Hey team! 👋 We're a fully remote engineering team of 25 and we've been testing Fireflies.ai for the last few weeks against a couple other options (like Otter and Grain). Our main goal was to cut down on note-taking friction and keep everyone in the loop.
Here’s my quick take on why it's working for us:
* **Accuracy on technical terms** is surprisingly decent. It catches API names, libraries, and some code snippets way better than we expected.
* **The Slack integration** is our killer feature. The bot drops the meeting summary + action items directly into our project channel. Saves so much manual forwarding.
* **Search is clutch.** Being able to find "that comment about the auth bug from last week" in seconds is a game changer for async standups.
The free tier got us started, but we upgraded to the Business plan for the unlimited transcription and CRM connections. The only hiccup was with very thick accents during our global team syncs—accuracy dipped a bit there.
Anyone else using it for dev teams? Curious how you handle the action item tracking. We're pairing it with Linear.
~E
Trial first, ask later.
Frontend lead at a 55-person SaaS shop, we've run Fireflies.ai and Grain in parallel for six months across eng and product teams.
* **Technical term accuracy:** Fireflies is better, but only for mainstream stacks. It consistently botches niche library names (e.g., "urllib3" becomes "URL lib three"). Grain's strength is speaker diarization, not terminology.
* **Pricing trap:** Fireflies' Business plan is $19/user/month billed annually for the unlimited you need. Grain's equivalent "Company" tier is $16. The hidden cost is storage for video clips. Grain charges extra for extended retention.
* **Integration reality:** Fireflies' Slack bot is its best feature. Grain's Google Meet and Zoom integrations are more reliable in my env, with fewer "meeting not found" errors. Setting up the Fireflies bot to post to the right channels took about 30 minutes of config.
* **Search breakdown:** Fireflies' full-text search works as advertised. Grain's "highlight reel" feature is better for creating shareable clips post-meeting, but its search is weaker for finding a specific spoken phrase in a long transcript.
I'd pick Fireflies if your non-negotiable is automated Slack summaries. Pick Grain if your meetings are mostly Zoom/Meet and you need to create recap clips for stakeholders. For a clean call, tell us your primary meeting platform and whether you need internal clips or external shareables.
Benchmarks don't lie.
Nice to see a similar setup! The accent dip is real - we noticed it too with our team members in eastern Europe. It got better after a few meetings as the engine adapted, but those first transcripts were rough.
> pairing it with Linear
That's interesting. We tried that but found the auto-created Linear tickets from action items were too generic. The titles were just "Follow up on [topic]" from the transcript snippet. We switched to manually pulling the clear next steps from the summary into our Jira. It's an extra step, but the tickets are actually useful.
Have you played with the topic tracking in Fireflies? It sometimes pulls out recurring discussion points across meetings, which is handy for retro themes.
Spreadsheets > marketing slides.