Best for
Best for sales, recruiting and client teams whose meeting notes have to land in a CRM or applicant tracking system rather than a folder.
- Freelancers
- Small and mid-sized
- Enterprise
AI Voice & Speech Comparison
Fireflies.ai vs. Retell AI
At a glance
At a glance
Best for
Best for teams putting AI voice agents on real phone lines and testing them before they meet customers.
- Small and mid-sized
- Enterprise
Cataleo does not name a winner. Both statements come from the vendors themselves.
Full Comparison
| Criterion | Fireflies.ai | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | Free plan; Pro from $10 / seat / month The $10 rate is billed annually; on monthly billing Pro is $18 per seat. Business is $19 billed annually or $29 monthly, and Enterprise $39 per seat / month on annual billing only. | lower value From $0.07 / minute of calls Pay as you go, quoted by the vendor as $0.07 to $0.31 per minute for voice agents depending on the models, telephony and add-ons chosen, plus from $0.002 per message for chat agents. Enterprise is quoted by sales. |
| Free trial | Free plan | $10 in free credits, no contract and no commitment; 20 concurrent calls are included |
| Commercial use | Not stated | Yes, usage-based |
| Output | Transcripts, AI summaries with overviews, bullet points and action items, plus searchable meeting notes | Voice agents for inbound and outbound phone calls and web calls, plus chat agents over SMS and a web widget |
| API | Yes, from the Business plan | Yes, REST API with Node.js and Python libraries, webhooks and an MCP server |
| Languages | More than 100 languages with automatic language detection; the vendor marks the wider set as beta | 57 languages listed for text-to-speech and 55 for speech recognition, each with the providers that cover it |
| Hosting | Cloud, with a Chrome extension for Google Meet plus mobile and desktop apps | Cloud on AWS; the vendor states it does not currently operate services within the European Union |
| Voice cloning | No, Fireflies transcribes and summarises speech and does not synthesise or clone voices | Yes, custom voices can be added by searching ElevenLabs community voices, importing an existing clone or training one from uploaded recordings, with Inworld, Cartesia, MiniMax, ElevenLabs and Retell's own platform clones as providers; up to 100 custom voices per account |
| Real-time use | Yes, a bot joins the call and records it live, and the mobile and desktop apps capture conversations held in person | Yes, live inbound and outbound phone calls and browser web calls, with a proprietary turn-taking model, batch calling for campaigns and live monitoring that lets a human listen in or step in |
| Speech-to-speech and dubbing | No dubbing or speech-to-speech translation is published | A call runs as spoken conversation by chaining speech recognition, a language model and text-to-speech; dubbing of existing recordings is not part of the product |
| Editing and controls | AI summaries with overviews, bullet points, action items and custom notes, speaker talk-time analytics, sentiment analysis, topic trackers and AI filters, plus AskFred for questions across past meetings | Single and multi-prompt agents or node-based conversation flows, knowledge bases, expressive mode for emotion and emphasis, custom pronunciation with IPA, CMU, Pinyin or Jyutping, denoising and interruption sensitivity, voicemail and IVR handling, plus a playground, simulation tests, A/B testing and post-call analysis |
| Consent and trust | The vendor states SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and HIPAA compliance, zero data retention and private dedicated storage with customer data ownership; Enterprise adds custom data retention and a super admin role | HIPAA compliant, SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 certified and GDPR compliant, with a BAA and a DPA including EU standard contractual clauses available for self-signing at no extra fee. Per-agent data retention runs from 1 day to 2 years, PII can be excluded from what is stored, and recording URLs can be signed. Services are not currently operated inside the EU |
| MCP-ready | No | stated Yes |
| Deployment | Cloud (SaaS), Browser-based | Cloud (SaaS), Browser-based |
| Support | Email helpdesk | Not stated |
| Onboarding | Documentation and knowledge base | Documentation and knowledge base |
| Company size | more entries Freelancers, Small and mid-sized, Enterprise | Small and mid-sized, Enterprise |
| Integrations | more entries Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Webex, GoToMeeting, Dialpad, Lifesize, Aircall, RingCentral, Zoom Phone, OpenPhone, Salesforce, HubSpot, Affinity, Slack, Notion, Google Docs, OneNote, Confluence, Microsoft SharePoint, Linear, Airtable, Asana, Microsoft To Do, Greenhouse, Lever, BambooHR, Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Box, Zapier | Twilio, Telnyx, Vonage, Genesys Cloud, Five9, Avaya, Amazon Connect, HubSpot, Make, n8n, GoHighLevel |
Add a tool
Adds a column to the table, from the tools in this category.
