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 Skeptic
Has seen "99% accuracy in 100 languages" turn a German meeting into English nonsense, a bot that joined a meeting its owner never attended and mailed the summary to every guest, and an action item no one in the room had agreed to. Asks which model wrote the summary and where it runs, whether each statement can be traced to the transcript, who told the external participants, what "we do not train on your data" covers in the DPA — and how the archive leaves.
Fireflies.ai
tl;dv
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Recording, transcription & languages
Fireflies.ai
A joining bot sits next to a documented botless system-audio mode, with dialers, phone calls, file upload, live transcripts and a multi-language mode — broad and honestly documented, down to admitting botless mode labels speakers only as Speaker 1 and 2. But the claimed 95% accuracy is stated overall, never per language, the captured language pages name English, Spanish and French but not German, and we found no public information on custom vocabulary or speaker names learned across meetings. The transcription engine is at least named in the trust center as Assembly.ai in the US.
tl;dv
Botless capture sits next to the bot story — Zoom, Meet and Teams plus Slack, WhatsApp and Discord, and a desktop app claiming any other platform — with real-time transcription, thirty-plus languages including German, speaker recognition, file upload up to 2 GiB and custom vocabulary on Business. But the accuracy claim is a flat "over 90%" with no per-language figure, and we found no public information on Webex, phone or dialer calls or mixed-language meetings. The transcription engines surface only in the privacy policy's subcontractor list (AssemblyAI, ElevenLabs), not as a product statement with accuracy per language.
Summaries, action items & meeting knowledge
Fireflies.ai
Custom templates per team with sharing permissions, workspace defaults and meeting rules are documented in detail, and search results play the recording from the matching moment. What I cannot verify: whether the assistant's answers cite the transcript passage they rest on, who owns an action item and by when, and how a hallucinated summary is caught — none of that is documented. The language model behind summaries is at least named in the trust center as OpenAI in the US.
tl;dv
Custom templates with rules per meeting type, action items assigned to team members and pushed to Asana, ClickUp and Jira, topic trackers, clips and a whole week summarized at once are documented, and the Anthropic partnership names the model behind the summaries. My worry: nothing captured shows Ask AI answers citing or linking the transcript passage they rest on, and we found no public information on hallucination handling, human review or summary quality by language. Search across the library and export to Markdown via the API are there, so this sits just under the auditable level.
Integrations, API & workflow
Fireflies.ai
A long CRM list including Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Pipedrive, a documented GraphQL API with rate limits per plan, webhooks with signing and a versioned V2, plus an MCP server make this the strongest layer. We found no public information on CRM field mapping per meeting type, SharePoint or Confluence export, Make or n8n, or OAuth scopes; the API is GraphQL, not REST.
tl;dv
A documented REST API with a downloadable OpenAPI specification, webhooks at user, team and organization scope with named triggers, an MCP server, Zapier, and a native HubSpot connector with prompt-per-field mapping and conditions keeping internal calls out of the CRM — that is a workflow layer a buyer can build on, with Pipedrive, Salesforce, Zoho, Greenhouse and calendar-driven recording rules alongside. My reservations: the API declares itself version alpha with no sandbox, organization-wide automation sits behind Enterprise, and we found no public information on SharePoint or Confluence export.
Consent, participant rights & works council
Fireflies.ai
Notice and control are better documented than most: opt-in where platforms support it with every participant required to approve, a decline link by email an hour ahead, pause and leave chat commands, three botless notification signals and deletion on a participant's request. But talk-time and sentiment analytics are sold with no word on whether they are off by default or switchable per organisation, and we found no public information on works-council material, DPIA support or an EU AI Act classification. The vendor also puts the recording-law burden on any user who disables a consent option.
tl;dv
The terms put consent squarely on the user — "you are responsible for collecting consents from all participants in the meeting prior to starting the recording" — while the enterprise governance page claims consent collection "on auto-pilot" under GDPR and other regimes without showing how it is collected, presented or logged. Auto-join and auto-recording rules per user or team and erasure on request are documented, and a no-profiling statement exists, but we found no public information on a guest notice method, a participant opt-out, per-person analytics with a switch-off, works-council material, DPIA support or an EU AI Act classification.
Retention, AI training & administration
Fireflies.ai
Retention by policy, transcript-only and summary-only modes so audio need not be stored, named subprocessors with a zero-day retention policy, SSO with SCIM, an audit-logs API and no-training commitments repeated in privacy policy and terms give a real governance surface. The gaps an auditor would ask about: certification scope is only available by requesting the report, and we found no public information on legal hold, SIEM export of logs, or documented deletion of every copy at subprocessors beyond the zero-retention claim.
tl;dv
Customer content is excluded from model training in contract language, subprocessors are named with regions on the trust page, SSO with SCIM, a super-admin role, Enterprise activity logs, AES-256 at rest and SOC 2 are all documented. But retention is a fixed rule — free users three months, paying users until account deletion — rather than a centrally configurable policy, we found no public information on discarding audio after transcription, on deletion at subcontractors, or on legal hold, and the captured pages give different figures for the SOC 2 attestation (Type I on the governance page, Type II on the trust and security pages).
European sovereignty
Fireflies.ai
The chain on the captured pages is entirely American: Fireflies.ai Corp., servers in the United States and other countries, OpenAI and Assembly.ai as US AI and transcription providers — with the Data Privacy Framework as the only stated safeguard for EU transfers. A self-service GDPR data processing agreement and a named subprocessor list with locations lift it above a bare policy, but we found no public information on a European entity or named EU hosting, and the private-storage "preferred location" names no EU region.
tl;dv
A German GmbH under German law with Aachen as venue, primary processing in the EEA, hosting named as Google Cloud, Hetzner and Wasabi with German locations, a published subcontractor list, a data processing agreement and standard contractual clauses — the chain is largely traceable, and Anthropic models can run via Google Vertex AI in the EU. It stops short of the top: the AI hosting region is customer-selectable between Europe and the US, Anthropic is not a European operator, and the subcontractor list names transcription (AssemblyAI, ElevenLabs), payment, support and analytics providers without stating where they process.
Pricing transparency
Fireflies.ai
Plan inclusions are unusually public — storage minutes, AI credits, recording limits, API rate limits per tier, the annual discount and which add-ons cost extra — but we found no public information on seat prices in the captured pages, so no buyer can compute a real annual cost. We also found no public information on what counts as a seat, VAT treatment, minimum seats or overage handling for credits.
tl;dv
Three tiers carry public seat prices — Free at €0, Pro €18 and Business €29 per seat/month billed annually — with weekly recording caps and simultaneous-recording limits published, AI-note and Ask AI quotas on the free tier, and a one-person-per-account definition of what a seat is. But "up to 40% off" annual billing is not a computable monthly-billed price, Enterprise is contact-us only, and we found no public information on VAT treatment, storage limits or add-on pricing. Fees are stated non-refundable and the weekly allowance renews weekly, which helps a buyer estimate — the gaps keep it mid-scale.
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.