Curious how this app compares to others?
Welcome to your ultimate productivity stack guide!
If you're reading this guide, you:
What you won't find in this guide are general software recommendations with a bunch of tools that are 'trending' but we haven't actually used ourselves. This isn't another guide about all the productivity tools under the sun.
This guide is prescriptive and offers single tools to help you make essential business software decisions more quickly. The software below has been deeply vetted against competitors and all the below mentioned are used by us (we are paying customers).
Let's get into it! ⤵
Let's start with the portal to the internet: your browser.
For years, we used Chrome and the last thing we ever thought about needing was another browser. We have seen browser companies come and go with none on the market leaving much to be desired.
Then Arc by The Browser Company showed up. Arc is not just another browser. It's a workflow engine, offering an entirely new way to personalize the internet and make it your own.
The idea behind Arc is that no matter where you are in the world, no matter what device, you can log into your "portal to the internet" aka your browser and have it configured exactly like you left it.
The problem with Chrome, we learned, is that the creators had no reason to make the internet personal. This is because the creators want you to start from scratch every time you open the browser, searching Google for where you want to end up online. This is great for their ad revenue business model.
It wasn't until we started using Arc that we realized how often we really were unnecessarily going to Google to just open up the programs we use on a daily basis.
The difference with Arc is that the team has totally rethought the bookmarks and the "tab experience", along with introducing a feature called "Spaces". Spaces allow you to stay focused and easily segment your personal and work life while easily organizing tabs are important to you in folders.
For example, set up a personal space, favorite your YouTube, Spotify, WhatsApp, and Gmail tabs—from there, they function like mini apps. Now, with the swipe of 2 fingers, you're in your work space. All of your favorite apps are swapped out with your work apps, and you're logged into all of your work accounts:
This is like organizing a drawer. You put everything in its place, and hours later when you return, everything is as you left it. No more "searching" every time you want to use the internet. This has tremendously reduced fatigue (we didn't even realize we had) when using the internet.
If you're intrigued, want to know more, and see more of the features/benefits in GIF format, go check out this article where we've done a deep dive on why we think Arc is the future of the internet.
Sign up for Arc For Free (MacOS only, Windows coming soon!)
Now that you've enhanced your browsing experience, let's move onto your email. Meet Superhuman. Superhuman is a paid email client tool that is designed to make your email experience faster and more enjoyable.
But wait, you might be thinking why pay for your email when you can use any email client for free? 🤔
"Making email suck less" is Superhuman’s business mission. And remember — this guide is for the folks who want the best of the best—and Superhuman is a tool that after using for several years, we can't live without.
Prior to Superhuman we were using Gmail. And Gmail is great as a free email sending tool, but once we tried Superhuman we found it made the entire "checking and answering emails" experience way more enjoyable—and fast.
Not kidding, you know those 3-5 seconds you often need to wait for Gmail to load—yeah, Superhuman is literally instant. Want to write an email? Open Superhuman and press [c] and you'll be in a compose window a solid 2 seconds before Gmail loads.
Superhuman allows you to triage through your inbox using only keyboard shortcuts and the app on the phone is also super sleek and fast. Set reminders to be returned on your emails if someone hasn't responded, mark messages as done with hitting a button and label messages with ease. Since we started using Superhuman, we see inbox 0 way more often.
In summary, if you’re on email A LOT and want to optimize for enjoyment/ease/speed, Superhuman is 100% worth it. We’ve been paying for it for years and can't see life without it It's thoughtful, fast, and powerful. The way email should have been.
Click here to get a free Superhuman trial (get 30 days free).
On the topic of email, Mailman is a Gmail plugin that allows you to control when and what emails should land in your inbox.
You can set the times you'd like Mailman to deliver your emails (say at 9 am and 4 pm daily) so that you are not constantly interrupted by a new emails coming in.
Waiting on an urgent email? You can tell Mailman to only allow the email from that specific sender.
Mailman is that cherry on top of email if you're looking to optimize your email experience and create more blocks of focus time in your day.
Click here to sign up for Mailman.
If you've hung around our website long enough, you'll know we 🫶 Motion. And that's because it's changed the way we managed our meetings, time and projects — and this cannot be ignored.
