4 Grain Alternatives for AI Meeting Notes and Follow-Up
Choose Carly as a Grain alternative when the meeting matters for what happens after it: the CRM update, the tasks, the follow-up email and the next meeting. Fathom is the strongest free notetaker, Fireflies is the low-cost pick for team transcription, and tl;dv suits teams that want AI reports across many meetings. Keep Grain if its clips, shared libraries and CRM sync already work for your team.
Grain is an AI notetaker for growing teams. It records Zoom, Google Meet, Teams and Webex calls with a bot or through its bot-free desktop app, writes AI notes and action items, and lets you cut shareable clips and highlight reels. On its Business plan it syncs to HubSpot and Salesforce and adds conversation intelligence. Grain holds 4.6/5 from 315 reviews on G2, and most of this year’s reviews there are positive.
This comparison is published by Carly. We checked vendor pricing pages and original customer reviews on November 10, 2026, and did not run a head-to-head trial. Grain’s Trustpilot profile holds a single review, which describes a broadband service rather than the notetaker, and Capterra’s review page would not load for us, so the review evidence below comes from G2.
What Grain customers flagged in 2026
The criticism in recent reviews is less about the notes and more about managing a growing library of recordings.
Finding and sharing recordings. Rachel B., a senior Salesforce consultant at a small business, gave Grain 3/5 on G2 on October 30, 2026, in a review that praised its transcripts and summaries. Her complaint was that recent navigation changes made it hard to find anything, and that sharing every meeting from one client with her boss took her almost two hours, even though both had Grain access. G2 marks the review as an invitation sent on behalf of the seller.
Organizing at scale. Laura I., who works in enablement and experience design at a small business, rated Grain 4.5/5 on July 29, 2026, and credited it with saving hours through auto-transcription, clips and transcript search. Her main reservation: “The organization of recordings gets messy at scale.” She described having to tag recordings by hand to group them by project or client, and wanted to record her screen for async demos without inviting Grain to a live call. G2 lists the review as organic.
Languages other than English. A marketing professional at a small business gave Grain 5/5 on August 25, 2026, calling the experience best in class, but noted that accuracy drops when a conversation is in a language such as Hindi.
These are individual accounts, not measured failure rates. The operational lesson is concrete, though: if your team shares recordings across clients or deals, test library organization and sharing with a real client’s meetings before you commit to any notetaker, including Grain’s replacement. If you run calls in more than one language, test those too.
Grain pricing: where the limits are
Grain’s pricing page lists a free plan and three paid tiers.
| Grain plan | Price | Meeting length | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Up to 45 minutes | Unlimited meetings and AI notes, 30-day history, basic Claude and ChatGPT connector, bot-free desktop capture |
| Pro | $15/month annually, $19 monthly | Up to 4 hours | Unlimited history, uploads and imports, custom AI notes |
| Business | $29 per seat annually, $39 monthly, 2-seat minimum | Up to 8 hours | Shared workspace, team libraries, workspace API and webhooks, conversation intelligence, HubSpot, Salesforce and Slack |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | Unlimited | SSO and SCIM, 1080p recording, bring your own LLM, custom retention |
Grain states that it never trains AI on your meeting data on any plan. The plan gates that matter most are meeting length on Free, and the fact that CRM sync and shared team libraries start at Business. For three people on Business, that is $117 a month on monthly billing or $87 a month billed annually. Those are arithmetic examples, not quotes.
When keeping Grain makes sense
Keep Grain if your team relies on its clips and highlight reels, the HubSpot or Salesforce sync does what you need, and the problem you are trying to solve is the work after the call rather than the recording itself. Switching notetakers means re-learning where recordings live. Adding an assistant that acts on Grain’s notes can fix the follow-up without moving your archive.
Four alternatives by the job you want done
| Alternative | Strongest reason to evaluate it | What to verify first |
|---|---|---|
| Carly | Turns every finished meeting into CRM updates, tasks, follow-ups and booked next steps | Your follow-up rules, which meetings to ignore, and separately billed phone add-ons |
| Fathom | A free plan with unlimited recordings, clips and summaries | Which tier your CRM sync needs, and how its new ownership affects your roadmap |
| Fireflies | Low per-seat pricing and conversation intelligence on Business | Storage minutes, AI credits and recording length on each plan |
| tl;dv | AI reports and insights across many meetings | The monthly price of Pro, and which insights need Business |
The table sorts by job, not quality. Nothing we reviewed shows one product transcribing your meetings more accurately than another.
