.webp)
.svg){kind=icon}
The AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings
Granola is a meeting recorder tool that doesn't require those annoying bots to join. In-fact the people you're on the call with don't even have to know you're using it.
Interestingly enough, this isn't any different than just having a note taker on the call, because they don't allow you to playback the audio. What you can do is ask Granola's AI Chatbot questions about the call, or any calls you've had across the company.
We make sure to always have Granola recording our meetings (even in-person team meetings and brainstorming meetings), even if we have one of the best meeting recorder bots joining the call as well. It's just a more lightweight solution that can't be kicked from calls and is less invasive.
-v2.webp)
Use AI to plan your work, automatically. Be 137% more productive. Use the AI assistant for busy people and work teams.
Motion (also often referred to as Use Motion and Motion App) is in a category of it's own that we've been referring to as time management…
Let me explain:
Motion's main goal is to take care of all of your team's needs revolving around time. If you're someone that wakes up in the morning and looks at their calendar app to see what you have on for the day, Motion App will fit in like a glove.
It connects in deeply with your Google Calendar, Microsoft Calendar, and even Apple Calendar, allowing you to build out project management and task management for yourself and team members. The best part is that all of these tasks automatically organize themselves based on priority right onto your calendar (and your team's) to ensure the most important (and blocking) tasks get done.
If you've heard of the productivity app terminology of "time blocking", well Motion does that automatically using AI, no manual time blocking needed.
It even goes to the degree of allowing you to share meeting scheduler links with others, all while respecting your existing events across all of your calendars (and even your team's calendars), along with automatically inviting team members into the appointment once booked.
With your entire team using Motion, it's like you have a full-time personal assistant shared across the company, ensuring that everyone is getting deep work done all while focusing on what is most important (at the most ideal time), all while making sure that no one is ever double-booked.
All of this makes for an incredibly powerful tool for individuals, but exponentially more valuable with every additional team member you add. No other project management or daily planner tool on the market seems to go to this degree.
As compared to some of the best project management software on the market often mentioned like Asana, Monday, ClickUp, Motion has taken their sights on slightly smaller teams of between 1–50 people.
This team size target is based on their current feature-set, from what we've seen. For example, the larger teams that we work with who have many layers of management often require reporting capabilities over everything else. And with Motion, that's not something you're going to get, because they are currently focused on giving the only AI project management tool on the market focused on helping the individual and teams, over the needs of upper-management.
So if you and your team are used to spending a lot of time planning deadlines, and rearranging your "My Task" view in the existing tools on the market, Motion flips this on it's head with the use of AI. Something to consider if you're fed up with the manual work involved with traditional project management tools.
-v2.webp)
Compared to the best daily planner apps on the market like Sunsama and Akiflow, Motion is the only daily planner we've seen that actually leverages AI to plan your day for you. With all of the other apps in the category, you need to manually drag in tasks to time block and plan each day. This is an incredibly time consuming process, that some justify as being "more mindful", but once you actually have AI schedule your day for you, you realize how much time is actually wasted "mindfully planning your day".
Compared to the best calendar schedulers on the market like Calendly and Chili Piper, Motion bakes in the core functionality of these tools, with the added visibility of team tasks and urgent deadlines, actually booking off availability for you and your team if high priority work needs to get done by a quickly approaching deadline.
Large teams (100–500) with other enterprise software implemented will find integrating Motion more involved than other enterprise tools. When using an enterprise software stack like that of Salesforce, it's common for other project management tools to have native integrations.
With Motion, it will require a custom integration approach (something that we actually help teams do). But while it's possible, one might ask if it's worth making the large investment in a custom integration when you might be able to get something more native out of the box with the other tools focused on larger teams.
(This of course depends on the actual integration needs of your team, as native doesn't always do exactly what you'd like it to do).
Motion currently lacks advanced reporting and dashboard functionality. So while you can see at a top-level the status of projects and tasks in Kanban and Listviews, even a team workload view, that's about where reporting dashboards end, making it less suitable for large teams requiring extensive project analytics.
Note: If you need 2 seats, you're pretty much better off getting the discount by purchasing 3 seats, as you're effectively getting a 3rd seat for free.
If all of that connects with you and you think it might fit your needs, they have a 7 day free trial that you can use along with your team to see what it's like having a personalized AI assistant.
Your meeting insights automated—the meeting recorder to understand & champion your users’ needs.
What we love most about tl;dv is that you can take all of your meeting notes directly from a floating pop-up right within the meeting you're in.
As you type the notes, tl;dv automatically timestamps your message and your entire team can also see the notes as they are being written.
No more do we need to find where to take collaborative call notes of which would otherwise not even be connected to the call recording itself.
