Circleback and Fireflies both have real free plans, and both advertise transcription in more than 100 languages. On a pricing page that reads as the same promise at two different prices.
Then you open the Fireflies FAQ. The answer to “What languages do you support for transcription?” reads: “Currently English is the primarily language that is supported. We also support Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and 100+ other languages in beta.”
Circleback publishes no such footnote. That one difference decides whether the number on the marketing page describes the meeting you actually have to record.
It is worth being precise about what that footnote does and does not tell you. Beta is not a synonym for broken, and plenty of teams transcribe Spanish or Portuguese through Fireflies without incident. What the label removes is the promise. A vendor that ships a language in beta has told you, in writing, that it is not holding itself to the same standard there as it does in English — and if the transcript comes back wrong in month four, you were on notice in month one.
The Quick Verdict
Choose Fireflies if your meetings are in English and you want the cheapest seat with the deepest toolkit. Pro is 10 dollars a month on annual billing, the lowest per seat price here, and now includes video recording, an email assistant and voice agents.
Choose Circleback if you run multilingual meetings or want the strongest free plan. It states over 100 languages with no beta qualifier, and its free tier now drafts emails, which Fireflies charges for.
Choose AmyNote if the recording should stay on your phone and you count languages beyond Europe. It transcribes 140+ languages, is tuned for East Asian and Arabic speech, and costs a flat 99 dollars a year for the whole account. No free plan, and iPhone only.
What We Compared
Every figure below was read from the vendor’s own pricing page on 3 September 2026, with the billing toggle clicked both ways. That last detail is not pedantry. Both vendors ship the monthly and annual price sets into the same page, so a careless read returns the annual rate and quotes it as the monthly one — which is how a 18 dollar plan ends up described as a 10 dollar plan in a roundup.
Fireflies prices did not move, but its plan contents did. Since mid August it has added an Email Assistant, AI Skills and Voice Agents to Pro. Comparisons that still call it a transcription tool with a summary attached are describing last season’s product.
Feature and policy claims come from published help center and privacy text rather than from review sites, which in this category copy each other and go stale within a release cycle. Where a vendor states something plainly, it is quoted. Where a vendor is silent — and silence is itself a finding here — that is said too.
Circleback: Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths. The free plan is the most complete starting point here: unlimited meetings online and in person, a calendar bot or a bot-free desktop app, mobile and Apple Watch apps, speaker-labeled transcripts, and API, MCP and CLI access. It has also just added view and draft emails to the free tier, which Fireflies puts behind Pro.
On languages it says over 100 and leaves it there. Nothing on the pricing page gates language support to a higher tier, so the free plan reads the same list as Enterprise. That is the structural difference worth paying attention to: at Circleback, language coverage is a property of the product, not a property of your plan.
Its privacy answer is the cleanest sentence in this comparison. The published FAQ says only: “No. We don’t train AI models on customer data.” No de-identification caveat, no opt-out buried three levels into a settings pane.
Weaknesses. The free plan keeps 30 days of history, then the window shuts. Storage is the real ladder: Pro buys one year of recordings, Business two, only Enterprise unlimited. Past a certain point, what you are paying Circleback for is the right to keep what you already recorded.
It is also the most expensive entry seat here, 15 dollars a month annual against Fireflies at 10, and HIPAA sits at the 35 dollar Enterprise tier. Circleback publishes no exact language count either — “over 100” is a floor, not a list, and if a specific language matters to you, you will be testing rather than reading.
Fireflies: Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths. Fireflies has the cheapest paid seat here and the largest surface area. Pro at 10 dollars a month annual adds video recording, downloads, an Email Assistant, AI Skills, Voice Agents and unlimited integrations, and it runs on desktop, iOS, Android and a Chrome extension.
Its free plan does not cap normal meeting capture. The asterisk on “unlimited transcription” resolves in the FAQ: no monthly rate limits on the bot or the extension, only on the API, dialers and bulk uploads. That is genuinely generous, and it is the opposite of the pattern in this category, where free tiers usually meter the thing you actually came for.
The privacy sheet deserves correcting upward. The policy states that Fireflies does not use personal information for AI model training and contractually prohibits its vendors from doing so. It also imposes zero data retention on meeting content: audio, video, transcripts and summaries are not stored by any vendor after processing, not accessed once the service completes, and not used to train any model. Add AES-256 at rest, TLS in transit, and GDPR, SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliance. Fireflies has a reputation in this category that its current published policy does not deserve.
