Earmark vs Fireflies.ai: The Best AI Meeting Assistant Depends on One Question — Notes or Shippable Work?

If you’re researching Earmark vs Fireflies.ai, you’re likely trying to pick the best AI meeting assistant for your team: something that can handle meeting transcription, generate AI meeting notes, produce meeting summaries, and extract action items without creating more work. Fireflies.ai is one of the most widely adopted products in this space, marketing itself as an AI notetaker that can “transcribe, summarize, search, and analyze” your meetings. Earmark is built with a different priority: it’s designed to collapse the time from conversation to execution, turning meetings into shippable outputs instead of just a record of what was said.

Fireflies.ai is a strong solution for teams who primarily want automatic meeting capture. It reliably produces transcripts and summaries and helps teams build a searchable knowledge base of conversations, which is valuable when your main problem is recall, visibility, and sharing. Fireflies also supports the classic “meeting bot joins your call” workflow and can record meetings even if you’re not present, which makes it incredibly convenient for teams that live in back-to-back calls. In other words, if what you need most is a dependable system for capturing and organizing meeting content at scale, Fireflies is built for that job.

But here’s the catch: in most modern teams, the painful part of meetings isn’t the meeting itself. It’s the translation tax afterward. The expensive part is turning a one-hour discussion into two more hours of cleanup: rewriting notes, clarifying what was decided, assigning owners, drafting tickets, updating stakeholders, and doing all the small coordination work that keeps execution moving. This is where Earmark is intentionally biased. Earmark doesn’t optimize for “best summary.” It optimizes for “best outcome.” It treats the meeting like an input stream that should produce real work artifacts immediately—tickets, decision logs, follow-ups, and updates that match the formats teams already execute with.

This is the core difference in the Fireflies.ai vs Earmark comparison. Fireflies is primarily a meeting documentation tool: capture everything, summarize it, and make it searchable later. Earmark is primarily a meeting execution tool: convert alignment into action while the conversation is still happening. When your team leaves a meeting and someone still has to interpret a transcript, decide what matters, and manually turn it into structured deliverables, you’re still paying the tax. Earmark is designed to remove that layer entirely, so the output isn’t “what happened,” but “what’s happening next.”

Even in how they approach “bot vs no bot,” the difference is revealing. Fireflies supports recording without a bot for Google Meet through its Chrome extension, which is helpful for teams that don’t want a bot joining meetings. It also supports the bot-based approach that many organizations use for hands-free capture and coverage. Earmark is built around keeping the workflow lightweight and controlled, because for many teams—especially in security-conscious or high-trust environments—the biggest blocker isn’t transcription quality, it’s adoption friction. The easier it is to use in real meetings without introducing cultural or security pushback, the faster it spreads.

Security and compliance matter in both tools, especially for buyers searching for terms like SOC 2, SSO, GDPR, “no training,” and “data retention.” Fireflies highlights “no data training,” data ownership controls, and SSO as part of its security posture. Those are important checkboxes for enterprise evaluation. But Earmark’s advantage, in practice, tends to show up one layer earlier: if the tool is designed to minimize exposure and maximize user control, you’re not just meeting compliance requirements—you’re making it easier for teams to adopt it in the first place.

Pricing-wise, Fireflies positions itself with a familiar tiered model, with Pro and Business plans that include unlimited transcription and AI summaries, and an Enterprise tier for larger org requirements. The bigger cost question, though, isn’t “what does transcription cost?” It’s “what does it cost my team to keep doing the second shift?” If your organization is spending real engineering and product velocity on meeting cleanup, then the best AI meeting assistant is the one that eliminates that hidden work—not the one that creates a nicer document for someone to process later.

So if you’re trying to decide between Fireflies.ai and Earmark, here’s the simplest decision test: after your next important meeting, do you need to remember what was said, or do you need to ship what was decided? Fireflies.ai is excellent for capturing and organizing meeting knowledge. Earmark is the better choice for teams who are done paying the translation tax and want meetings to directly produce execution-ready outputs. And that’s the point to conclude on: notes are table stakes now—winning teams are the ones who can turn conversations into shippable work, immediately. Earmark is built for that.