All of the most important notes and timestamps are automatically sent to everyone on the call (or just your team), and they even have a nifty Slack integration as well.
We do wish it natively integrated with more CRMs though, but know the team is working on opening up the API to allow for it.
For teams of all sizes looking for a modern AI-powered work phone (call + SMS) that can be integrated with other tools.
Having used just about every single VoIP on the market over the past decade, Dialpad is the clear innovator in the space.
So much in-fact that I personally use Dialpad as my professional relationships number (work/angel investing/networking). This is because the mobile app actually feels like a modern SMS app, and is the most stable of the bunch.
The added perk is that I've integrated Dialpad with our CRM (Copper) so all texts and calls automatically log into the CRM (and even automatically create new leads in the CRM if the number doesn't yet exist in our CRM).
You'll see software like RingCentral (the 800lb gorilla in the space) claims to "integrate" with everything, but it doesn't integrate as you'd actually like it to (it's just marketing-speak), and the desktop + mobile apps are incredibly outdated on all fronts.
There's more modern VoIP solutions on the market like Aircall and JustCall, which do have better "native integrations", although they pale in comparison to the UI/UX of Dialpad + have no AI intelligence features like Dialpad does (sentiment analysis, AI call review, etc.).
If you're unable to justify the investment into a custom integration with Dialpad, you'll probably be better off with Aircall or JustCall. Although, if you're interested in using the best tool in the space (clear leader) and are open to investing in a proper integration with your CRM, Dialpad won't let you down.
Rating: B
Dialpad has invested a lot in the AI and sentiment analysis side of things, which makes it really stand of when comparing the top VoIP tools on the market.
When you move into the meeting side of things though, that's where Dialpad Meetings makes itself shown. The truth of the matter is that it's pretty great, and it's included in your subscription. The thing is, actually getting your team (and those you're meeting with) to all switch to Dialpad Meetings is the tough part. So when comparing Dialpad Meetings vs Google Meet for example, there's a ton of trade-offs.
In an odd way, Dialpad Meetings is a positive and negative to the "Features & Differentiation" category. In one part it's cool! In another part, it introduces confusion to anyone who is simply using Dialpad as their company VoIP. Should we also switch over our meetings? Well, the answer is probably no 😅 that said, we got into this more on the Dialpad Meetings page.
Rating: B-
Dialpad is in a bit of an odd boat here. They are quite selective about what apps they choose to build native integrations with, and you can't completely trust their site in determining if the integration exists. This at times makes us feel like they initially built the integration as an MVP v1 more for marketing purposes than anything (to be able to say "we integrate with this software" to check the box for a new buyer).
What we've seen though, is that integrations like their native Copper + Dialpad integration, while technically exists, it's incredibly buggy, doesn't do what you'd expect it to do (e.g. doesn't sync texts over to the CRM, just phone calls—any only sometimes). It also just doesn't work consistently.
So as much as Dialpad is our top pick when it comes to the best VoIP software category, we can't exactly recommend it when customers being asking us deeply about integration. Unless of course they are open to investing in the custom integration path, like the custom Copper + Dialpad integration that we built for ourselves and use.
Their API is decent, and they even have a Zapier connector (which we always appreciate), although it's quite complicated to get it to actually function how you'd like it to work.
Also, if you're hoping to trigger automatic SMS or MMS messages to send out via the API, look elsewhere. Dialpad is not trying to go down that path.
With all of that said, we recommend you check out Aircall if native integration is important to you, and more specifically checking out our Dialpad vs Aircall write-up to better understand the difference.
I will note that A2P (Application to Person) messaging is starting to get worse and worse. Dialpad and other VoIP services used to function more like P2P (Person to Person) messaging, but because businesses have taken advantage of this, carriers and the government have stepped in.
The result? A worse experience and higher costs for everyone. Dialpad now charges on-top of your monthly fee for sending messages (although they will cover the first 250 per user/mo), with stipulations (e.g. local SMS, not international or messaging an application—think Google 2FA codes, yep, those now charge you $0.01.
At the end of the day, SMS/MMS and traditional calling services suck, and are somehow just getting worse. How we're now moving backward to paying per SMS sent, when using just about any other messaging platform is free, is just baffling (not to mention the 30%+ in additional regulatory fees everything costs).
With all the regulatory frustrations, this does seem like it's hitting every business (A2P) VoIP provider, so we need to put this to the side when simply evaluating Dialpad vs the others mentioned.
If you need a VoIP in your business (you're calling customers/receiving calls or texts), then Dialpad is definitely one of the best solutions on the market.
With the regulatory downsides and paying per SMS sent, the upside is that using an A2P business VoIP tool, it enables API access, which allows you to do things like automatically logging SMS and calls + recordings into your CRM—something that will never exist when using a traditional P2P phone number.