We think of Motion as the ultimate platform for time management. Motion is a calendar, a meeting scheduler, and a task/project manager all in one. On top of this, it uses AI to help plan your day (as if you had a personal assistant on hand).
Here's how it works:
For example, let's say you have three hour-long meetings scheduled for Monday. You also have some other tasks that you need to get done that day. If something urgent comes up and you need to add an ASAP task, Motion will automatically rearrange your day and push the other tasks back. This way, you can always be sure that you're working on the most important tasks first.
There are so many other calendar and project management tools on the market and we find that Motion to be the best that we've evaluated. It's also helped us replace numerous tools. For example, we went from using four tools, Google Calendar, Chili Piper (call scheduling), TickTick (personal task management), Asana (project management) to using just Motion to manage all of the above.
For teams of all sizes, drowning in Slack notifications? Use Dispatch to get 2x more done in Slack.
Dispatch was one of those apps that I didn't even think to look for because I never thought I needed it. Until I used it...
Let's be real, Slack is an overwhelming mess. You get mentioned all the time, have tons of DMs, while channels are just popping off left and right at all hours of the day.
So what do you do? You start muting all of the channels, and then you start missing everything. What if you could set simple filters which split your inbox to "Important" and "Other", all while all useless messages got auto-read (archived)?
That's Dispatch. It allows you to work through your Slack environment like email: [e] to archive messages, [h] to snooze them for later. Within the first minute of using it, you'll be wondering why Slack wasn't just built like this from the get-go.
It's like Superhuman for Slack (genuinely, if you're using Superhuman and not Dispatch—go and give it a whirl right now, you'll never be able to go back):
It also has super powerful team collaboration features. Have a shared Slack channel? Cool, @mention your team members and have private side comment threads without the external team members ever knowing.
If you're in any way trying to use Slack for internal or external support (inviting customers/clients), then you must be using Dispatch. Slack wasn't built for that. Dispatch was. Few apps have I actually bought the annual subscription so quickly (within 3 days). It's just magical.
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
Get 50% off for the first 3 months (for 2+ seats) and free white glove onboarding. After you've created your account, email [email protected] with the subject line "Efficient" and they'll apply the discount.
Fireflies helps your team transcribe, summarize, search, and analyze voice conversations.
Fireflies was actually one of the first meeting recorder solutions on the market. They managed to build remote tooling that would actually join in existing meetings, like in Google Meet or Zoom, act like a guest, and record the audio.
This was super impressive, back when online video conferencing software was more restrictive, and Google Meet for example didn't even have native video meeting recorder functionality.
We actually used Fireflies almost exclusively for years, super early days back in 2017, and it has come a long way since, moving more into that of a AI meeting assistant.
This is an area where Fireflies really excels, although is the core piece that we think also bites them a bit. Fireflies has a lot of features. Especially with the launch of AI (OpenAI) being integrated with everything, came a whole myriad of features.
When every meeting recorder on the market is flocking to AI, Fireflies is like:
"How can we add that and many different spins on it to differentiate?"
While we appreciate that in theory, it does come at a point of overwhelm. What we find actually missing from Fireflies is actually simplicity. Do more with less. So while we are rating them high in this category, we don't necessarily mean it in a good way per-say.
They've built out a unique feature-set around being able to create snippets of calls, and tag them to a specific playlist, to then reference later or share with your team or others:
It's a really cool idea, it's just in practice, how often will you really be using it? I could see this being more useful for very specific industry verticals or teams, but not most, and not in the way we use a meeting recorder tool in our day-to-day.
All-in-all, they give you a lot of tools to organize your online meetings. But that's where I sorta wish I could just do less. I'm already organizing so many other facets to my life, from file storage in Google Drive, to channels and notes in Slite. I really just want to record meetings, have them log to my CRM, and forget about them unless I need to reference them.
