Fireflies.ai vs. ClerkMinutes: Which AI Meeting Tool is Right for Government Clerks?

With over 20 million users across 800,000+ organizations, including people at three-quarters of Fortune 500 companies, Fireflies.ai is a leader in AI-powered note-taking apps for a reason.

But here's the question most government employees don't ask until it's too late.

Was this tool actually built for you?

Fireflies.ai is a powerful general-purpose tool designed for sales teams, project managers, and corporate environments. It excels at capturing conversations, generating summaries, and integrating with CRMs. But when it comes to producing accurate, publish-ready meeting minutes that comply with municipal standards, parliamentary procedure, and public records laws, it falls short.

That's where ClerkMinutes comes in since it's a purpose-built solution for local government Clerks who need to turn meeting recordings into compliant, ADA-friendly, agenda-aligned minutes without spending hours editing, formatting, or fact-checking.

Quick Comparison

What is Fireflies.ai?

Fireflies.ai is a cloud-based AI meeting assistant that automatically records, transcribes, and summarizes meetings across platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and more. It acts as a virtual notetaker, joining meetings via a bot or integration to capture full conversation transcripts with high accuracy (claimed ~95% for clear audio) in over 100 languages.

Beyond transcription, Fireflies generates AI-powered meeting notes including bullet-point summaries, action items, and key highlights available shortly after each call. Users can search past meetings by keyword or ask questions to "Fred," the AI assistant, to quickly retrieve information from conversation archives.

The platform has processed over 3 billion minutes of meetings to date.

Fireflies.ai Key Features

Here are the most popular features that users like about Fireflies.ai.

• Automated Transcription & Recording: Records audio and video for meetings, producing transcripts that differentiate speakers and handle multiple languages. Supports live transcription during calls. Final transcripts and summaries are typically ready about 15 minutes after a call ends.

• AI Summaries and Notes: Generates structured summary notes including an overview, key discussion points with timestamps, and action items. The format is consistent but generic.

• AskFred AI Assistant: Conversational AI that allows users to query meeting content with questions like "What did we decide about pricing?" However, it currently works one meeting at a time and doesn't aggregate insights across multiple meetings.

• Live Assist (2025): Real-time feature that surfaces suggestions, answers, and coaching tips during meetings. Can pull up relevant information from past meetings on the fly. Useful for sales reps who need instant access to previous conversation details.

• Conversation Analytics: Tracks speaker talk time, performs sentiment analysis, and allows topic tracking across calls. Managers can review calls for coaching or identify trends. Business tier includes team-level metrics and a Rules Engine for automation.

• 90+ Integrations: Connects with CRMs (Salesforce, HubSpot), project tools (Trello, Asana, ClickUp), ATS systems (Lever, Greenhouse), and collaboration hubs (Slack, Teams). API and Zapier support for custom workflows.

• AI App Marketplace: 200+ pre-built AI plugins for specialized analyses including sales qualification (BANT), customer satisfaction scoring, objection handling, interview scorecards, and more. This extensibility is a major differentiator for corporate business users.

• Security: SOC 2 Type II certified, GDPR compliant, HIPAA-compliant option available for healthcare. Does not use customer meeting data to train AI models. Enterprise plans include private cloud storage, SSO, and custom data retention.

Fireflies.ai Pricing

Just like Otter.ai and other all-purpose note-taking platforms, Fireflies.ai has a limited free tier.

• Free: Unlimited transcription with limited storage and advanced features

• Pro: $10/user/month (annual) – Full AI summaries, integrations, extended storage

• Business: $19/user/month (annual) – Video recording, unlimited storage, advanced analytics, Rules Engine

• Enterprise: Custom pricing – SSO, private cloud, custom data retention

What Fireflies.ai Does Well

Fireflies has earned its popularity for good reasons. For general business meetings, it delivers real value:

• Time savings: many users consistently report eliminating 70%+ of post-meeting admin work. One G2 reviewer noted: "I honestly don't know how I survived without Fireflies before."

