Head to head · Audio · updated Oct 25, 2026
Whisper vs Fireflies.ai
Whisper scores 91 to Fireflies.ai's 11 on public evidence for speech-to-text transcription, and they rank #1 and #4 there. Both are free to start. Numbers below are the same public signals the ranking uses, recomputed nightly — nothing here is sponsored.
Whisper
OpenAI's open-source speech-recognition model that transcribes and translates audio in dozens of languages, locally or via API.
+ Free, runs fully offline, and remains the accuracy benchmark that most commercial transcription services are measured against.
− No speaker diarization out of the box, it hallucinates text during silence, and large models are slow without a GPU.
Fireflies.ai
A meeting bot that records, transcribes and summarizes calls and pushes notes to CRMs and Slack.
+ Deep integration list (Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Notion) and searchable transcripts across every past meeting.
− Speaker labeling and accuracy drop on noisy or accented audio, and the bot joining every calendar event by default surprises people.
Side by side
public evidence| Whisper | Fireflies.ai | |
|---|---|---|
| Evidence score / 100 | 91 | 11 |
| GitHub stars | 111,216 | closed source |
| Hacker News stories, 30d | 12 | 0 |
| Release-feed mentions, 30d | 3 | 0 |
| Last activity | 3 days ago | – |
| Pricing | Open source · Free (MIT); hosted API $0.006/min | Free tier · Pro from $10/mo billed annually |
| Platforms | cli, api, mac, windows, linux | web, ios, android, chrome-extension |
| Maker | OpenAI | Fireflies.ai |
Which one?
Pick Whisper if
- you want the stronger public evidence (91 vs 11)
- you want open source — self-host it, read it, fork it
- you need it on api, cli, linux
- a bigger GitHub community matters (111,216 vs 0 stars)
Best for free local transcription.
Pick Fireflies.ai if
- you need it on android, chrome-extension, ios
Best for teams piping meeting notes into a CRM.