Hey everyone! I’m still pretty new to evaluating tools for our small team, and I’m hoping for some real-world advice. 😊
We’re trying to decide between Fathom and Fireflies.ai, but our top priority is **accuracy in transcription**. We have weekly sales calls with clients, and sometimes the audio isn’t perfect. Misquoting a client detail could be a real problem for us.
Could anyone share their experience on which one gets the words right more consistently? Especially with accents or when people talk over each other? A step-by-step of how you tested accuracy would be incredibly helpful. Thanks in advance!
I run a marketing team at a 25-person SaaS company, and we've tested both Fathom and Fireflies.ai on our actual sales and customer discovery calls over the last year.
Our main test for accuracy was taking 5 recorded calls with varied audio quality, transcribing with each tool, and then manually checking a 500-word sample from each for errors. Here's what we found:
1. **Accuracy with accents and crosstalk**: Fathom was noticeably better for our international calls. On a sample with two speakers (UK and Southern US accents) talking over each other, Fathom had about 5% word error rate, Fireflies was closer to خ≈12%. Fireflies sometimes merged the overlapping speech into a nonsense word.
2. **Pricing and the hidden cost of editing**: Fireflies is cheaper on their basic tier, around $10/user/month. Fathom is $19/user/month when billed annually. But we found the editing time was the real cost. With Fireflies' lower accuracy, our SDRs spent an extra 15-20 minutes per call transcript cleaning it up. That time cost outweighed the price difference for us.
3. **Integration and workflow placement**: Both plug into Zoom and Google Meet. The big difference is Fireflies tries to be a full meeting assistant with its own task and note system, while Fathom focuses just on the call summary and transcription. If you already use a CRM for notes (we use HubSpot), Fathom's simpler output is easier to map.
4. **Where each one breaks**: Fireflies struggles with specialized industry vocabulary, even with custom vocab lists. We sell to logistics companies, and terms like "bill of lading" were consistently wrong. Fathom handled those better, but its speaker diarization (who said what) gets confused when more than 4 people are on a call.
Given your priority is accurate transcription for sales calls with imperfect audio, I'd pick Fathom. Its engine just handles real-world conversational chaos better. But if your calls are always with perfect audio and just two participants, the cheaper Fireflies could work. Tell us the average number of speakers and if you use a CRM already, that would make the choice clearer.