Grain vs tl;dv
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
Still shortlisting? Browse the best in Conversation Intelligence and the best in AI Meeting Note Takers for every option we track, with award winners called out.
The short answer
Both sides assessedGrain compared with tl;dv
tl;dv is a meeting notetaker that grew a genuine coaching layer, and the two land at almost the same money: tl;dv Pro is about EUR 18 per seat on annual billing (EUR 29 monthly) against Grain Starter at about $15, and tl;dv Business at about EUR 29 annually (EUR 39 monthly) against Grain Business at about $29. Grain is the deeper conversation intelligence buy at that price: both bot and bot-less capture, transcription in 100-plus languages against tl;dv's 30-plus, talk-ratio interaction insights, free unlimited viewer seats for the whole company, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. tl;dv counters with playbook adherence scoring, which Grain does not attempt, multi-meeting AI reports delivered to an inbox, translation between languages, and euro invoicing from a German entity. Pick tl;dv if you are a European team that wants a local counterparty and reps scored against a defined playbook; pick Grain for the shared library, the clip workflow, and cheap company-wide access to calls.
tl;dv compared with Grain
Grain approaches from the conversation intelligence side and matches tl;dv almost dollar for euro: Starter at about $15 per seat annually against Pro at about EUR 18, and Business at about $29 against tl;dv Business at about EUR 29 on annual terms. Grain's advantages are structural: free unlimited viewer seats, so only recording reps pay while the whole company watches calls; a bot-less desktop capture mode tl;dv does not offer; 100-plus transcription languages against 30-plus; and the best clip and playlist workflow in either category, backed by native HubSpot and Salesforce sync on its Business tier. tl;dv answers with playbook adherence scoring, which Grain lacks entirely, recurring multi-meeting AI reports for product and marketing teams, transcript translation between languages, and a German entity with euro billing that EU procurement prefers. Choose Grain if coaching means a shared library, talk-ratio comparison, and cheap company-wide access; choose tl;dv if coaching means scoring reps against a defined sales process and mining the archive for cross-call insight.
Choose Grain if
Small and mid-sized sales teams, from two reps to about fifty, who want recorded calls, coaching clips, talk-time insight, and CRM sync without an annual contract or a procurement cycle, plus customer success and product teams who need to share evidence from customer conversations across the company.
Choose tl;dv if
European sales teams of roughly 3 to 50 people that want call recording, CRM logging, and genuine coaching analytics from a euro-billing vendor, plus product and marketing teams who want recurring reports mined from the whole call archive rather than one meeting at a time.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Grain | tl;dv |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Call Coaching | Meeting Notes |
| Starting price | $0 (Free, capped at 20 meetings), then about $15 per seat per month on Starter billed annually | EUR 0 (Free), then EUR 216 per seat per year for Pro (EUR 18 per month equivalent; EUR 29 billed monthly) |
| Pricing model | Per-recorded-seat subscription across four tiers with free unlimited viewer seats, billed monthly or annually, plus a meeting-count cap on the free plan only. | Freemium per-seat subscription, quoted in euros on the vendor's pricing page, with substantial annual discounts and a promoted 40 percent off annual plans. |
| Free plan | Free covers 20 meetings with AI notes and viewing of the team's meetings; free viewer seats cannot record, upload, or import. | Free forever with unlimited video recording and transcription for Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, email and calendar integrations, and the mobile app, with AI usage capped at 10 meetings with AI notes and 10 Ask AI queries. |
| Free trial | 14 days, plus a 30-day money-back guarantee on paid plans | Paid-plan trials are offered (length not published); the free plan needs no credit card |
| Best for | Small and mid-sized sales teams, from two reps to about fifty, who want recorded calls, coaching clips, talk-time insight, and CRM sync without an annual contract or a procurement cycle, plus customer success and product teams who need to share evidence from customer conversations across the company. | European sales teams of roughly 3 to 50 people that want call recording, CRM logging, and genuine coaching analytics from a euro-billing vendor, plus product and marketing teams who want recurring reports mined from the whole call archive rather than one meeting at a time. |