1. Carly: when the follow-up is the real problem
Carly is an AI assistant that runs the work a finished call creates. It can record the call itself or take the recap from Grain or any notetaker you already use. Then it writes a dated summary onto every attendee’s CRM record, turns the action items into tasks with owners and due dates, and drafts the follow-up email in your name.
The reason to choose it is reliability you can shape. You write the rules, such as only acting on calls with outside attendees, sending pricing questions to a person, or proposing three times for the next meeting, and Carly follows them the same way every time. Its strengths are email labeling and sorting, advanced calendar work, and phone and SMS, which is why “book the next call” can actually end with an event on the right calendar.
- Pre-built, not a build project. The meeting recorder to CRM timeline and recap to action tracker templates ship ready to use, and workflows can start on their own when a recap arrives.
- Your CRM, or Carly’s. Carly connects to HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive and Attio, and has its own built-in CRM if you do not want another one.
- Inside the AI you already use. Carly plugs into ChatGPT, Claude, Grok Bot, Meta Muse and Perplexity, so you can ask about last week’s calls and act on them from one chat.
Keeping Grain and adding Carly
You can keep Grain and hand Carly the follow-up. Grain includes personal API access on every plan, according to its pricing page. Generate a personal API token in Grain and paste it under Connect an API on Carly’s integrations page. Fathom, Fireflies and tl;dv connect natively, and Carly connects to thousands of apps beyond those. Our guide to AI that updates your CRM after meetings shows the full chain.
Carly’s cost and limits in this comparison
Free Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month. Organization seats are $35 per seat a month. Business calling, SMS and the AI receptionist are Organization add-ons billed separately from seats, and AI usage can affect cost too, so do not treat $35 as an all-inclusive price.
If your team’s main use of Grain is building clip libraries, highlight reels and coaching playlists for reps, that is a notetaker’s job. Keep the notetaker that does it best and give Carly everything that happens after the call.
2. Fathom: the strongest free plan
On the listed limits, Fathom has the most generous free tier in this group: unlimited recordings and transcription, instant AI summaries, clips, playlists and search across your calls, with a choice of bot capture or bot-free capture (in beta on Mac). On its pricing page, Premium is $16 per user a month annually or $20 monthly. Team is $15 or $19 per user with a two-user minimum and adds a shared workspace and Ask Fathom across team calls. CRM field sync, deal views and coaching scorecards sit on Business, at $25 annually or $34 monthly per user.
Three Business seats cost $102 a month on monthly billing. Fathom also changed hands this year: Superhuman announced it had acquired Fathom on September 14, 2026, to feed meeting context into its own assistant.
Tradeoff: the free plan is easy to start with, but automatic CRM updates need Business. Teams that care about where meeting data goes should read the current terms rather than assume they match the pre-acquisition ones. See Fathom alternatives and the Fathom integration.
3. Fireflies: low per-seat cost for a whole team
Fireflies is the budget option when everyone on a team needs transcripts. Its pricing page lists a free plan with transcription, limited AI summaries, 400 minutes of storage per team and 20 AI credits. Pro is $10 per seat a month annually or $18 monthly, with unlimited summaries, 8,000 minutes of storage per seat and video recording. Business is $19 annually or $29 monthly and adds unlimited storage, conversation intelligence, team analytics and a multi-language mode.
Three Business seats are $87 a month on monthly billing. That makes Fireflies cheaper than Grain Business for the same headcount.
Tradeoff: the limits are different units. Fireflies caps recordings at two hours on Free and Pro and three on Business, against Grain’s four hours on Pro and eight on Business, and storage and AI credits vary by plan. If your calls run long, check the cap first. More options are in Fireflies alternatives, and Carly connects through the Fireflies integration.
4. tl;dv: insights across many meetings
tl;dv is the alternative to look at when the question is not “what happened in this call” but “what happened across fifty of them.” Its pricing page lists a free plan with unlimited recordings and transcription in more than 100 languages, plus AI notes for 10 meetings. Pro is $18 per seat a month annually or $29 monthly, with unlimited AI notes, custom templates, an email follow-up drafter, global transcript search, and an MCP server, API and webhooks. Business, at $29 annually or $39 monthly, adds multi-meeting AI insights, scheduled AI reports, playbook monitoring and objection handling.
Three Business seats are $117 a month on monthly billing, the same as Grain Business.
Tradeoff: the monthly price of Pro is a large step up from the annual rate, and the cross-meeting reporting that sets tl;dv apart is on Business. Carly connects through the tl;dv integration.
Switching notetakers without losing your archive
Start by deciding what you actually need to keep. For most teams that is transcripts and a handful of recordings tied to open deals or client work, not every call ever recorded. Download those from Grain before you change plans, and check what happens to older meetings on a lower tier, since Grain’s free plan shows 30 days of history.
