Exploring Grain alternatives: The Top 5 meeting note-taking tools

What is Grain?

Before we start, know that we won’t be talking about wheat, rice, barley, oats, or corn in this article! We will talk about Grain, the well known automatic note-taking tool! But maybe you aren’t familiar with the tool, so let me explain it a bit to you!

What are the key features of Grain?

‍

Grain comes with a large set of useful features:

• Automatic meeting notes: Grain automatically transcribes your meetings. No more manual note-taking!
• Notes auto-synch: The information contained in the meeting notes taken by Grain is automatically synchronized with your corresponding CRM contacts.
• AI assistant: Grain is powered by an AI which allows you to personalize the output obtained by pre-defining a format or directly asking questions to the AI assistant!
• Collaboration options: Grain allows you to share transcripts and highlights of a meeting on your team library so your teammates can view and comment on it.
• Revenue Intelligence features: Grain has revenue intelligence features and enables for instance to track topics mentioned during meetings and get deal insights.

How much does it cost?

3 plans are available if you want to use Grain:

• Free: With a limit of 20 meetings
• Starter: $15/month per user with unlimited meetings and a limit of 10 monthly uploads
• Business: $29/month per user with unlimited meetings, unlimited uploads and access to conversation intelligence features
• Enterprise: Custom

Grain is a formidable way to increase your productivity or the productivity of your whole team! But don't jump the gun on buying it! There are other options that are worth being explored. And I’m here to help you explore them!

The best alternative: Claap

I could sound a bit biased here but I do believe the best alternative to Grain is Claap. Because Claap is not just a simple note-taking tool. It’s way more than that. And let me explain to you why.

Claap’s key benefits

Let's delve into why Claap is a top-tier option if you’re looking for a Grain alternative:

• Note-taking and meeting recording features: Claap obviously allows recording and automatically transcribing your meetings. The main advantage of Claap here is that it can transcribe 100+ languages accurately!
• AI-Powered Summaries: Claap's AI summaries make the difference as they not only provide context but also highlight key points of the meeting, allowing you to quickly grasp the essence of your meetings.
• Advanced collaboration features: Claap offers advanced collaboration as you can share your recordings to your teammates and allow them to react to it, ask questions… and all that very accurately as Claap allows you to do it on a specific part of the screen.
• Edition tools: Claap allows users to edit their meeting recordings to make them clearer and more impactful. Don’t spend on a video edition tool! 
• Record claaps: This is certainly the main advantage of Claap. As it is equipped with screen recording features, the tool facilitates the recording of claaps. Claaps are 2 to 5-minute videos enabling your team to communicate without traditional synchronous meetings! Just create your claap, share it and let your teammates give their feedback or ask questions using Claap’s collaboration features! 

Claap’s limitations

• Compatibility: Claap’s desktop app is currently only available on Mac. Windows is on the way.
• Limits of the Free Plan: Claap only allows 10 video uploads with the free plan. 

Claap’s pricing

• Starter: Free with an upload limit of 10 videos.
• Team: $10/month per user with unlimited videos upload/storage.
• Enterprise: Custom

If you're interested in Claap's paid features but hesitant to commit financially, don't worry. Claap provides a 14-day free trial, giving you full access to all premium features without any charges.

Gong, the best revenue intelligence alternative

If you’re more interested in the revenue intelligence features of Grain, then you might be interested in Gong. I’ll show you why

Pros

• Note-taking and meeting recording features
• Real-time analysis: Gong not only transcribes your meetings but also gives real time analysis and insights to assist you during conversations.
• Multi-source insights: Gong is equipped with advanced revenue intelligence features. It can notably track your activity and provide you with personalized insights based on information coming from your calls, your emails and other softwares!
• External analysis: Gong provides market insights to help you make the best decisions.

Cons

• Transcription issues: Gong’s transcriptions have been reported as slow to load and sometimes inaccurate. For a transcription tool, you’d rather have another option like Claap.
• High price: Gong is a way more expensive option than the other tools presented. If you are price sensitive (and let’s be honest, we all are) this could be an issue.

