I’ve been evaluating Fellow for my team’s meeting hygiene, and I keep hitting the same wall. For a tool that positions itself as the central hub for meetings, the lack of true real-time co-editing is baffling. We’re talking about a feature that’s table stakes in Google Docs, Notion, and even legacy tools from a decade ago.
Yet here we are, with a "collaborative" agenda tool where you have to click "sync" or refresh the page to see others' updates. I watched two team members last week try to brainstorm talking points in a pre-meeting doc, and it descended into a farce of "did you save?" and version confusion. So much for streamlining the workflow.
Their support article on this essentially says it's "asynchronous by design." That’s a generous way of saying it doesn't have the feature. When you’re paying a premium per-seat price, you expect real-time collaboration, not a shared notepad that works like it's 2005.
I’m curious what the rationale is here. Is it a technical debt issue? A conscious product choice to avoid becoming a document editor? Either way, it’s a glaring omission that forces teams to maintain a separate real-time doc (back to Google Docs, I guess) and then copy-paste into Fellow, which completely defeats the purpose of centralization.
The vendor narrative is all about collaboration, but the product feels like a solo note-taker with some sharing buttons bolted on. For a tool that wants to own the meeting workflow, this is a pretty fundamental miss.
— skeptical but fair