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 IT Lead
Head of IT at a 450-person engineering services firm on Microsoft 365, where a dozen employees already signed up for free notetakers with their work address. Wants one tool for everyone instead: single sign-on and SCIM, admin policies for when the assistant joins and what may be shared outside the company, retention set centrally, audit logs, Teams and SharePoint working properly, and a seat price that holds at four hundred users.
Fireflies.ai
This judge's pick
tl;dv
Criterion by criterion
Recording, transcription & languages
Fireflies.ai
Both capture paths are documented side by side — the notetaker bot for Zoom, Teams and Google Meet, and botless system-audio capture from the desktop app that also reaches WhatsApp, Aircall, FaceTime, Discord and phone calls — plus in-person recording on mobile, file upload, live transcripts and a beta mode transcribing several languages in one meeting. The transcription engine is named as Assembly.ai with a blanket 95 percent accuracy claim, though we found no public information on accuracy per language or custom vocabulary, and in botless mode speakers appear only as Speaker 1 and Speaker 2.
tl;dv
Botless capture is documented across Zoom, Meet, Teams, Slack, WhatsApp and Discord, with a desktop app that records calls on any other platform, real-time transcription with speaker tagging in 30+ languages including German, custom vocabulary on the Business tier, and a stated accuracy figure of over 90 percent plus file import formats up to 2 GiB. For a regulated rollout I note we found no public information on Webex, phone or dialer capture, mixed-language meetings, or accuracy stated per language.
Summaries, action items & meeting knowledge
Fireflies.ai
Custom summary templates built from written instructions or pasted sample notes can be defaulted for the whole workspace, assigned per user group and applied through meeting rules; action items push to Asana, Jira and Trello, topic trackers and search across meetings exist, and OpenAI is named as the language model behind summaries. We found no public information on answers that cite and link the transcript passage they rest on, on choosing the summary language, or on summary quality by language, which keeps this a notch below the top.
tl;dv
Structured minutes with built-in and custom templates, decisions and action items assignable to team members, auto-send to participants after the call, clips cut from transcript highlights, whole-week multi-meeting summaries, topic trackers, full search and an Ask-AI agent over the transcript library, with Anthropic named as the AI partner. We found no public information on answers citing the transcript passage they rest on, and Word or PDF export of the minutes is not documented.
Integrations, API & workflow
Fireflies.ai
Over twenty CRM integrations are listed including HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive and Microsoft Dynamics 365, alongside Slack, Zapier, a documented GraphQL API with published per-plan rate limits, webhooks with signing, and an MCP server for assistants like Claude and Cursor. For our Microsoft 365 estate the gap is real: we found no public information on SharePoint or Confluence export, and CRM field mapping per meeting type is not documented. Meeting rules that apply templates by title, host or meeting type give me a workable per-team rollout lever.
tl;dv
A native HubSpot connector with per-field prompt mapping and conditions keeping internal calls out of the CRM, further CRMs including Salesforce, Pipedrive and Zoho, calendar-driven recording rules for Google and Outlook, a documented REST API with webhooks, an OpenAPI spec and an MCP server, plus Zapier and task tools like Jira and Asana. As a Microsoft shop I have to flag that we found no public information on SharePoint, Confluence or Microsoft Dynamics connections, and the captured API documentation marks the current version as alpha with no sandbox yet.
Consent, participant rights & works council
Fireflies.ai
Participant rights are documented in unusual depth: on Google Meet, Zoom and Microsoft Teams every participant must approve before the bot joins and any decline stops it, an email with a decline link goes out one hour ahead, pause and leave commands work mid-meeting, botless capture carries three separate notice signals, and participants can request deletion from the host or support. But talk-time and sentiment analytics are presented as features with no published way to switch them off organisation-wide, and we found no public information on a works-agreement template, DPIA support or an EU AI Act classification.
tl;dv
Automated consent collection is marketed with GDPR among the supported regimes, auto-join settings and per-user or team auto-recording give me the admin rules, and erasure rights are stated in the privacy policy. The terms put collecting participants' consent squarely on the user, and we found no public information on a guest notice method for botless capture, a participant opt-out, per-person analytics, works-council material or a works agreement template — that is thin for introducing this under co-determination.
Retention, AI training & administration
Fireflies.ai
This is what I want from a vendor: the Enterprise plan carries SSO with SCIM, custom data retention, an audit logs API, a super admin role and an admin rules engine; customer content is excluded from model training by default and contractually at vendors, encryption is 256-bit AES at rest with TLS in transit, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 42001 are stated, and the subprocessors are named with region and a zero-day retention policy. Transcript-only or summary-only modes let us drop audio, and per-meeting downloads of summary, transcript, audio and video cover export. We found no public information on SIEM export of the audit logs or on legal hold.
tl;dv
SSO available to all users with SCIM provisioning, a super admin role with org-wide integrations and automations, organization activity logs and privately hosted AI on the Enterprise tier, a contractual statement that customer content trains no models, AES-256 encryption, and SOC 2 Type II plus ISO 27001 datacenter certifications. Retention is published only as fixed vendor terms — three months for free users, until account deletion for paying users — and we found no public information on centrally configurable retention policies, discarding audio after transcription, SAML specifics or legal hold.
European sovereignty
Fireflies.ai
The contracting entity is Fireflies.ai Corp. in the United States, processing runs on servers located in the United States and other countries, and the whole chain — OpenAI for the language model, Assembly.ai for transcription, Google Cloud Platform and MongoDB Atlas for infrastructure — is US-based; a self-service GDPR data processing agreement and EU-US Data Privacy Framework certification are published. Enterprise private storage promises storage at a preferred location, but we found no public information confirming EU hosting or a European entity, so this will be the hard conversation with my works council.
tl;dv
The contracting entity is tldx Solutions GmbH in Aachen under German law and venue, primary processing sits in the EEA on named Google Cloud, Hetzner and Wasabi infrastructure with locations given, and the published subprocessor list names the AI and transcription providers — Anthropic via Google Vertex AI hosted in the EU, plus AssemblyAI and ElevenLabs — alongside a data processing agreement, standard contractual clauses and SOC 2 and ISO 27001 statements. The AI hosting region is selectable between Europe and the US, and the transcription providers' own regions are not stated, so it stops short of fully sovereign.
Pricing transparency
Fireflies.ai
The four tiers are public with their inclusions — AI credits per plan, storage from 400 mins of storage/team on the free tier to 8,000 mins of storage/seat on Pro, recording-length limits and API rate limits — plus a monthly-versus-annual toggle advertised as "Save up to 44% with annual billing". We found no public information on the per-seat price itself, on what counts as a seat, on VAT treatment or overage handling, and no published price attaches to the Enterprise inclusions such as SSO and custom data retention — so I cannot compute what four hundred seats would cost me.
tl;dv
Free, Pro at €18 per seat/month billed annually and Business at €29 per seat/month billed annually are public, each with weekly recording caps and simultaneous-recording limits, the free tier's ten AI-note meetings and ten Ask AI queries are stated, and API access by plan is documented. The Enterprise tier — where SSO at scale, SCIM, activity logs and privately hosted AI sit — is contact-us only, and we found no public information on monthly-billing prices, minimum seats or VAT treatment, so I cannot compute the real annual cost at four hundred users from public pages.
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.