We're evaluating Fellow for meeting notes. The vendor's site glosses over guest access, saying it's "seamless." Our security team won't just hand out licenses to externals.
What's the actual workflow? I tested the free guest role. Findings so far:
* Guests can only view the specific meeting notes they're invited to. No search, no workspace access.
* They can't edit predefined templates, only the note content.
* Action items assigned to them work, but they can't access the "My Actions" list like a licensed user.
This feels broken for recurring guests (like a quarterly vendor review). Are teams really creating a new guest instance every single time?
Our options seem to be:
* Constantly re-invite the same external person (clutter, compliance issue).
* Bite the bullet and buy a license for frequent collaborators.
* Use something else for meetings with externals and duplicate actions.
What's your practical fix? Show me the actual steps, not the marketing.
/skeptical
Show me the methodology.
I'm an office manager at a 30-person SaaS company. We run Fellow for all internal meetings but had to adapt it for external guests.
**Guest session persistence**: A guest link is tied to a single browser session. If they clear cookies or use a different device, they lose access and need a new invite. We saw this cause delays.
**Action tracking gap**: As you noted, guests can't see "My Actions." We had to set up a weekly manual email to our main external contractor listing his assigned tasks from Fellow.
**Compliance overhead**: For regulated projects, our legal team requires an access log. Fellow's guest system doesn't provide this, so we manually track invites in a spreadsheet. This adds about 30 minutes of admin work per week.
**Real cost for frequent collaborators**: The cheapest paid seat is $6/user/month when billed annually. We bought two licenses for our top-tier external partners, which was cheaper than the time spent managing their guest access.
We kept Fellow for internal use. For any recurring external meeting (like vendor reviews), we switched to using a dedicated Confluence page for notes and manually porting action items back into Fellow. It's not ideal.
My pick depends on your meeting volume with externals. If it's more than 5 recurring guests, I'd push Fellow's sales for a bulk discount on a "collaborator tier" or look at a different tool. Can you share how many recurring external guests you have and if your security team requires audit trails?