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 server (privately hosted) |
| Where your recordings live | Stored and processed on Fireflies’ servers | Your server’s disk and your own 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 | Flocci Speech Recognition, with your key |
| Who owns the AI keys | Fireflies | You — your Flocci Speech Recognition and Flocci Intelligence keys |
| What you get after the call | Transcript, summary, action items, topic trackers, CRM sync | Meeting intelligence through one of six lenses: 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 — credit-metered usage on the hosted service, or only your own infrastructure and API usage when deployed privately |
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 own database — nothing on a vendor cloud. For boards, client work, hiring, negotiations, and one-on-ones, that line is usually the whole decision.
What each one charges
| Fireflies | Donna | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Free forever plan; 400 storage minutes per team | One-time credit grant plus a monthly free allowance |
| Paid | Pro $18/seat monthly or $10 annual; Business $29 monthly or $19 annual; Enterprise $39 annual | Credit-metered usage — meetings attended, minutes transcribed, reports delivered. No seat licence. |
Fireflies’s figures were read from their own pricing page on 29 July 2026; check it before you buy, because plans change without notice. Donna’s current credit costs live on your billing page at account.flocci.in.
Questions, answered straight
Is Donna a private alternative to Fireflies.ai?
Yes. Donna is a privately hosted meeting bot: it joins Google Meet like Fireflies’ Fred does, but records and analyzes entirely on your own server 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 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
Access is open — sign in with your Google account and she’s in your dashboard in minutes. Rolling out to a whole team, or want a hand with the server setup? We’re glad to help.