HoverNotes vs Fireflies.ai

It depends on the job. For learning from video, HoverNotes is purpose-built: it watches courses, lectures and tutorials with you, captures timestamped screenshots of on-screen code, equations and diagrams, and saves AI study notes to your Obsidian vault. Fireflies.ai is the stronger choice for meetings — it joins your Zoom, Teams and Google Meet calls, transcribes them, and delivers summaries, action items and analytics.

Fireflies.ai is a meeting assistant: it joins your calls, transcribes them in 100+ languages, identifies speakers, and produces summaries, action items and searchable meeting history. HoverNotes is a note-taker for video learning — it watches the videos you study, captures screenshots of the code and diagrams the moment they appear, and writes timestamped AI study notes straight to a local Obsidian vault.

Fireflies is built around live meetings and uploaded audio/video files. It transcribes the audio, but it doesn't watch a course video alongside you or capture the on-screen frames — so the code, equations and diagrams in a tutorial aren't saved. HoverNotes is built for course and tutorial video and grabs exactly those visual moments as timestamped screenshots.

Fireflies has a free-forever plan (unlimited transcription with limited storage), with Fireflies Pro from about $10/seat/month billed annually. HoverNotes is free to install, with paid plans for heavier use. HoverNotes is also local-first: your notes stay in your own Obsidian vault rather than the cloud.

Choose Fireflies.ai if your main job is meetings — you want a bot that joins your calls, transcribes them, identifies speakers, and gives your team summaries, action items, search and conversation analytics. Choose HoverNotes if you learn from video and want a screenshot-rich study-note library built automatically as you watch.