| Functionality | 8 <p>Grain is well-rounded, offering all the functionality you'd expect from an AI notetaker. It simplifies managing your team, upcoming meetings, summary templates, playback, finding and organizing meeting information, and sharing with participants and team members. Every feature is carefully chosen, with no unnecessary functionality added.</p><p>The only notable missing feature is insights spanning multiple meetings.</p> | 7 <p>Read’s functionality focuses on speech analysis, offering tools to evaluate engagement and the impact of speech on others. It provides great summaries across multiple conversations to keep you informed. However, it lacks options to customise AI insights or edit key moments in meetings, and there is no AI assistant to answer questions or expand on specific insights.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 9 <p>Setting up with Grain is extremely easy, and its core functionality is intuitive. Users can choose how deeply they want to engage with the platform. If they stick to the core features, they won’t be overwhelmed by additional functionality, as advanced features are typically well-hidden in settings and can be accessed only when needed.</p> | 5 <p>Read has a high learning curve, largely due to its extensive speech analysis tools and unique suggestions, such as recommending meeting skips or removing low-contributing participants. It can take time to get used to the navigation, particularly if you prefer simpler, more condensed summaries.</p> |
| Look and feel | 9 <p>Grain is exceptionally polished, offering rich functionality without overwhelming the interface with unnecessary detail. Finding what you need is easy thanks to its powerful search. Within meetings, you can view the recording and notes in three templates, each designed for:</p><ul><li>Reviewing calls and coaching</li><li>Navigating and searching calls</li><li>Creating clips</li></ul><p>There’s a good balance between quick-access features and more advanced settings, with only essential elements displayed on the page. Even the AI assistant is tucked behind a button that opens a pop-up when pressed, keeping the interface streamlined overall.</p> | 4 <p>Read's interface is modern but somewhat overloaded with features, similar to Fathom. Information is duplicated in the report, such as action items appearing in both the notes on the left and the highlights on the right. During testing, we found ourselves frequently scrolling between sections, whereas other AI notetakers use better design and spacing to present information more clearly.</p> |
| Customisability | 9 <p>Grain is highly customizable at every stage, including:</p><ul><li>Fully editable transcripts, both in text and speakers.</li><li>Notes that can be regenerated with a different template, and the ability to create custom templates. AI assistant answers can be added to notes and templates with a single click.</li><li>Comments can be left on notes, and highlights can be created, with both displayed separately.</li><li>Clips can be merged into stories, and meetings can be grouped into playlists.</li><li>Tags can be added to meetings, and custom trackers set up to track specific topics—by both single words and multi-word phrases.</li><li>Custom words can be added for improved recognition in transcripts.</li></ul> | 3 <p>Read offers many AI insights, but customisation options are limited. You can't modify the template for summaries, action items, or key questions, and the trailer/highlights generated for meeting recordings can't be customised. Even the tags on reports are limited to a selection of auto-generated options.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 8 <p>Self-serve, no sales calls. Handful of note templates with guided input creation for sections. Basic setup takes 10-15 minutes. Advanced workflows via Zapier take 30-40 minutes because there is a rich library of predefined templates.</p> | 6 <p>Self-serve, no sales calls. Provides AI insights but no custom note templates. Basic setup takes 10-15 minutes. Advanced workflows require Zapier but lack a rich library of Zapier templates, taking 1-2 hours.</p> |
| Customer Support | 8 <p>You can book a live demo, and there’s a Guides & Resources page with over 100 articles.</p><p>Additionally, in-app chat support is available, with human agents typically responding within a few minutes.</p> | 5 <p>A contact form is available on their page, along with a searchable FAQ section. Usual replies are within 24 hours.</p> |
| Integratability | 9 <p>Grain integrates with most major software and offers ready-made, tested Zapier templates for Notion, Google Drive, Cardinal, Trello, and others.</p><p>The app features a native "Deals" section that lets you track deal status, risks, and momentum in one place when connected to HubSpot.</p><p>Recordings, transcripts, notes, and meeting metadata can also be integrated with any platform via the Grain API.</p> | 8 <p>Integrates with a wide range of popular tools like Google Calendar, Slack, and Zoom, though some advanced integrations (Jira, HubSpot etc.) require premium plans.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 10 <p>Meeting recaps can be automatically shared with workspace members, participants from your team domain(s) or all meeting participants.</p><p>Individual meetings can be shared via a link, with access revocable at any time. You can also include a description and start the meeting at a selected timestamp.</p><p>Clips from the meeting can be added to a story and shared together. Additionally, there’s an option to copy the embed iframe. The meeting recording can be downloaded, and the transcript can be exported in .pdf, .srt, .vtt, or .docx format.</p> | 9 <p>Read AI offers various options to share meeting recordings and notes, including downloading the summary or transcript (both in .txt), the full video, or auto-generated trailer/highlights (all in .mp4). It also provides quick share buttons for integrations like Notion, Slack, and more. Meeting reports can be shared via link or email, with access control options.</p> |
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