• Transcription accuracy: Generally achieves 90%+ accuracy for clear English speech with multi-speaker support. Users praise being able to trust the transcript for most meetings.

• Searchable archive: Creates a knowledge base of all past meetings that can be searched by keyword, speaker, or date. Sales reps mention finding client requests from weeks ago in seconds.

• Integration depth: Automatically logs call notes to CRM, creates tasks in project management tools, and posts summaries to team channels. Eliminates manual data entry for sales and project teams.

• Cross-platform flexibility: Works with virtually any meeting platform, phone calls, and even in-person meetings via mobile app or desktop app that can capture any audio source.

The Core Problem: Fireflies.ai Wasn't Built for Government

Fireflies.ai is excellent at what it was designed to do, which is to capture business conversations and turn them into searchable, shareable notes. But government meetings operate under a completely different set of requirements, and that mismatch shows up fast.

Transcripts and Summaries Aren't Minutes

This is the fundamental disconnect. Fireflies produces two things: a transcript (everything that was said) and a summary (bullet points under generic headings like "Notes" and "Action Items").

Neither of those are meeting minutes.

Minutes require structure tied to your agenda. They require motions captured verbatim with movers, seconders, and vote outcomes. They require formatting that meets your municipality's standards and compliance with public records laws.

Fireflies gives you raw material. You still have to build the actual document which oftea means reorganizing content by agenda item, hunting for motions, reformatting everything, and hoping you didn't miss anything. Multiple G2 reviewers noted the summaries can be "inconsistent," "too high-level," or "lacking detail or clarity." For Clerks, that means reading the full transcript anyway to fill in the gaps.

Parliamentary Procedure Is Invisible to the AI

Government meetings run on parliamentary procedure. Motions, seconds, amendments, substitutes, withdrawals, roll call votes. These aren't optional details. They're the legal backbone of public decision-making.

Fireflies doesn't see any of it. When a council member says "I move that we approve the budget," Fireflies transcribes the words but doesn't recognize it as a motion. It won't flag an unseconded motion. It won't tally votes. It won't attach outcomes to agenda items.

You're left scanning a wall of text, manually identifying every procedural action, and formatting them yourself. That's hours of work per meeting and every manual step introduces error risk into official records.

Speaker Attribution You Can't Trust

Every statement, motion, and vote must be attributed to the correct person.

Fireflies attempts auto-detection, but user reviews consistently flag problems. Generic labels like "Speaker 1" and "Speaker 2" are common, especially when multiple people have similar voices or speak infrequently. One G2 reviewer wished for "a feature to permanently teach it a person's name." Another noted the tool "occasionally mixes up two voices, especially if people interrupt each other."

In a business meeting, you fix a few labels and move on.

In official government minutes, a misattributed vote or motion is a compliance issue.

The AI Guesses When It Shouldn't

When audio is unclear, Fireflies fill in the gaps. It might approximate a name, paraphrase a motion, or summarize a vote in a way that's close but not verbatim.

User reviews confirm this: "occasional factual mix-ups," "a date error in the summary," content that requires "verification and editing." For internal corporate notes, that's a minor inconvenience. For public records subject to FOIA requests and legal scrutiny, it's a liability. Clerks need tools that flag uncertainty, not tools that fabricate plausible-sounding details.

No Paper Trail for Accountability

Public records require defensibility. When a resident files a complaint or a council member disputes the minutes, you need to show exactly where each statement came from.

Fireflies gives you a transcript with timestamps, but nothing connecting specific lines in your finished minutes back to source recordings. No version history tied to agenda items. No audit trail showing what was AI-generated versus Clerk-verified.

You're left defending official records without the documentation that government accountability demands.

What is ClerkMinutes?

ClerkMinutes was built from scratch for one job. That’s helping government Clerks turn meeting recordings into official, publish-ready minutes. It's not a transcription app with a government skin on it.

It's a complete municipal workflow, agenda builder included, that understands how public meetings actually work.

