Fellow vs Read AI
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentFellow compared with Read AI
Read AI leans on meeting analytics, engagement scoring, and cross-workspace search, and sends a bot. Fellow leans on the meeting itself: agendas before, structured capture during, tracked commitments after. Read gives you more telemetry about how meetings went; Fellow gives you more machinery for making them go better, plus compliance controls Read does not offer.
Choose Fellow if
Managers and teams that want meeting workflow rather than just transcription, and regulated organizations in finance, legal, or healthcare that need retention controls, redaction, information barriers, and auditable archiving alongside AI notes.
Choose Read AI if
Managers and distributed teams who want meeting notes plus a behavioural read on how meetings are going, organisations trying to reduce meeting load with data rather than opinion, and anyone who wants one search layer across calls, email, and chat rather than a notetaker alone.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Fellow | Read AI |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Meeting Notes | Meeting Notes |
| Starting price | $0 (Free), then $7 per user per month billed annually (Team) (free plan available) | $0 (Free), then $15 per user per month billed annually (Pro) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Freemium per-seat subscription metered by AI note and AI recording counts, with unlimited AI from the Business tier and a 10-user minimum on Enterprise. | Per-seat subscription metered by number of meeting transcripts on the free plan and by feature tier above it. Paid tiers are unlimited on transcripts but meter file uploads in credits per month. |
| Free plan | 5 AI notes and 5 AI recordings in total, not per month, plus audio and video uploads, summaries, transcription, action items, AskFellow, and Google Meet, Zoom, Teams, and Slack integrations. | Five meeting transcripts per month, plus unlimited enterprise search, summaries, the personalised meeting coach, basic integrations, 20-plus languages, and the mobile and desktop apps. |
| Free trial | No fixed-length trial is published; the free plan is the evaluation path but is capped at lifetime rather than monthly usage | No separate paid trial; the free plan is the evaluation path |
| Best for | Managers and teams that want meeting workflow rather than just transcription, and regulated organizations in finance, legal, or healthcare that need retention controls, redaction, information barriers, and auditable archiving alongside AI notes. | Managers and distributed teams who want meeting notes plus a behavioural read on how meetings are going, organisations trying to reduce meeting load with data rather than opinion, and anyone who wants one search layer across calls, email, and chat rather than a notetaker alone. |
| Setup time | Fifteen to thirty minutes for an individual: connect a calendar, install the desktop app if you want botless capture, and pick your default capture mode. A team rollout takes longer because agendas and one-on-one templates deserve configuration, and an Enterprise deployment with SSO, provisioning, retention policy, and redaction rules is a multi-week project with the vendor. | Ten minutes for meetings. Connect Google or Microsoft calendar, set whether the bot joins everything or only approved calls, and you are covered. Adding the Gmail extension and the Slack or Teams connectors takes another ten minutes each and is where most of the differentiated value sits. |
| Learning curve | Moderate, and higher than pure notetakers, because Fellow is two products stacked: a meeting workflow tool and an AI assistant. Teams that adopt only the AI half get a fine notetaker and wonder why they are paying for the rest. | Low mechanically, higher socially. Reading the reports takes no training. Deciding what to do about the fact that your colleague's engagement score is low, and whether to share those scores at all, is the part that requires actual thought before rollout. |
| Platforms | macOS desktop app, Windows desktop app, iOS, Android, Web, Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex | Web, macOS and Windows desktop apps, iOS, Android, Chrome extension for Gmail |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA, Global Relay archiving for SEC and FINRA record-keeping | SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA on the Enterprise+ tier only |
| Founded | 2017 | 2021 |
| Headquarters | Ottawa, Ontario, Canada | Seattle, Washington, United States |
| Ownership | Venture-backed | Venture-backed |
Strengths and limitations
Fellow
Strengths
- The only product in this batch that offers both bot-based and botless capture with the choice made per meeting, which resolves the client-call awkwardness without giving up proxy attendance.
- A genuine meeting workflow layer with collaborative agendas, one-on-one templates, and persistent action items, built over eight years rather than bolted on last quarter.
- Regulated-industry controls that nothing else here comes close to: zero-day retention, transcript redaction of MNPI and account numbers, information barriers, and Global Relay archiving.
- Conference-room speaker diarization, which is the scenario where system-audio-only competitors produce an unusable single-speaker transcript.
Limitations
- The free plan's 5 AI notes and 5 AI recordings are lifetime allowances, which is close to misleading and makes free evaluation genuinely difficult.
- The $7 Team tier's 10 AI notes and 10 AI recordings per user per month is a light allowance that most buyers will exhaust within two weeks.
- No published EU or regional data residency, which is a hard stop for European buyers regardless of how good the compliance tooling is.
- The regulated-industry features that most distinguish Fellow all sit at Enterprise with a 10-user minimum, excluding the small advisory firms that need them.