Shared clip links are easy to forget. If your team has sent Grain clips to customers or embedded them in documents, list them before cancelling so nothing breaks unexpectedly.
Pick a cutover date rather than running two notetakers at once. Two bots joining the same call confuses attendees and doubles the recordings you need to manage. Recreate the rules that matter on day one: which calendars auto-record, recording consent settings, and which meetings sync to your CRM.
A first workflow to test in Carly
Start with external calls only. A good first brief: after any meeting with someone outside the company, write a dated summary to each attendee’s CRM record, create a task for every action item with an owner and due date, draft a follow-up email for your review, and if the other person asked for another meeting, offer three times from your calendar.
Test it on one real sales or client call and one internal meeting that should be ignored. Then check the CRM record, the task list and the draft, not just the summary. Once that holds up, let Carly send the follow-up on its own.
Set up Carly for after-meeting follow-up
Paste this into Claude, ChatGPT or any AI agent. Start with one calendar, your CRM and one follow-up rule.
Help me set up Carly. I'll add it to you myself: tell me exactly what to click for the app you are, one step at a time, and wait for me to confirm before moving on. If you can do the setup yourself (Claude Code, Codex, Muse, Grok Bot), go ahead, and ask me for any key in your secure credential prompt, never in the chat. Once it's added, walk me through connecting my accounts, check it worked by listing every mailbox and calendar you can see through Carly, and ask what I want to hand off first. The steps are below.
# Connect Carly to an AI app
> Carly connects to thousands of apps, from Gmail, Outlook and calendars to Slack, HubSpot and QuickBooks, and keeps working after a chat is closed: answering email, booking meetings, following up and running workflows the moment something happens.
MCP server: https://carlyassistant.com/mcp/ (streamable HTTP, OAuth)
## Setup
1. Add the Carly plugin (some apps call it a connector):
- ChatGPT: open https://chatgpt.com/plugins/plugin_asdk_app_6a67a26316b88191860222f918d4ec54 (or open Plugins and search "Carly"), add it, and sign in.
- Claude (claude.ai, Claude Desktop, or Cowork): open https://claude.ai/directory/carly, click Connect, and sign in.
- Claude Code: `claude mcp add --transport http --scope user carly https://carlyassistant.com/mcp/`, then /mcp, pick carly, and authenticate.
- Codex: `codex mcp add carly --url https://carlyassistant.com/mcp/`, then `codex mcp login carly`.
- Cursor: add {"mcpServers": {"carly": {"url": "https://carlyassistant.com/mcp"}}} to ~/.cursor/mcp.json, then sign in to carly from Customize.
- Muse: a custom connector to https://carlyassistant.com/mcp/ with a Carly API key as its bearer token. The key comes from carlyassistant.com/account (API key under Carly) and goes in Muse's connector settings, not in a chat message.
- Grok: grok.com/connectors > New Connector > Custom, paste https://carlyassistant.com/mcp/, and sign in.
- Grok Bot: a custom remote MCP server named carly at https://carlyassistant.com/mcp. Approve it and sign in.
- Perplexity: Plugins in the sidebar (or Customize > Connectors), then Add custom > Connector > Add MCP connector. Choose Remote, name it Carly, paste https://carlyassistant.com/mcp/, pick OAuth, check the box and click Add, then click the Carly card to sign in.
- Anything else: a remote MCP server (streamable HTTP) named carly at https://carlyassistant.com/mcp/. It signs in with OAuth.
Sign in with a Carly account, or create one at carlyassistant.com.
2. Once it's added, Carly's tools show up in the chat. If they don't, turn Carly on for the chat or start a new chat.
3. Connect accounts at https://carlyassistant.com/integrations. Under Accounts, click Connect Google or Connect Microsoft, pick the account and grant everything it asks for. If the page shows an email field instead, type the address, click Add Email, click Connect Google or Connect Microsoft on the new address, then Connect with Google or Connect with Microsoft. For an address that is already connected, open Manage access and click Connect next to anything missing. Repeat for every account, then connect any other apps.
4. To check it worked, ask Carly to list every connected mailbox and calendar.
5. Something to hand off first: "Check all my inboxes for anything that needs a reply today."
## Business calls and texts
Business SMS, business phone calls, voicemail and a team's voice and text agents are a separate connector, Carly Teams, at https://carlyassistant.com/team/mcp. It needs membership of a Carly organization and its own connection. Its setup is https://carlyassistant.com/team/mcp.txt.Ready to automate your busywork?
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