Fireflies vs Dialpad Meetings

Fireflies was actually one of the first meeting recorder solutions on the market. They managed to build remote tooling that would actually join in existing meetings, like in Google Meet or Zoom, act like a guest, and record the audio.

This was super impressive, back when online video conferencing software was more restrictive, and Google Meet for example didn't even have native video meeting recorder functionality.

We actually used Fireflies almost exclusively for years, super early days back in 2017, and it has come a long way since, moving more into that of a AI meeting assistant.

They've built out a unique feature-set around being able to create snippets of calls, and tag them to a specific playlist, to then reference later or share with your team or others:

It's a really cool idea, it's just in practice, how often will you really be using it? I could see this being more useful for very specific industry verticals or teams, but not most, and not in the way we use a meeting recorder tool in our day-to-day.

All-in-all, they give you a lot of tools to organize your online meetings. But that's where I sorta wish I could just do less. I'm already organizing so many other facets to my life, from file storage in Google Drive, to channels and notes in Slite. I really just want to record meetings, have them log to my CRM, and forget about them unless I need to reference them.

Thing is, if you aren't staying on-top of organizing your calls though, it almost feels like you're just not taking full advantage of what Fireflies has built, which honestly stresses me out. 😅

Fireflies is pretty clean overall—it looks decently nice, it's just that there's a lot vying for your attention even just on the call review page:

Do you view the AI summary? Create Soundbites? Maybe AskFred? Or a Smart Search? Maybe you just want to make a comment? 🤷

It's just a bit overwhelming until you get used to the interface, but overall design-wise, it is clean.

This is an area that we really have to hand it to Fireflies—they have focused on integrations quite deeply out of the gate. For example, they integrate with most of the best CRM tools on the market.

Fireflies’ pricing looks typical at first, but in practice it is fairly restrictive.

• Free tier is extremely limited with only 3 transcription credits, 800 minutes of storage per seat, and audio-only recording.
• To unlock integrations you must upgrade to the $18/user/mo Pro plan, which includes 8,000 minutes of storage but still does not offer video recording. With moderate usage, around 30 calls per month, that storage only lasts roughly 4–5 months before you are pushed to the highest tier if you want to keep historical recordings.

Because video recording is locked behind the top plan, many teams will need the most expensive tier immediately.

I was actually one of a few people back in the day that tried to make the pivot from Google Meet and Zoom to Dialpad Meetings (formerly UberConference) happen.

The thing is, at the time, there was just too much friction trying to get people to use and accept Dialpad Meetings, because it's just different from what they are used to using (thank you inertia /sarcasm).

• You can have it automatically join your calls in Dialpad Meetings, but Google Meet and Zoom as well, it's super flexible in that way.
• They are likely to be a bit more advanced than even that of Dialpad Meetings, since they are solely focused on just the meeting AI side of things, whereas Dialpad Meetings needs to also support the entire infrastructure of a meeting platform.
• If you ever do choose to leave Dialpad Meetings and move back to Zoom/Google Meet, your historical lock-in is on a 3rd party tool (Fireflies), instead of the meeting platform itself. So with Fireflies, you can jump between Dialpad Meetings to Google Meet to Zoom, no problems!

• You're now going to be paying for a second meeting recorder to join the call, and the integration will be linking your CRM and notes from what Fireflies comes up with, not Dialpad Meetings.
• It'd definitely a bit less clean. Also, Fireflies will join the call as a fake person, that's how they record the call.

So all-in-all, we know this isn't the most ideal thing to hear. Without Dialpad Meetings having a proper API though (or a native CRM integration), that's all we can really do here.

If the above is you, all I can say is we hear you... It's overwhelming, confusing, and we were going down this exact same rabbit hole 6+ years ago.

Dialpad Meetings is quite clean, we've always appreciated the simplicity it brings with it. I appreciate them coming at it with a more modern approach, but with that, comes more difficult user-adoption (unless you just copy Google Meet and Zoom identically).

This is where we've ran into the most struggles with Dialpad Meetings. It's just not familiar with most people when joining. They don't know where the screensharing icon is, along with everything else. It's just different from what people are used to. While this is normally fine and we don't want to be too negative on Dialpad Meetings for this point, the truth of the matter is they are just battling inertia (familiarity), and people just hate change when it comes to something they also dislike (Meetings) 😅

Dialpad Meetings doesn't have an API that we can connect into, so there's no current way to create custom integrations outside of what they list on their site (native integrations).

So say you want to create a meeting activity within your CRM (assuming you picked one of the Best CRM options on our list), you can't do that without a meeting recorder tool that can join your meeting, like Fireflies. So the only way to really do this is to hand off the integration side of things to a meeting recorder tool that has deep integrations with CRMs.

What I did back in the day to get this working actually, was relying on Fireflies to join the call and be the native integration with the CRM. They do have a dedicated landing page for their integration with Dialpad Meetings, although it is still has the URL "uberconference". 😅

There are positives and negatives that come with this approach though.

At the end of the day, we ultimately just decided to use Google Meet alongside Granola, as the native integration they have between eachother, alongside no longer having to fight the inertia (of people not wanting to try a "new" meeting tool), is where we ultimately found ourselves.

It's also more likely that tools will integrate natively with Google Meet and Zoom, especially because for some reason Dialpad Meetings is choosing to highly restrict their API for internal use only. 🤷