Pricing

Unlike the other options, Gong doesn’t offer classic plans. Prices are on demand and depend on your specific needs. On average, a company using Gong pays $1,600 per user per year (for a company with less than 50 employees).

Fireflies, the most user-friendly option

Pros

• Note-taking and meeting recording features
• User-friendly interface: Fireflies stands out for its user-friendly interface which will help you master the tool in no time.
• Integration Capabilities: Fireflies integrates with many different tools such as  Zoom, Google Meet, and Slack, facilitating your work.
• AI Super Summaries feature: Fireflies comes with AI Super Summaries features. It summarizes your meetings in key points and automatically generates action items based on your discussions.

Cons

• Transcription issues: Some Fireflies users have reported issues in the understanding and transcription of certain accents, resulting in inaccuracies in their transcripts.
• No speaker recognition: Fireflies lacks speaker recognition capabilities, which may pose challenges during calls involving multiple participants.

Pricing

• Free: with limited transcription credits and 800 min storage of recordings
• Pro: $10/month per user with unlimited transcription credits, 8000 min storage of recordings and features like AI Super Summaries
• Business: $19/month per user with unlimited transcription credits, unlimited storage of recordings and other features like video screen capture
• Enterprise: Custom

Fathom, the best free alternative

The price of a tool is an important factor to consider. Maybe you’re looking for a free alternative to Grain! And in this case, I have exactly what you need: Fathom.

Pros

• Real time transcription feature
• Pre-formatted summaries: After your meeting, Fathom automatically creates formatted meeting notes that you can send as is. 
• AI highlights feature: You can highlight sections during your meetings to make Fathom summarize them and integrate them into your notes.

Cons

• No meeting recording option: You can’t record meetings using Fathom’s free plan.
• No video library: Fathom is not great to manage your past meetings as there is no library recording them.
• Only 6 languages supported: Fathom only supports English, Spanish, Italian, German, French, and Portugese. If you speak another language, you’d rather use a more complete tool such as Claap.

Pricing

• Free: Regular version with all the features mentioned above.
• Team Plan: $19/user/month adding teamwork features such as video library and workspace organization to share key moments of meetings with your teammates.

Otter: the best audio-only alternative

Why reinvent the wheel when we can keep it simple? If you need only audio transcription, then Otter might be the right choice for you. Let’s dive into Otter’s capabilities together!

Pros

• Real time transcription feature
• Slide capture feature: Even though Otter can’t record the video of a meeting, it can still keep useful information as Otter can copy the text from slides that are presented during the meeting!
• Otter AI Chat: Otter AI Chat is a great feature. It answers your questions using the information contained in the transcripts of your past meetings! It’s like a digital assistant ready to help whenever you need it!

Cons

• No video recording: I know it’s the title of the section, but it’s important to highlight it. Otter only offers audio transcription and is not capable of recording your meetings.
• Limited AI capabilities: Beyond Otter AI Chat, the AI capabilities of the tool are very limited. Unlike other alternatives, Otter will not be able to identify action items or tasks for instance.
• No speaker recognition: Just like Fireflies, Otter doesn’t have speaker recognition capabilities, which are nonetheless very important for tracking who said what during the meeting.
• Privacy scandals: Otter has a track record of audio files being shared with third parties. While Otter has taken steps to address this issue, customer anecdotes about such incidents remain disconcerting to read.

Pricing

• Free: with 300 monthly transcription minutes and a 30 minutes limit per conversation.
• Pro: $10/user/month with 1200 monthly transcription minutes and a 90 minutes limit per conversation.
• Business: $20/user/month with 6000 monthly transcription minutes and a 4 hours limit per conversation.
• Enterprise: Custom

Conclusion

Instead of looking for Grain alternatives, you should think about which characteristics you are looking for (for the tool). If you don’t have a clear idea, I’d suggest trying Claap as I truly believe it has the best price/quality ratio on the market. And you can even try it for free! So why are you still hesitating?