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 Works Council Chair
Chairs the works council of a machine builder with 2,300 employees in Baden-Württemberg. Management wants a notetaker in every Teams meeting; the council has to agree to it under § 87 BetrVG first. Wants to know who is told that a recording runs and who can say no, whether talk time or engagement scores per person exist and can be switched off for good, how long recordings are kept, and material the vendor provides for a works agreement.
Fireflies.ai
tl;dv
This judge calls it a tie.
Criterion by criterion
Recording, transcription & languages
Fireflies.ai
Bot capture and botless system-audio capture are both documented, alongside phone and dialer calls, file upload, live transcripts and a beta multi-language mode across 100-plus languages. Speaker recognition is documented for the bot, while the botless mode shows speakers only as Speaker 1 and 2. The vendor claims 95% accuracy overall, but we found no per-language accuracy figures, and the captured pages name English, Spanish and French without naming German specifically.
tl;dv
Recording covers Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, alongside a bot-free capture that also works on Slack, WhatsApp and Discord, a desktop app for calls on any other platform, and upload of audio and video files; transcription is real-time with automatic speaker recognition, German is among more than thirty languages, custom vocabulary sits on the Business plan, and an accuracy above 90% is stated. The transcription providers appear only in the privacy policy's subcontractor list. We found no public information on Webex, on phone or dialer calls, or on meetings that switch language.
Summaries, action items & meeting knowledge
Fireflies.ai
Custom summary templates per user group with workspace defaults and meeting rules, action items pushed to Asana, Jira or Trello, topic trackers, soundbites and smart search across meetings are all documented. Answers over the archive exist via Ask Fireflies, but we found no public information on answers that cite and link the transcript passage they rest on, or on export of minutes to Word, PDF or a wiki.
tl;dv
Minutes are organized by topic with built-in and custom templates applied per meeting or by rule, action items can be assigned to team members, decisions and next steps are extracted, topic trackers and keyword alerts run across meetings, notes are fully searchable, and an ask-AI works over the whole transcript library, with Anthropic named as the model partner. Minutes can auto-send to all participants when a call ends — a default we would insist is off under a works agreement. We found no public information on answers that cite and link the transcript passage they rest on, on summary quality by language, or on hallucination handling and human review.
Integrations, API & workflow
Fireflies.ai
HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive and Microsoft Dynamics 365 sit in a long CRM list, next to a documented GraphQL API with published rate limits per plan, webhooks with signing, an MCP server for Claude and Cursor, Zapier, Slack and native desktop and mobile apps. We found no public information on SharePoint or Confluence export or on CRM field mapping per meeting type.
tl;dv
Google and Outlook calendars drive auto-join with recording configurable per user or team; the native HubSpot connector maps meeting content to CRM fields through per-field prompts and can keep internal calls out of the CRM, alongside Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho and Greenhouse; task and wiki tools (Asana, ClickUp, Jira, Notion), Slack, Box and Dropbox, Zapier, and an alpha-stage REST API with an OpenAPI specification, webhooks at user, team and organization level, and an MCP server are documented. Organization-wide integrations and automations, plus organization activity logs, sit in the Enterprise plan. We found no public information on Microsoft Dynamics or on SharePoint and Confluence export.
Consent, participant rights & works council
Fireflies.ai
On Google Meet, Zoom and Microsoft Teams every participant must approve before recording starts, an email informs participants an hour ahead with a link to decline, pause and leave commands work mid-meeting, the bot does not rejoin after removal, and botless capture has three documented notice signals on by default. But talk-time analytics and sentiment analysis are part of the paid product and we found no public information on switching them off for the whole organisation, nor on a works-agreement template, DPIA support or an EU AI Act classification. The pages also put the duty to inform participants on the individual employee whenever notice options are disabled, which a works agreement would have to close.
tl;dv
Consent collection is offered "on auto-pilot" under GDPR and other regimes, auto-join and auto-recording are configurable per user or per team, and the privacy policy grants opposition and erasure — but the terms put collecting every participant's consent on the recording user, and we found no public information on how participants are notified, whether someone can stop or opt out of a running recording, or on talk-time, sentiment or engagement figures and an off-switch for them. Nothing published supports a works agreement or a data protection impact assessment. The documented sales-coaching and AI playbook-monitoring modules work on individual meeting recordings and would need close examination in co-determination talks.
Retention, AI training & administration
Fireflies.ai
Custom retention, a rules engine, a super admin role, SSO with SCIM and audit logs via API are documented on the Enterprise plan, together with SOC 2 Type II and ISO 42001 certifications, AES-256 encryption, training on customer content contractually excluded including at the vendors, and named subprocessors under a stated zero-day retention policy. We found no public information on legal hold, on audit-log export to a SIEM, or on a default retention period for recordings outside the Enterprise plan.
tl;dv
Retention is stated as three months for free users and until account deletion for paying users, with the details referred to the help center; we found no public information on centrally configurable retention periods or on discarding audio after transcription. Strong points: the terms exclude customer content from AI model training, single sign-on with SCIM provisioning is offered, a super-admin role with organization activity logs sits in Enterprise, AES-256 encryption at rest and in transit, ISO 27001-certified data centers and SOC 2 are stated, and the subprocessors are listed. The captured pages give different SOC 2 figures, showing Type I on one page and Type II on another, with the report available on request.
European sovereignty
Fireflies.ai
The contracting entity is the US corporation, processing is stated to happen on servers in the United States and other countries, and every named subprocessor — OpenAI for the language model, Assembly.ai for transcription, Google Cloud, MongoDB Atlas — is listed as US-based. A GDPR data processing agreement is published for self-service signature and the EU-US Data Privacy Framework is invoked, but we found no public information on EU hosting or on a European contracting entity or representative.
tl;dv
The contracting entity is tldx Solutions GmbH of Aachen under German law with the Aachen courts as venue, processing and storage are primarily in the EEA on named German infrastructure (Google Cloud Germany, Wasabi Germany, Hetzner Germany and Finland), a data processing agreement and standard contractual clauses exist, and SOC 2 and ISO 27001 are stated. Anthropic receives only anonymized metadata and meeting content is processed in randomized chunks, with the AI hosting region selectable between Europe and the US — the US option is one a works agreement would have to lock to Europe. Transcription runs through AssemblyAI and ElevenLabs, whose processing locations we found no public information on.
Pricing transparency
Fireflies.ai
The captured pricing pages show a free tier and four plans with their storage minutes, AI credits, recording limits and video quality, a stated saving of up to 44% with annual billing, and priced behaviours such as custom templates beyond the first consuming AI credits. But we found no public seat price in the captured pages, so the annual cost for a workforce of our size cannot be computed from them.
tl;dv
Free (€0), Pro at €18 per seat/month billed annually and Business at €29 per seat/month billed annually are public, each with a weekly recording allowance of 40, 80 or 120 recordings, simultaneous-recording limits, and a stated overage behaviour — recording stops until the weekly allowance renews; annual billing is advertised at up to 40% off and the free tier includes ten meetings with AI notes and ten ask-AI queries. For our size, however, only the Enterprise plan applies, priced as "Contact us", and we found no public information on monthly billing prices, VAT treatment, minimum seats or contract 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.