Hyprcore vs Fireflies.ai

Most comparison pages in this category reach straight for the privacy attack. On Fireflies that attack does not land, and pretending otherwise would tell you more about us than about them.

Fireflies' Terms of Service say the company "will not use your User Content to train, retrain, fine-tune or otherwise improve any generative artificial intelligence models." Their privacy policy adds: "We do not use personal information for AI model training and we contractually prohibit our vendors from using this information for their own model training." They also operate a zero-data-retention arrangement with their processing partners, so meeting content is not kept by a third party after processing. That is a contractual commitment at every tier, not a settings toggle you have to find, and it is stronger than what several better-known competitors offer.

One caveat worth knowing rather than shouting about: the same Terms grant Fireflies a perpetual, irrevocable, sublicensable licence over your content in broad language, before narrowing its exercise to "providing the Services to you." Broad-grant-then-narrow is standard SaaS drafting and the narrowing clause is the operative one. Read both halves and decide for yourself.

So this comparison is not about training. It is about where the file lives, what the free plan actually gives you, and what you give up to avoid the bot.

The Fireflies free plan advertises unlimited transcription, and that is true as far as it goes. The constraint is storage: 400 minutes, and Fireflies' own documentation is explicit that "storage does not reset monthly – it's a total cap." Once you hit it, new meetings still get captured, but you have to delete older ones to reach them.

That is under seven hours of meetings for the lifetime of the account. Most people read "unlimited transcription" and assume a monthly allowance that refills. It does not. Fireflies' own pages also disagree with each other on whether the 400 minutes is per seat or per team, and one older help article still says 800 — so treat the exact figure as approximate and check it against your account.

There is a second surprise underneath: downloading your transcripts requires a paid plan. Free users can read their meetings in Fireflies but cannot take them out.

Hyprcore has no equivalent ceiling because there is no pooled quota to run out of. The recording, the transcript, and the note are written to your Mac as portable markdown and audio, so "how much can I keep" is a question about your own disk, and "can I export" was never a question at all.

Fireflies will record without a bot. The desktop app on Windows and Mac captures system audio and no participant appears in the call, and the Chrome extension does the same for Google Meet. This is a real feature and it works.

Two things go missing when you use it, both documented by Fireflies. Speakers stop having names: the transcript labels them Speaker 1 and Speaker 2, because named detection only works when the bot joins the meeting or you are on the Chrome extension. And no media file is kept — system-audio mode produces a transcript and a summary, not a recording you can go back and listen to.

So the bot-free path costs you attribution and the audio. If you want both, you invite the bot, and Fireflies is clear that it cannot be hidden: "Can I hide the bot's presence? No. Fireflies is always visible in the participant list to ensure compliance." That is a defensible design decision on their part — visible recording is more honest — but it is a decision you inherit.

Hyprcore does not make you choose. It captures system audio and mic from the machine, keeps the audio, identifies speakers, and never puts anything in the participant list, because there is no bot in the architecture at all.

Three of the controls people assume come with a paid plan sit on Fireflies' top tier. Auto-delete is "exclusive to Fireflies Enterprise users." A HIPAA Business Associate Agreement is marked Enterprise only. Choosing where your data is stored, via private storage or bring-your-own-bucket, is Enterprise only — and processing stays in the United States regardless of where the bucket lives.

By default your meeting content — audio, video, transcripts, summaries, AskFred chats — sits in Fireflies' US cloud on AWS and GCP, and is kept until you delete it. Close your account and they commit to deleting within 30 days.

We should be equally clear about our own gap: Hyprcore does not offer a HIPAA BAA either. What it offers instead is a path where the question is different — run the local model and the audio is never transmitted to us in the first place. That is not a substitute for a signed BAA if your compliance team requires one. If they do, Fireflies Enterprise is a real answer and Hyprcore is not.

Fireflies runs on the web, Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and as a Chrome extension, and connects to 50+ apps on every plan including the free one — CRMs, dialers, ATS, storage, project management. If your team is mixed-platform, or your meetings need to land in Salesforce or HubSpot automatically, that breadth is the product and Hyprcore cannot match any of it.

Hyprcore is macOS-only and will stay that way, because the local transcription path is built against Apple Silicon. What it does with that focus is go wider per-machine rather than wider per-platform: dictation into any app, Action Mode voice commands that run an instruction against your selected text, an AI wiki, screen-and-mic walkthroughs that become notes with chapters, and web or YouTube captures — all in one vault, under one ⌘K palette, with an agent that can read and write across it.

The honest test: count your platforms first. If the answer includes Windows or a phone, this is decided. If everyone is on a Mac and you are paying for a meeting recorder plus a dictation app plus a notes tool, Hyprcore Pro at $19.99 is aiming to be all three.