Thing is, if you aren't staying on-top of organizing your calls though, it almost feels like you're just not taking full advantage of what Fireflies has built, which honestly stresses me out. 😅
Fireflies is pretty clean overall—it looks decently nice, it's just that there's a lot vying for your attention even just on the call review page:
Do you view the AI summary? Create Soundbites? Maybe AskFred? Or a Smart Search? Maybe you just want to make a comment? 🤷
It's just a bit overwhelming until you get used to the interface, but overall design-wise, it is clean.
This is actually what frustrates us most about Fireflies. There's a lot going on. With all of their features, they have a lot vying for your attention, and with many features, also comes miscellaneous bugs.
Even in just trying to create a soundbite clip, I couldn't for the life of me get it to actually play the sound when selecting a small 2 minute clip in the middle of a 2 hour call:
Will they fix this? Of course, although point being—build some stability into your core features before introducing new ones.
This is the recurring theme that we've experienced with Fireflies over the years. I'm saying 5–6 years now. So it's not just a one-off thing, it's pretty core, meaning there's likely a bit of tech debt and feature rushing which is affecting their end-user UX. They just keep adding more, but when simply trying to do the basic things, we find ourselves fighting with the software to make things happen.
This is an area that we really have to hand it to Fireflies—they have focused on integrations quite deeply out of the gate. For example, they integrate with most of the best CRM tools on the market.
They integrated with the usual suspects out of the gate back in the day, from HubSpot to Salesforce, and when reaching out and asking about integrating with Copper, they said "sure!" and a week later, it was built 🤯
So while we counted earlier in the UX area, feature bulk as a negative, this is the area that the speed at which the team does release features is appreciated. They aren't afraid to push a feature or integration live, even if it's only 70% there, which sometimes is okay. 🤷
Their pricing tiers are pretty standard when compared to the best meeting recorder software on the market. If you're looking for free meeting recording software, Fireflies does have that, although what you'll get is incredibly limited at just 3 transcription credits, and 800 total minutes of storage per seat, and audio only at that.
Want any integrations at all, and you'll have to move to the paid Pro tier at $18/user/mo, for which has a pre-set 8,000 minutes of storage, and still no video recording functionality.
So if you do the math and are recording about 30 calls per month (assuming that some days are 0 while others are 3–4), the middle tier will get you about 4–5 months of storage before you're forced to move to the highest tier without losing historical recordings.
This is where they really ultimately force you to move to the highest tier with any meaningful usage. Not to mention, if you, like us, need video recording (which genuinely feels table-stakes when it comes to software that can record online meetings), well, you're going to be immediately on the highest tier right out of the gate. A bit steep with a lot of pressure to upgrade to the annual tier due to the discount on that.
When comparing Fireflies vs tl;dv for example, you'll see that you actually get full video recording and storage for free, you're just giving up some of the summarization features unless you pay. Fireflies, gate keeps not only the AI features, but also video recording features, allowing you to only get basic audio recording on the free tier, and super limited at that.
This is just where we feel like Fireflies has one of the more strict usage models as it relates to pricing. If you use Fireflies over time, you're going to be on their highest tier, guaranteed.
While Fireflies was quick on the scene when it came to recording the audio to meetings, they were laggards when it came to actually recording the video as well. This is actually the main reason that we left Fireflies and moved to tl;dv ourselves a couple years back.
tl;dv on the other hand started out of the gate focusing on being video recording software out of the gate. And for a company like ours, where we're often screensharing important information over video calls with customers and others, and needing to reference the screen recordings at a later time, that's where other tools excelled over Fireflies.
You genuinely can't go wrong here—the only wrong solution is probably not using a video meeting recorder tool. You have your pick from tl;dv, Fireflies, Grain, and others.
The only other thought is to probably select a recording option that allows you to record Google Meet and Zoom calls. Other online meeting recording software like Dialpad Meetings for example have similar functionality, although it actually requires that you fully switch all of your internal and external meetings to that of Dialpad Meetings. This is a complete operational change that may introduce a bit too much friction for your team or clients, so just be forewarned.
If you want video conference recording software that goes to the depths of sentiment analysis, allows for deep organization of snippets, and has focused most of their resources on the audio side of things, Fireflies definitely wouldn't be a bad option.
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
Sidekick makes the Internet distraction-free. It speeds up your workflow and protects against attention killers
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!