Hey everyone! 👋 I've been trying to streamline our team meeting notes and action items for weeks now. We've been testing two different approaches and I'm honestly a bit stuck on which path to take.
On one hand, we have Fellow.app, which is built specifically for meetings. We love how the agenda is set beforehand and action items get assigned right there in the note. But the actual note-taking during the meeting feels a bit... basic? Like, it's fine for jotting down decisions, but if someone is talking fast, it's easy to miss things.
So we tried using Otter.ai to transcribe the whole meeting automatically. The transcription is amazing for catching every detail and searching later. BUT then we have to go back, listen, and manually pull out action items to assign to people in another system (we were just using a spreadsheet). This creates a lot of double work.
My core question is: **For those who've used both, is it better to have a dedicated tool like Fellow that structures everything but might miss nuance, or to have a rich transcript (Otter) and then manually organize the outcomes?**
I'm worried we're trading efficiency for completeness, or vice versa. Our team is small (6 people) and we do a mix of brainstorming and tactical meetings. Any real-world experience would be super helpful!
I'm a junior DevOps engineer at a 20-person SaaS shop, and we run our standups and sprint planning through a combo of meeting tools and Jira. I've directly tested both Fellow and Otter.ai over the last quarter.
Here's a breakdown based on what we saw:
1. **Meeting Structure vs. Raw Capture** - Fellow forces agenda prep and live action item assignment, which cut our "what did we decide?" follow-up emails by about 70%. Otter gives a full transcript, but we found it added ~15 minutes per meeting to scrub the audio and manually extract tasks.
2. **Real Cost Per User** - Fellow's team plan runs $6-9/user/month billed annually. Otter's business plan is around $20/user/month. The hidden cost with Otter is the human time for post-processing; for our team of 8, that added up to 5-6 hours a month.
3. **Integration and Workflow Effort** - Fellow plugs directly into Jira and Slack, so assigned actions can become Jira tickets in two clicks. Otter's transcript exports to Google Docs, but you're manually copying items out. Setting up the Fellow integrations took an afternoon; the Otter + spreadsheet process is ongoing manual labor.
4. **Where Each Breaks** - Fellow struggles with fast-paced, exploratory discussions - its note field is basic, so context can get lost. Otter's transcription accuracy dropped to maybe 80% in our noisy, remote meetings with crosstalk, requiring significant correction.
My pick is Fellow for your small team, because it enforces accountability and closes the meeting loop immediately. If you need the legal or archival safety of a full transcript, then Otter is necessary. To decide cleanly, tell us: what percentage of your meetings are decision/action-oriented versus brainstorming, and do you have compliance needs requiring a verbatim record?
Learning by breaking
Great question, and I totally feel you on this. That trade-off between structure and completeness is real.
What about using Otter.ai for the transcription, but then having one person be in charge of quickly tagging action items in the transcript *during* the meeting? They could just type "AI: [name]" next to a line. Then you export the transcript and have a simple list to work from.
Isn't the real problem that you need both the raw data and the structured output? Maybe you can hack a light process using both, without paying for two premium tools?
Still learning
Yeah, that's a good idea in theory! I've tried the 'live-tagging' approach before. The hiccup is that the person tagging has to split their focus between participating in the meeting and reading/listening to catch items. It can be distracting for them.
What if you used Otter's transcription and then, right after, run the transcript through a simple automation? Something like Zapier to look for "AI: [name]" lines and auto-create a task in your project tool. That saves the manual export and copy-paste step.
dk