams, Zapier, native apps and a browser extension, a documented GraphQL API with rate limits stated per plan, webhooks with signing and an MCP server form a strong integration layer. We found no public information on CRM field mapping per meeting type or SharePoint and Confluence export.
tl;dv
Google Calendar and Outlook with auto-join rules, a native HubSpot connector with per-field prompt mapping and internal/external conditions, further CRM connectors including Pipedrive and Salesforce, task tools, Slack and Notion, Zapier, webhooks and an MCP server are all evidenced alongside a REST API with an OpenAPI specification. The API is labelled version one alpha with no sandbox and meetings limited to import so far, and we found no public information on SharePoint or Confluence export.
Consent, participant rights & works council
Fireflies.ai
The consent machinery is genuinely documented: opt-in requiring every participant on Meet, Zoom and Teams, an opt-out flow with a one-hour email and decline link, pause and leave commands, deletion on participant request, and three botless notice signals on by default. But talk-time and sentiment analytics are described without any off-by-default statement, and we found no public information on a works-agreement template, DPIA support or an EU AI Act classification, which is what co-determination would turn on.
tl;dv
The terms make the user responsible for collecting participant consent before recording starts, while the enterprise page advertises automated consent collection under GDPR and comparable regimes without documenting how a bot-free recording is announced to external guests or how a participant opts out. Auto-recording is configurable per user or team and erasure rights are listed. We found no public information on per-person analytics and their defaults, works-agreement material, DPIA support or the EU AI Act classification.
Retention, AI training & administration
Fireflies.ai
The terms exclude model training contractually and prohibit vendors from training, zero-day retention is claimed with all vendors, custom retention and transcript-only modes exist, and SSO with SCIM, audit logs, AES-256 and TLS, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 42001 are stated, with OpenAI and Assembly.ai named with their region and a self-service DPA. We found no public information on deletion of every copy at subprocessors being evidenced beyond the policy claim, or on audit-log export to a SIEM.
tl;dv
Customer content is contractually excluded from model training, a subprocessor list is published, recordings are kept three months for free users and until account deletion for paying users, AES-256 at rest and TLS in transit are stated, and SSO with SCIM, organization activity logs, a selectable processing region and privately hosted AI sit in the Enterprise tier. The captured pages give different figures for the SOC 2 type, and we found no public information on administrator-configurable retention periods, discarding audio after transcription, subprocessor zero-retention commitments, SAML specifically, or legal hold.
European sovereignty
Fireflies.ai
The contracting entity is Fireflies.AI Corp. in Miami, processing is stated for the United States and other countries, and all four named subprocessors - OpenAI, Assembly.ai, Google Cloud Platform and MongoDB Atlas - are US providers, with the Data Privacy Framework and a self-service DPA as the safeguards. Enterprise private storage offers a choice of storage location, but we found no confirmation of EU hosting or a European entity, and transcription and language-model processing in Europe are not documented.
tl;dv
The contracting entity is tldx Solutions GmbH of Aachen under German law with the BfDI as supervisory authority, personal data is processed primarily in the EEA on named Google Cloud, Hetzner and Wasabi infrastructure including locations in Germany, the AI region is selectable between the EU and the US with Anthropic models reached through Google Vertex AI in the EU, and standard contractual clauses plus a data processing agreement are stated. The subprocessor list names the transcription providers AssemblyAI and ElevenLabs, Stripe, Mixpanel, Intercom and others without stating their locations, and the metadata shared with Anthropic is anonymised while standard contractual clauses are the stated transfer safeguard.
Pricing transparency
Fireflies.ai
A free tier and four public tiers with their inclusions - storage minutes, AI credits, recording limits, video quality, API rates - and an annual discount of up to 44% are documented. The captured pricing page states no per-seat figures, the bot-name add-on and AI-credit consumption are unpriced, and Enterprise terms are on request, so the annual cost cannot be computed from public pages.
tl;dv
The free tier at €0, Pro at €18 per seat/month billed annually and Business at €29 per seat/month billed annually are published with weekly recording caps of 40, 80 and 120, simultaneous-recording limits, free-tier AI quotas, an annual discount of up to 40 percent, and the terms define each account as one single user. Enterprise is contact-us, and we found no public information on monthly prices, VAT treatment, minimum term or seats, or overage and add-on fees such as the optional usage-based Enterprise pricing.
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.