Row where the values differ The small markers point at the lower number, the longer list or the stated feature. They describe the data, they are not a verdict.
The short version
Key Differences
- Starting price Fireflies.ai Free plan; Pro from $10 / seat / month Retell AI From $0.07 / minute of calls
- Free trial Fireflies.ai Free plan Retell AI $10 in free credits, no contract and no commitment; 20 concurrent calls are included
- Company size Fireflies.ai Freelancers, Small and mid-sized, Enterprise Retell AI Small and mid-sized, Enterprise
- Hosting Fireflies.ai Cloud, with a Chrome extension for Google Meet plus mobile and desktop apps Retell AI Cloud on AWS; the vendor states it does not currently operate services within the European Union
- Languages Fireflies.ai More than 100 languages with automatic language detection; the vendor marks the wider set as beta Retell AI 57 languages listed for text-to-speech and 55 for speech recognition, each with the providers that cover it
Every line is one datapoint from the table above, picked automatically. Nothing here is written text.
The trade-offs
Strengths and Limitations
Fireflies.ai
Strengths
- Covers Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Webex, GoToMeeting, Dialpad and Lifesize, plus dialers and uploaded audio files
- More than 100 languages with automatic detection
- Over 100 integrations carry summaries into CRM, ATS, chat and docs
- SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and HIPAA compliance with zero data retention
Limitations
- Transcription only, no text-to-speech or voice cloning
- API access, analytics and private channels all start at the Business plan
- The vendor marks the wider language set as beta
Retell AI
Strengths
- Usage-based per-minute pricing with no contract and $10 in free credits to start
- Testing tooling built into the product: playground, simulation runs, batch tests and A/B splits of live traffic
- Custom voices can be cloned or imported across several voice providers
- HIPAA, SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 and GDPR, with BAA and DPA available for self-signing at no extra fee
Limitations
- The per-minute rate varies widely with the models, telephony and add-ons chosen, so the entry rate is not the rate to budget with
- The vendor states it does not currently operate services within the European Union
- Retell-managed phone numbers cover the US and Canada only; elsewhere a number has to be brought in
- Building and running an agent assumes developer work; there is no packaged seat-based plan
Plans
Pricing
Fireflies.ai
- Free $0 Free forever for one person: limited AI summaries, 400 minutes of storage per team and 20 AI credits a month.
- Pro $10 / seat / month Billed annually, or $18 per seat on monthly billing. Unlimited transcription and AI summaries, 8,000 minutes of storage per seat, video recording, downloads, the personal and email assistants and unlimited integrations.
- Business $19 / seat / month Billed annually, or $29 per seat on monthly billing. Unlimited storage, 30 AI credits, multi-language mode, conversation intelligence, team analytics for admins, public meeting access, user groups and private channels.
- Enterprise $39 / seat / month Annual billing only. Adds the rules engine, SSO and SCIM, audit logs, HIPAA compliance, private storage, custom data retention, a super admin role and a dedicated account manager.
Retell AI
- Pay as you go $0.07 Per minute and up, quoted by the vendor as $0.07 to $0.31 per minute for voice agents and from $0.002 per message for chat agents. Includes $10 in free credits and 20 concurrent calls, with no contract.
- Enterprise Not stated Contact sales. Custom pricing for higher volumes, with dedicated support and implementation, custom compliance terms covering HIPAA, SSO and a DPA, no cap on concurrent calls and a dedicated server option.
What users say
Review Scores · opens after launch
Fireflies.ai
- Ease of use
- Not rated yet
- User interface
- Not rated yet
- Onboarding
- Not rated yet
- Support and service
- Not rated yet
- Value for money
- Not rated yet
- Features
- Not rated yet
No reviews yet. Be the first to review this tool. Every review is checked for fairness before it appears, and the vendor cannot have one removed.
Retell AI
- Ease of use
- Not rated yet
- User interface
- Not rated yet
- Onboarding
- Not rated yet
- Support and service
- Not rated yet
- Value for money
- Not rated yet
- Features
- Not rated yet
No reviews yet. Be the first to review this tool. Every review is checked for fairness before it appears, and the vendor cannot have one removed.
Where this comes from
Where this comes from
Fireflies.ai https://fireflies.ai · checked against the official source on 2026-09-12
Retell AI https://www.retellai.com · checked against the official source on 2026-09-13
This table lists factual criteria taken from information the vendors publish themselves. For how we put it together, see the methodology.