Oyma vs Fireflies.ai

Fireflies.ai and Oyma represent two opposing architectures for meeting capture. Fireflies is a cloud-based conversational intelligence platform built for enterprise sales teams, customer success departments, and distributed organizations. Oyma is an autonomous, on-device Markdown notes app for Mac built for individuals who require private meeting capture and local file ownership.

Fireflies centers its workflow around an automated meeting bot (Fred), cloud-hosted transcripts, CRM pipeline synchronization, and team-wide conversation analytics. Oyma eliminates the bot entirely, capturing system audio on your Mac, transcribing speech locally with Whisper, and writing structured summaries directly into your personal vault.

Capturing calls: automated cloud bot vs native system audio

The primary interaction difference between Fireflies and Oyma is how each application captures spoken conversation:

In Fireflies:

• The default method is Fred, a virtual recording bot that automatically joins your scheduled Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or Webex calls.
• The bot sits in the attendee roster, often sending greeting messages in the call chat.
• While Fireflies provides desktop and Chrome extensions for botless recording, all audio is streamed to Fireflies cloud servers for transcription, diarization, and analysis.
• For teams running customer demos or high-volume sales discovery calls, automated bot attendance is common practice. However, in executive sessions, legal discussions, board meetings, or sensitive 1:1 reviews, participants frequently object to the presence of an AI bot.

In Oyma:

• Call capture is entirely silent and botless, utilizing Apple’s ScreenCaptureKit (macOS 14.2+) and CoreAudio to capture both system audio and microphone sound locally.
• No third-party bot enters the call, no notifications appear in the meeting chat, and call participants remain unaware of automated software.
• Oyma detects meetings across 8 major desktop applications—Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, Slack huddles, Discord, Around, and Whereby—and prompts you to start taking notes.
• Your meeting capture remains private, confidential, and completely within your personal control.

Storage and data sovereignty: cloud lock-in vs plain Markdown files

The storage model determines whether your meeting records remain accessible long term:

Fireflies operates as a proprietary cloud database:

• All transcripts, audio recordings, and AI action items are hosted on Fireflies cloud infrastructure.
• On the Free tier, your team is restricted to 400 total minutes of storage, and transcript downloads are disabled entirely. Your history is effectively locked inside the platform unless you subscribe to a paid tier.
• Paid tiers offer exports to PDF, DOCX, CSV, or JSON, but there is no native integration with local Markdown vaults. Meeting notes remain isolated from your personal thinking environment.

Oyma stores every meeting as an ordinary Markdown file on disk:

• When a call ends, Oyma writes a standard .md file with structured YAML frontmatter directly into a folder of your choice on your Mac.
• The note includes meeting metadata, attendee names (matched from macOS Calendar), the chosen summary template, action items, and the complete transcript.
• Because notes are plain Markdown, you can link meeting topics to project notes using standard [[WikiLinks]], explore connections in the force-directed graph view, and search across years of meetings in sub-10ms queries using local SQLite FTS5.
• You can open your vault folder in Obsidian, Visual Studio Code, or any text editor. Your notes remain permanent, readable text files that survive any cloud outage or vendor shutdown.

AI architecture: cloud processing with metered credits vs local execution

The intelligence engines in Fireflies and Oyma reflect divergent approaches to cost and privacy:

In Fireflies:

• Audio streams and transcripts are processed on remote cloud servers.
• AI capabilities—such as AskFred Q&A, automated topic tracking, and AI Skills—consume metered AI credits that sit on top of monthly seat fees.
• Transmitting confidential audio and business discussions to a multi-tenant cloud introduces compliance hurdles for healthcare, finance, and legal organizations subject to strict data-handling policies.

In Oyma:

• Speech-to-text runs directly on your Mac using embedded Whisper models across 13 languages, with weights downloaded once and cached locally.
• Meeting summaries run either entirely offline via Ollama (supporting local models like Llama, Mistral, or Gemma) or through your own Anthropic or OpenAI API keys stored in the macOS Keychain.
• When running local Ollama models, zero bytes of meeting audio or text ever leave your computer.
• Local-only mode can be enabled to sever all outbound network traffic at the socket level, verified by a transparent egress log that monitors network requests.

Pricing: per-seat subscriptions with credit meters vs free local core

Fireflies is structured around corporate software tiers:

• Free ($0): Unlimited transcription and summaries, but capped at 400 minutes of storage per team and zero transcript downloads.
• Pro ($10/seat/month billed annually, $18 monthly): Unlimited storage, transcript downloads, AI summary credits, and basic integrations.
• Business ($19/seat/month billed annually, $29 monthly): Video screen recording, conversational intelligence analytics, CRM integrations, and team administration.
• Enterprise ($39/seat/month, annual only): Custom data retention, dedicated account management, and single sign-on (SSO).

Oyma is free during its private beta for Apple Silicon Macs:

• Requires no user accounts, corporate domains, or subscription commitments.
• Because transcription and summaries run on your Mac’s hardware, there are no storage caps, no monthly minute quotas, and no export restrictions.
• When you use your own API keys for cloud models, you pay providers directly at wholesale token rates, typically costing pennies per meeting.

Summary verdict

Choose Fireflies.ai if you need team-wide conversation intelligence, CRM integration with Salesforce or HubSpot, automated sales coaching metrics, and a bot that automatically joins meetings across your organization.

Choose Oyma if you want silent, botless recording on macOS, complete privacy with on-device transcription and local Ollama summaries, and permanent Markdown notes stored in your own Obsidian-compatible vault.

Where Fireflies.ai is better

• Broad integrations: CRMs, dialers, Slack, Zapier and an API.
• Conversation intelligence and team analytics for sales teams.
• Free, unlimited transcription and summaries on the free plan.
• Speaker identification, mobile apps and a free dictation app (Fireflies Talk).

Thinking of moving? Your notes in Oyma are plain Markdown, so you can always take them with you. Start withgetting started, or read what leaves your Mac.

Looking at other options too? Read our guide to the best Fireflies.ai alternatives.