Everyone's rushing to crown a "best" meeting assistant, especially for a Google Workspace shop of your size, and I'm here to pour some cold water on that. The real question isn't which shiny AI tool transcribes the best, it's which one you can actually live with—and escape from—in two years when the pricing model changes, the features get gutted, or a better option emerges. At 200 users, you're not buying a tool; you're entering a long-term strategic partnership with all its attendant risks.
Let's cut through the usual feature checklist. Yes, you need accurate transcription, Google Calendar integration, and action item extraction. Every major player promises that. What they don't advertise is the lock-in. MeetGeek, like many SaaS tools in this space, stores your meeting data on its platform. Your summaries, your transcripts, your insights—they become the sticky honey that makes switching later a monumental data migration headache. Have you looked at their data export capabilities? It's often a secondary thought, a CSV dump of metadata at best, not the full, structured record of your intellectual property. The total cost of ownership isn't just the per-user monthly fee multiplied by 200; it's the cost of the internal hours to manage yet another user directory, the security review for another API with broad calendar and drive permissions, and the future cost of extracting your data when you inevitably need to.
Speaking of permissions, for a Google Workspace integration to work, you're typically granting OAuth scopes like "read/write access to calendars" and often "read access to Google Drive." That's a significant attack surface. Has your security team audited the exact data flows and data retention policies of these assistants? Where is the audio processed? Where are the transcripts stored? Is the data used for model training? The answer is usually buried in the privacy policy, not the sales demo. For an enterprise of 200, this isn't trivial.
And then there's the "Google Workspace" assumption itself. It's a comfort, but it's also a trap. It makes you think the integration is seamless. What it often means is you're bypassing your own internal procurement and security standards because "it's just an add-on for Google." This is how shadow IT becomes sanctioned IT, and then you're left holding the bag when there's a data incident or a price hike. Before you even look at MeetGeek or its competitors, you should be evaluating whether a self-hosted, open-source transcription pipeline (think Whisper models, local processing) combined with internal note-taking protocols could solve 80% of your problem with 0% of the vendor risk. The other 20%—the fancy AI summaries—might not be worth the contractual and operational baggage you're taking on.
Just my two cents
Skeptic by default
I'm a junior ops manager at a 170-person tech consultancy, all on Google Workspace. We've been running Otter.ai and tested Fireflies for 6 months.
1. **Real enterprise pricing vs SMB price tag:** Fireflies lists $19/user/mo for the business plan, but for 200 seats you'd negotiate. At my last shop (150 users) they got it down to about $12. Otter's "Business" is $20, but they have a custom "Enterprise" tier that likely starts around $15/user/mo for your size.
2. **Google integration depth:** Both connect to Calendar. Fireflies wins on direct Google Meet recording; it auto-joins and records. Otter requires you to invite the Otter bot to each Meet, an extra step users forget.
3. **Data lock-in and export:** OP is right. Otter lets you export all transcripts as a zip of HTML/JSON files, which is messy but complete. Fireflies' bulk export is weaker; you get summaries and notes easily, but full audio/video requires a manual process per meeting or an API project.
4. **Where it breaks:** Otter's search is slow across 1000s of meetings. Fireflies' action item extraction is generic; it often creates "tasks" from casual comments.
Go with Otter if your main need is a structured, searchable archive of everything said. Pick Fireflies if automatic recording and catching every meeting is the non-negotiable goal. To decide, tell us if you need the meeting audio archive for compliance, and what your top user complaint is about meetings right now.