Donna vs Fireflies.ai
Donna or Fireflies? Pick Fireflies if you want automatic CRM logging and the widest integration catalog. Pick Donna if the meeting record must stay on your own infrastructure and you want analysis beyond summaries — verbatim receipts, tensions, position shifts, and the room read, all from a bot on your own server.
Fireflies is built for teams that want every call funneled into their CRM automatically, and at that job it is the category leader. But every integration is another cloud holding a copy of your conversations. Donna takes the opposite bet: one server, yours, and a report sharp enough that you don’t need six tools to interpret the meeting.
Side by side, structurally
| Axis | Fireflies.ai | Donna |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Fireflies’ cloud (SaaS) | Your own Linux VPS (self-hosted) |
| Where your recordings live | Stored and processed on Fireflies’ servers | Your server’s disk and your PostgreSQL database — nothing on a vendor cloud |
| How it attends meetings | The “Fred” bot joins your calls | Joins Google Meet as a visible participant — on demand, or auto-joined from your calendar’s iCal feed |
| Meeting video capture | Video capture on higher tiers | Yes — screen video + audio, compressed server-side after the call |
| Transcription engine | Vendor-managed, multilingual | Whisper large-v3 via the Groq API, with your key |
| Who owns the AI keys | Fireflies | You — your Groq key, your DeepSeek key |
| What you get after the call | Transcript, summary, action items, topic trackers, CRM sync | Eight-section meeting intelligence: decisions with tradeoffs, exact-quote receipts, tensions, what nobody said, position shifts, the room read, and orders |
| Pricing model | Free tier; per-seat subscriptions for storage, video, and admin features | No per-seat fee — you pay your own server and metered API usage |
Where Fireflies genuinely wins
- Unmatched integration catalog — Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, and dozens more get transcripts pushed automatically.
- A mature, polished ask-your-meetings experience (AskFred) refined over years — Donna’s archive chat is newer.
- Broad multilingual support out of the box.
Where Donna wins
- Fireflies’ value depends on pushing your conversations into more third-party clouds. Donna’s value is the opposite: the conversation never leaves your server.
- Topic trackers count keywords; Donna reads dynamics — who pushed back, who conceded, which commitment came with a soft deadline.
- No per-seat math. A sales team of twenty pays Fireflies twenty times; Donna’s server doesn’t care how many teammates the meeting had.
The data question, since nobody else leads with it
Fireflies: Stored and processed on Fireflies’ servers. Donna: your server’s disk and your postgresql database — nothing on a vendor cloud. For boards, client work, hiring, negotiations, and one-on-ones, that line is usually the whole decision.
Questions, answered straight
Is Donna a private alternative to Fireflies.ai?
Yes. Donna is a self-hosted meeting bot: it joins Google Meet like Fireflies’ Fred does, but records and analyzes entirely on your own VPS with your own API keys. There is no vendor cloud copy of your calls and no per-seat subscription.
Does Donna integrate with CRMs like Fireflies does?
Not today. Donna stores meetings, transcripts, and reports in your own PostgreSQL database, so your data is queryable and yours to pipe anywhere — but there is no one-click CRM catalog. If automatic Salesforce logging is your core need, Fireflies serves it better.
How does Donna’s report differ from Fireflies’ summaries?
Fireflies produces summaries, action items, and keyword-based topic tracking. Donna runs a two-pass analysis that extracts decisions with their tradeoffs, exact-quote commitments with timestamps, tensions, position shifts, and power dynamics — a reading of the meeting, not just a recap of it.
Put Donna in your next meeting
Donna deploys onto your own VPS in an afternoon: nginx, pm2, PostgreSQL, your API keys. Early access is open — tell us about your team and we’ll get her a seat at your table.
Request early access