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 Sales Team Lead
Leads eight account executives at a software vendor for the German Mittelstand. Discovery calls run on Teams and Zoom, and the CRM is only as good as the notes someone found time to type. Does not want a coaching platform that scores the team: wants the call summary, next steps and the fields that matter written into HubSpot after every call, a follow-up email draft, and prospects told politely that the call is recorded.
Fireflies.ai
tl;dv
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Recording, transcription & languages
Fireflies.ai
Both a bot and a botless Take Notes mode are documented, covering Zoom, Teams, Google Meet and Webex, phone and dialer calls, WhatsApp and FaceTime, with file upload, live transcripts, editable transcripts and 100+ languages including a beta mode for mixed-language meetings. The captured pages state a single 95% accuracy figure rather than accuracy per language, and we found no public information on custom vocabulary or explicitly named German transcription — the examples given are English, Spanish and French.
tl;dv
Botless capture is documented next to the classic bot for Zoom, Teams and Meet, a desktop app records calls on any other platform, and uploads of common audio and video formats are supported. Real-time transcription with speaker identification, German among thirty-plus languages, custom vocabulary on Business and a stated accuracy over ninety percent are public; I found no public information on Webex, phone calls, mixed-language meetings or accuracy per language.
Summaries, action items & meeting knowledge
Fireflies.ai
Custom summary templates per team, rules that apply a template by meeting title, host or type, action items, soundbites, time-stamped comments, search across meetings and topic trackers are all documented, with notes pushed to task tools and CRMs through Zapier and webhooks. We found no public information on action items carrying owners and due dates, on answers that cite the transcript passage they rest on, or on minutes exported to Word, PDF or a wiki; the language model provider appears only in the trust center.
tl;dv
Minutes come grouped by topic with summaries, decisions, objections and next steps, action items assignable to named team members, built-in and custom templates, week-at-a-time multi-meeting summaries, clips, a searchable library, and the AI provider behind them is named. Minutes can be auto-sent to all participants when the call ends, but for a drafted follow-up email, answers that cite the transcript passage, and export to Word, PDF or a wiki I found no public information.
Integrations, API & workflow
Fireflies.ai
HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive and Microsoft Dynamics 365 are among a long list of native CRM integrations with notes and call logs auto-filled, Slack and task tools are covered, and there is a documented GraphQL API with per-plan rate limits, signed webhooks, Zapier, a realtime API and an MCP server. We found no public information on CRM field mapping per meeting type or export to SharePoint or Confluence — the fine-grained HubSpot field control my team would rely on is not shown at that level.
tl;dv
The native HubSpot connector matches each call to the right record by calendar email, updates contacts, deals and companies, and fills the HubSpot properties you choose with a prompt per field, with conditions to keep internal calls out of the CRM and syncing a minute or two after the call. A documented REST API with webhooks, an MCP server, Zapier, Google and Outlook calendars, and task tools like Jira and Asana sit alongside it. I found no public information on Microsoft Dynamics, SharePoint or Confluence export, or API rate limits.
Consent, participant rights & works council
Fireflies.ai
Opt-in approval from every participant on Google Meet, Zoom and Teams, a decline link emailed an hour before the meeting, pause and leave commands, three botless notification signals on by default, and deletion on participant request are all documented — stronger consent machinery than I expected. We found no public information on per-person analytics such as talk time and sentiment being off by default or switchable per organisation, on a works-agreement template or works-council material, on DPIA support, or on an EU AI Act classification, which is exactly what a German works council will ask my customers for.
tl;dv
Automated consent collection is marketed for GDPR and other regimes, and admin rules exist for when the assistant joins and records, per user or per team. The terms place collecting every participant's consent squarely on the customer, and I found no public information on how external guests are notified, a participant opt-out, per-person analytics and how to switch them off, a works-agreement template, or DPIA and EU AI Act classification.
Retention, AI training & administration
Fireflies.ai
Enterprise brings custom data retention, SSO with SCIM, audit logs via API, a super admin role, private storage and a rules engine; customer content is excluded from model training by default and contractually from vendor training, encryption is AES-256 at rest with TLS in transit, and SOC 2 Type II and ISO 42001 are stated with subprocessors named with their locations. We found no public information on legal hold, on the scope of the certifications, or on a policy to discard audio after transcription, and export is per-meeting download plus API rather than a documented whole-archive export.
tl;dv
Customer content excluded from AI training is stated repeatedly, single sign-on with SCIM provisioning, organization activity logs, a super-admin role, hosting-region choice, Enterprise privately hosted AI and archive export via API are documented, and SOC 2 Type II plus ISO 27001 data centers are public. Published retention is fixed at three months for free users and until account deletion for paying users, so I found no public information on configurable retention policies, discarding audio after transcription, or zero retention at the AI providers.
European sovereignty
Fireflies.ai
The contracting entity is Fireflies.ai Corp. of Miami, Florida, the privacy policy states processing on servers in the United States and other countries, and the named subprocessors — OpenAI for the language model, Assembly.ai for transcription, Google Cloud Platform and MongoDB Atlas — are all listed as US. A self-service GDPR data processing agreement and the EU-US Data Privacy Framework are published, but we found no public information on EU hosting or a European entity, only a vague preferred-location choice for private storage on Enterprise.
tl;dv
The contracting entity is a German GmbH in Aachen under German law and venue, processing is stated to happen primarily in the EEA with named German data centers at Google Cloud, Wasabi and Hetzner, the subprocessor list including the AI and transcription providers is published, and a data processing agreement plus certifications are on the trust pages. Not every subprocessor's location is stated, and the AI region can be switched to the US with standard contractual clauses as the safeguard.
Pricing transparency
Fireflies.ai
The free tier's limits (unlimited transcription, 400 minutes of storage per team, 20 AI credits) and each tier's inclusions, recording limits and AI credits are public, with "Save up to 44% with annual billing" stated and the first custom summary template free while further ones consume AI credits. The captured pages contain no per-seat price at all, and we found no public information on what counts as a seat, VAT treatment, minimum terms or the price of add-ons beyond the bot-name customisation — I cannot compute the annual cost for my eight-person team from what was captured.
tl;dv
Every self-serve tier is priced publicly per seat with its weekly recording cap and simultaneous-recording limit, the free tier's AI limits are spelled out, a seat is defined as a single individual user, and hitting the cap blocks further recordings until the weekly allowance renews. Enterprise is quote-only, and I found no public information on monthly-billing prices, VAT treatment, minimum term, or the cost of SSO and the hosting-region choice.
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.