Fireflies.ai vs Shadow (2026)

Fireflies.ai

by Fireflies.ai

Shadow

by Taper Labs

Pros

• ✓Most comprehensive free tier in the meeting intelligence category with unlimited transcription, unlimited AI summaries, and 100-plus language support at $0, enabling enterprise-level evaluation before any financial commitment.
• ✓SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and HIPAA compliance with a BAA at the Enterprise tier covers a wide range of regulated industries including healthcare, finance, and legal.
• ✓The 200-plus AI Apps for post-meeting automation, including sales call analysis, objection tracking, and BANT and MEDDIC extraction, provide workflow depth well beyond simple transcription.

Limitations

• ⚠AI credits are a one-time shared workspace pool that does not reset monthly; heavy users of AskFred and advanced AI summaries exhaust the allotment quickly, triggering auto-recharge at $5 per 50 credits unless explicitly disabled
• ⚠Notetaker bot joins meetings as a named participant on most plans; a Chrome extension provides bot-free recording as an alternative, but the bot remains the default and most visible capture method, which can create friction in sensitive client-facing calls
• ⚠Video recording is locked behind Business at $19 per seat per month annual, meaning teams that need to review screen content alongside transcripts must upgrade past Pro even for moderate usage needs

Pros

• ✓Bot-free architecture means no visible participant joins meetings, which suits client-facing sales calls, regulated industries and confidential conversations where a vendor bot can create friction.
• ✓Captures both audio and on-screen content through smart screenshots, useful for design reviews, product demos and slide-driven presentations where screen context changes meaning.
• ✓Shadow 2.0 Skills run post-meeting actions (PDF creation, slide generation, CRM updates, follow-up emails, scheduling) automatically with no manual button press.

Limitations

• ⚠Mac-only, with no Windows or mobile support, so teams with mixed Mac and Windows environments cannot standardize on Shadow.
• ⚠No first-party SOC 2 certification and no public security or trust page. Shadow's privacy posture relies on on-device transcription plus OpenAI's enterprise privacy terms for AI features.
• ⚠Integration depth is Zapier-dependent rather than native. Connecting Shadow outputs to Salesforce, HubSpot, Notion or Linear requires a separate Zapier subscription and webhook configuration, which adds cost and setup steps.