Read AI
Strengths
- Engagement, sentiment, and participation analytics are genuinely differentiated; no other product on this list measures how a meeting went rather than only what was said.
- The personalised meeting coach is available on the free plan and is the cheapest speaking-habit feedback loop available anywhere.
- Unlimited search across meetings, email, and chat together answers questions no meeting-only tool can answer, and it is included on the free tier.
- The free plan is generous on features and honest about its single limit, which is a better structure than a minute meter that quietly degrades.
Limitations
- Audio and video playback is locked to the $22.50 Enterprise tier, which is the single worst-value decision in the pricing table given how many competitors include recordings for less.
- Bot-based capture only, with a vendor-named participant visible in every call and no local silent capture path for confidential client conversations.
- Engagement and sentiment scoring applied to employees is culturally loaded; it can read as surveillance, and it needs a conversation with your team before it is switched on.
- Sentiment and engagement scores are inferred from behavioural signals and should be treated as directional, not as measurement; a quiet participant is not necessarily a disengaged one.
Pricing compared
Fellow
Freemium per-seat subscription metered by AI note and AI recording counts, with unlimited AI from the Business tier and a 10-user minimum on Enterprise.
- Free$0
- Team$7
- Business$15
- Enterprise$25
Fellow is priced sensibly if you buy the right tier and badly if you buy the cheap one. Model 20 meetings a week: roughly 80 a month, which blows past Team's 10-note ceiling on day three. That person needs Business at $15 per user per month annually, $180 a year per seat, with unlimited notes and recordings, org-wide templates, and real CRM integration. Against Granola Business at $14 and Tactiq Team at $16.67 that is competitively priced, and Fellow gives you an entire meeting workflow layer, both capture modes, mobile in-person recording, conference-room diarization, and 90-plus languages that neither competitor matches. Where the value gets genuinely strong is Enterprise at $25: zero-day retention, redaction, information barriers, and exam-ready audit export are worth several times that to a regulated firm, and the realistic alternative is not another notetaker but a bespoke compliance project. Just do not mistake the $7 tier for the product.
Read AI
Per-seat subscription metered by number of meeting transcripts on the free plan and by feature tier above it. Paid tiers are unlimited on transcripts but meter file uploads in credits per month.
- Free$0
- Pro$15
- Enterprise$22.50
- Enterprise+$29.75
Read AI is priced as an analytics product that includes notes, not as a notetaker. Someone in 20 meetings a week takes roughly 80 meetings a month, which burns the free plan's five transcripts in the first two days, so that person is on Pro at $15 per seat per month billed annually, about $180 a year, for unlimited transcripts, engagement analytics, premium integrations, and cross-source search. That is fair against Otter Business at $20 and Fireflies, particularly because the search across email and chat has no equivalent elsewhere. Where the value case breaks is recordings: needing playback pushes you to $22.50 a seat, which is more than Otter, more than Granola, more than Fireflies Business, and considerably more than Fathom, all of which give you recordings or notes cheaper. Buy Pro for the analytics. Do not buy Enterprise for the video.
Editorial verdict on each
Fellow
Fellow is the most complete product in this batch and the least fashionable, which is roughly the right description of a nine-year-old company selling to compliance officers. If your problem is meetings rather than transcripts, the agenda, one-on-one, and action item layer is worth more than any summarization improvement, and the per-meeting choice between bot and botless capture solves a problem the rest of the category makes you pick a side on. If you are a broker-dealer, an RIA, a law firm, or a healthcare provider, the zero-day retention, redaction, information barriers, and exam-ready audit export are genuinely unmatched here and make the $25 Enterprise tier a bargain against the alternative of doing it yourself. Two warnings. The free plan is a lifetime-capped trial and should not influence your evaluation, and the $7 Team tier's 10-note ceiling means the real price for a busy person is $15. And if you need EU data residency, Fellow cannot help you no matter how good its compliance tooling is.
Read the full Fellow profileRead AI
Read AI is the only product in this category that is genuinely about meetings rather than transcripts, and that is both its case and its risk. The engagement scoring, participation breakdowns, and speaker coaching answer a question no competitor asks, and the search layer spanning calls, email, and chat is a real capability nobody else on this list offers. Pro at $15 a seat billed annually is a defensible price for that, and the free plan is a fair way to try it. The two things to think hard about before buying are the pricing of recordings, which sit on a $22.50 tier when Fathom, Bluedot, and MeetGeek include them for far less, and the culture question, because measuring how engaged your colleagues appeared in a meeting is a management intervention dressed as a software feature. If you want that data and your team is comfortable with it, Read AI is worth the money. If you want a notetaker, buy a notetaker.
Read the full Read AI profileFellow profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Read AI last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.