ClerkMinutes Key Capabilities

Here's what makes Clerks switch from generic tools:

• Agenda-Driven Minutes: Drop in your agenda and your recording. ClerkMinutes maps the conversation to your agenda items automatically including discussion, motions, and votes land under the right headings without you dragging and dropping anything.

• Built-In Parliamentary Procedure: The platform recognizes motions, seconds, amendments, substitutes, and withdrawals as they happen. It tracks who moved, who seconded, and how the vote went. Then attaches everything to the correct agenda item. No hunting through transcripts to piece together what happened procedurally.

• One-Time Speaker Setup: Tell ClerkMinutes who's in the room once. It keeps those names consistent from start to finish. When it's unsure, it asks you instead of making something up. You'll never see "Speaker 3" in your final minutes.

• Your Formatting, Every Time: Set your municipality's style once—heading structure, indentation, level of detail—and ClerkMinutes applies it to every meeting going forward. No more rebuilding the same template or fixing the same formatting issues week after week.

• Zero Fabrication: When audio is unclear or something's missing, ClerkMinutes flags it for your review. It won't invent names, guess at vote counts, or paraphrase motion language. For official records, that's non-negotiable.

• Audit Trail Built In: Every sentence in your minutes links back to the source recording with timestamps and version history. When someone disputes the record, you can point to exactly when it was said and by whom.
  
  

How ClerkMinutes Works

• Step 1: Add Your Agenda Drag your agenda file in. ClerkMinutes parses it automatically and builds the skeleton of your minutes.
  
  

• Step 2: Add Your Recording Upload the audio or video via Zoom, YouTube, local file, whatever you've got.
  
  

• Step 3: Confirm Speakers ClerkMinutes takes a first pass at identifying who's talking. You verify with a click. Once confirmed, those names stay locked in for the entire document.
  
  

• Step 4: Review and Export Your minutes come back structured by agenda item, formatted to your standards, with motions and votes already in place. Review everything in one screen, make any adjustments, and export to Word or PDF.

Detailed Feature Comparison

When to Use Each Tool

Fireflies.ai is the right fit when:

• You want transcripts for internal team reference.

• Your meetings are informal like standups, brainstorms, project syncs.

• You need to clip and share meeting highlights.

• You're in sales, startups, or corporate environments.

• CRM logging and workflow automation matter more than formal documentation.

• You want analytics on talk time, sentiment, or team patterns.

• Official, compliant minutes aren't part of your job.

ClerkMinutes is the right fit when:

• When you're a municipal Clerk who needs to publish meeting minutes for a government agency.

• Your output needs to be official, publishable minutes.

• You want discussion organized under agenda items without manual work.

• Motions, seconds, and votes need to be captured accurately the first time.

• You can't afford AI-generated errors in public records.

• You're tired of fixing speaker labels throughout a document.

• Your municipality has specific formatting requirements that need to be followed every time.

• Compliance and audit trails aren't optional. They're the primary job.

• You process multiple meetings monthly and need a workflow you can repeat without babysitting.

Final Verdict

Fireflies.ai has earned its reputation. 20 million users, integrations with nearly every business tool, and AI features that genuinely help sales teams, project managers, and corporate workers move faster. For the meetings it was designed to serve, it delivers.

But public meetings aren't sales calls.

Clerks need accurate minutes, motions, seconds, amendments, and roll call votes documented that hold up when someone challenges the record.

If you use Fireflies.ai for government minutes, here's what you're signing up for:

• Reorganizing a chronological transcript to match your agenda by hand

• Scanning for motions and manually formatting each one

• Fixing speaker labels when the AI guesses wrong

• Applying your municipality's formatting standards from scratch every time

• Hoping no AI-generated errors end up in the official public record

ClerkMinutes skips all of that. Agenda structure handled. Motions and votes captured. Formatting applied. Uncertainty flagged instead of fabricated. Full audit trail attached.

For Clerks who need minutes that are accurate, compliant, and ready to publish without hours of cleanup, ClerkMinutes is the obvious choice.

Ready to see the difference? Try ClerkMinutes and see what a tool built for government Clerks actually looks like.