We still continue using Dialpad here at Efficient App, as it is helpful to have a more work/business focused number for the occasional call with a customer and business-focused relationship tracking.
So if that's important to you, we recommend you give a business VoIP like Dialpad a shot. If you can get away with not using a phone service at your company, even better! Just don't let that happen if the alternative is your employees using their personal phone number at work. That is a regrettable decision 100% of the time.
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:
.webp)
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.
.webp)
Amie is a calendar app that helps you manage tasks and easily add emails as tasks to your calendar.
Amie has recently pivoted from a calendar/task/email app to a Meeting Recorder. Unlike other meeting recorder bots, Amie doesn't join the call as a bot, it just listens to your computer audio and microphone like that of Granola.
From there, it summarizes your meetings, creates tasks, and will even mock-up follow-up emails and send them off for you if you'd like.
It's like Googling Mid-Sentence: Cluely gives you the answers you didn’t study for in every conversation, without you even having to ask.
Cluely is just another AI chat wrapper as many others. The main differentiation is its ability to persist across calls and actively listen, while supplying recommended questions as the meeting goes on.
To explain this in a more tangible way, in comparing Cluely vs Granola (one of the best meeting recorder tools on the market), Granola ultimately sits in the background recording the call and only presents itself when a meeting is active. It then summarizes the transcript afterward and enriches any notes taken, allowing for perfect recollection of what was said in the conversation. Cluely on the other hand makes itself an active participant in the call.
For example, say you're on a call and the topic of another software product comes up, Cluely will begin recommending information to search that will give you more context without leaving the call:
The reality here is that it's no different than using the ChatGPT desktop app, pressing "CMD + Spacebar" and just writing a question. It's just that it's more preemptive taking the entire context of the call into consideration, and most specifically what was said in that moment to suggest showing information that might be relevant.
What they really do best is marketing via viral and rage-bait tactics. Trying to make their "hidden UI" and proactive prompting come off as being able to "cheat on everything". It's really just a feature decision, and creative messaging more than anything.
For teams of all sizes looking for a modern AI-powered work phone (call + SMS) that can be integrated with other tools.
I was actually one of a few people back in the day that tried to make the pivot from Google Meet and Zoom to Dialpad Meetings (formerly UberConference) happen.
The thing is, at the time, there was just too much friction trying to get people to use and accept Dialpad Meetings, because it's just different from what they are used to using (thank you inertia /sarcasm).
Dialpad Meetings is quite clean—we've always appreciated the simplicity it brings with it. I appreciate them coming at it with a more modern approach, but with that, comes more difficult user-adoption (unless you just copy Google Meet and Zoom identically).
This is where we've ran into the most struggles with Dialpad Meetings. It's just not familiar with most people when joining. They don't know where the screensharing icon is, along with everything else. It's just different from what people are used to. While this is normally fine and we don't want to be too negative on Dialpad Meetings for this point, the truth of the matter is they are just battling inertia (familiarity), and people just hate change when it comes to something they also dislike (Meetings) 😅
Dialpad Meetings doesn't have an API that we can connect into, so there's no current way to create custom integrations outside of what they list on their site (native integrations).
So say you want to create a meeting activity within your CRM (e.g. Copper), you can't do that without a meeting recorder tool that can join your meeting, like Fireflies. So the only way to really do this is to hand off the integration side of things to a meeting recorder tool that has deep integrations with CRMs.
What I did back in the day to get this working actually, was relying on Fireflies to join the call and be the native integration with the CRM. They do have a dedicated landing page for their integration with Dialpad Meetings, although it is still has the URL "uberconference". 😅
There are positives and negatives that come with this approach though.
So all-in-all, we know this isn't the most ideal thing to hear. Without Dialpad Meetings having a proper API though (or a native CRM integration), that's all we can really do here.
If the above is you, all I can say is we hear you... It's overwhelming, confusing, and we were going down this exact same rabbit hole 6+ years ago.
At the end of the day, we ultimately just decided to use Google Meet alongside tl;dv, as the native integration they have between eachother, alongside no longer having to fight the inertia (of people not wanting to try a "new" meeting tool), is where we ultimately found ourselves.
It's also more likely that tools will integrate natively with Google Meet and Zoom, especially because for some reason Dialpad Meetings is choosing to highly restrict their API for internal use only. 🤷
Never take meeting notes again. Get transcripts, automated summaries, action items, and chat with Otter to get answers from your meetings.
.svg){kind=logo}
.svg){kind=icon}
.jpg)
%20YouTube.webp)
.webp){kind=logo}
.webp)
.svg)