Weaknesses. The language claim is the problem. English is the only primary language by the vendor’s own account, everything else is beta, and Multi-language Mode, which handles meetings where speakers switch languages, is gated to Business at 19 dollars a month annual or 29 monthly. That is the detail that reverses the price comparison: the cheapest seat here stops being the cheapest the moment a second language enters the room.
Free storage is 400 minutes per team, not per seat, under seven hours for an entire company. Signup is narrow too: the FAQ says sign in is only possible through Google or Outlook authentication. For security teams that refuse blanket calendar OAuth, that is a hard stop before evaluation begins — not a feature gap but a procurement one, and the kind that kills a pilot in the first meeting rather than the third.
AmyNote: Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths. AmyNote transcribes 140+ languages and translates into 100+, tuned for East Asian and Arabic speech rather than treating them as a long tail. None of it is tier gated, because there is one product.
Pricing is flat for the account, not per seat: 12.99 a week, 19.99 a month, or 99 a year, which is 8.25 a month. For a small multilingual team that is the cheapest option here by a wide margin, and the gap widens with every person you add rather than narrowing.
Transcription runs through OpenAI’s Speech API and analysis through Anthropic’s Claude Opus. Both contractually guarantee zero training on user data. Audio is encrypted in transit and not retained after processing, and transcripts stay on the device with end-to-end encryption. It records the room directly, so there is no bot in the participant list — which matters in the meetings where asking permission to add one would change what people say.
Weaknesses, and they are real. AmyNote is iPhone only. No Android app, no desktop app, no browser extension. Both rivals beat it outright on platform coverage, and for a Windows or Android team it is not a candidate at all.
There is no free plan, only a three day trial, which against two perpetual free tiers is the hardest thing to defend here. There are also no CRM integrations, no video recording and no team features. If the point of recording a meeting is to push its contents into Salesforce automatically, this is the wrong tool and Circleback is the right one.
Side by Side
- Cheapest paid seat. Fireflies Pro at 10 dollars a month annual, Circleback at 15. AmyNote is 8.25 but bills per account, not per seat.
- Free plan. Circleback and Fireflies both have one. AmyNote does not.
- What free limits. Circleback forgets after 30 days. Fireflies allows 400 minutes of storage per team. Neither caps meetings themselves.
- Languages. Circleback says over 100, no caveat. Fireflies says 100+ in beta with English primary, and charges 19 dollars for mixed-language meetings. AmyNote says 140+, translating into 100+.
- Platforms. Fireflies and Circleback cover desktop, iOS and Android. AmyNote is iPhone only.
- Training on your data. All three publish a no-training commitment. That is no longer a differentiator, and any comparison implying otherwise is selling something.
- HIPAA. Enterprise only at both rivals. Not offered by AmyNote.
Which One Fits You
An English-speaking team of ten. Fireflies, without much argument. Ten dollars a seat annual buys the broadest toolkit here, the free tier is usable enough to pilot honestly, and the language footnote never touches you. The one thing to check first is the Google or Outlook signup requirement, because that is the constraint most likely to end the evaluation before price matters.
A team whose meetings switch between two languages mid-sentence. Circleback. Fireflies asks you either to accept beta support or to climb to Business at 19 dollars a month for Multi-language Mode, at which point it is no longer the cheap option. Circleback’s free plan reads the same language list as its Enterprise plan, so you can test the actual case before paying anything.
A regulated buyer who needs HIPAA. Both rivals put it on the top tier, so this is a 35 dollar Enterprise conversation at Circleback and a sales call either way. AmyNote does not offer HIPAA and is not a candidate.
One or two people recording in-person conversations in a language that is not English. This is the case the other two handle worst, and the one AmyNote was built for. A flat 99 dollars a year covers the account rather than the seat, nothing is metered, the transcript stays on the phone, and East Asian and Arabic speech is the design target rather than the long tail. The price of that fit is iPhone only, no free tier past three days, and no team administration at all.
The Bottom Line
If your meetings are in English, Fireflies is hard to argue with: cheapest seat, broadest toolkit, and a stronger privacy posture than its reputation suggests.
The moment a second language enters the room, that inverts. Fireflies asks you to accept beta support or climb two tiers to 19 dollars a month. Circleback gives you the same language list free.
AmyNote sits third, narrowly and on purpose. It gives up Android, desktop, video and team management to do one thing properly: capture a multilingual conversation on a phone, keep it there, and charge once for the account instead of once per person. If that is the shape of your problem, amynote.app has a three day trial. If it is not, one of the other two is the better tool, and this article should have made that clear.
Originally published as an X Article by @AmyNoteApp.
