Littlebird vs Fireflies

Littlebird is an AI note taker that captures your meetings AND understands everything around them as it learns through watching your screen. It records your calls, lets you take notes, and then layers in context from your calendar, email, and even what you had open on your screen. Which means your notes aren't living somewhere in isolation; instead, they're considered as part of a bigger picture of your day.

With Littlebird you can ask things like "What happened today?" or "Where did this come up?" and it can pull from meeting notes, Slack, tabs you had open, and anything else it saw (read-only) during the day. That makes it especially useful if you're constantly context switching and don't want to rely on memory to track everything.

The truth of the matter is a lot of work gets done outside of formal recorded meetings, like on Slack, or email and Littlebird is one of the only tools that captures all of that context.

The tradeoff here is that while you do get a smarter, more useful note-taking experience, the context awareness layer means it's more invasive. With other tools like Granola, we feel comfortable using everywhere, even in our private lives, but the level of access Littlebird requires gives us pause. That doesn't make it unusable since they have controls that give you some guardrails, but it is something to consider.

• Notes connect to your entire work-life context
• Great to lean on as an assistant, you can ask questions
• Lightweight, non-intrusive meeting recording experience
• Can recall information across any website or app you visit
• Reduces the mental load brought on by constant context switching

• More invasive than traditional AI note takers
• Slower at generating meeting notes
• Not purely focused on meetings

I'm usually working on different tasks back to back, which leaves little time for meeting prep. When Littlebird prompted me to prep for a meeting, I was curious and just so happened to be running late for the call, so I figured, "What the hell, let's see what it can do."

It went way deeper than other tools I've used. It knew what I was doing on X and was able to gather and understand the entire reason for my booking the call, including overlapping areas of interest. That was huge, considering I had actually forgotten the entire context as to why we were even meeting!

Littlebird definitely took inspiration from Granola. The flow is very familiar; it asks to join your call (when you have a meeting starting), and stays as a scratchpad so you can jot down notes while you're on the call.

After it'll generate a structured summary that does take a bit longer than Granola, but only because it actively ties everything back into your broader context.

Since I'm constantly context-switching, I don't always know what happened when or where. So, having Littlebird follow along like an actual assistant who's with me during my work day, I can just ask it to find that information and pull those answers.

Sometimes I forget whether something was discussed within a meeting or on Slack, and with other tools I'd need to search each individually to find what I am looking for. But with Littlebird, it already has seen everything that I have with my own eyes so when I ask "What did our engineering team say about website this week?" it just tells me an aggregate from all the context is has.

If something came up in a LinkedIn DM, a tab, or another tool on my computer, it can pull that into its answers as well. It's super helpful and makes my notes feel more complete and helpful when I need to look back at them later.

The memory layer is such a big differentiator across all my tools, especially when you're looking for something broader and need it to consider various pieces in your workday puzzle.

• Basic: Free. Best for those wanting to test the product and see if the context-aware approach actually clicks for their workflow.
• Plus: $17/mo. Best for people who want more depth, more routine usage, and plan to use Littlebird as an everyday assistant.
• Pro: $100/mo. Best for those who need significantly higher usage limits or like advanced intelligence and want early access to feature releases.

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.