| Setup time | Under an hour. Connect the calendar, set a capture rule, invite the reps, and the next external meeting is recorded. CRM connection on Business adds maybe thirty minutes of field mapping. | Under fifteen minutes to start recording: sign up, connect a calendar, authorize the meeting platforms, and confirm which meetings to capture. Configuring summary templates, CRM field mapping, and playbook criteria takes a further half day if you want the coaching layer to be meaningful. |
| Learning curve | Low for reps, who mostly do nothing. Moderate for managers, because the value comes from building coaching playlists and reading interaction insights weekly, which is a habit rather than a feature. | Low for recording and reviewing, moderate for the coaching and reporting layer. Playbook adherence only works if someone first writes down what the playbook is, which is a sales-management task rather than a software one. |
| Platforms | Web app, macOS and Windows desktop apps for bot-less capture, Chrome extension, Mobile access, MCP server | Web app, Browser extension, iOS and Android apps, Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, EU AI Act compliant, No model training on customer calls |
| Founded | 2018 | 2020 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States | Aachen, Germany (tldx Solutions GmbH; fully remote team) |
| Ownership | Venture-backed | Venture-backed |
Strengths and limitations
Grain
Strengths
- Genuinely self-serve: published prices, a free tier, a 14-day trial, a money-back guarantee, and no mandatory annual contract, in a category where almost every competitor gates the number behind a demo.
- Supports both bot-based and bot-less capture, so the same account can record demos on video and capture sensitive calls without a visible notetaker.
- Free unlimited viewer seats make company-wide access to the call archive affordable, which is how conversation intelligence actually changes behavior outside the sales team.
- The clip and playlist model is the best-executed part of the product and remains the fastest way to turn a call into a coaching asset or a piece of internal evidence.
Limitations
- The free plan's 20-meeting cap makes it an extended demo, not a usable free tier, unlike Sybill's free plan or Fathom's unlimited recording.
- AI coaching and interaction insights sit on Business, so the coaching layer that justifies the category costs about double the entry price.
- No published weighted scorecard engine with custom rubric criteria; coaching is AI-generated commentary and aggregate insight rather than the structured scoring Avoma and Demodesk offer.
- No forecasting or deal board with pipeline risk scoring, so revenue leaders looking for the Gong or Clari feature set will find Grain incomplete.
tl;dv
Strengths
- Genuine sales coaching depth (playbook adherence, AI-selected clips, per-rep performance metrics) that the note-quality-focused competitors in this category do not attempt.
- Multi-meeting reporting is a real product rather than a search box: recurring custom AI reports, feature request tracking, and quote extraction across the whole archive.
- Strong multilingual handling for European teams, with 30-plus transcription languages plus translation of transcripts and summaries between them.
- Video and audio are retained as first-class artifacts, which makes tl;dv usable for onboarding and demo review in a way transcript-only tools cannot be.
Limitations
- Free-plan limits are documented inconsistently: the vendor's own feature pages imply unlimited recordings, transcriptions, and summaries while third-party reviews report a monthly AI summary cap, and that ambiguity is a poor look for a tool asking for calendar access.
- Monthly pricing is the highest in this comparison set at EUR 29 and EUR 39 per seat, so the product only reads as good value if you commit for a year.
- Bot-based recording only, with no silent local-capture mode, which rules it out for teams whose clients react badly to a visible notetaker.
- 30-plus languages is respectable but well behind Fireflies and Circleback, both of which advertise more than 100.
Pricing compared
Grain
Per-recorded-seat subscription across four tiers with free unlimited viewer seats, billed monthly or annually, plus a meeting-count cap on the free plan only.
- Free$0
- Starterabout $15
- Businessabout $29
- EnterpriseCustom
Grain is one of the two or three genuinely self-serve entry points into this category, and at roughly $15 to $29 per recording seat it undercuts Jiminny by a factor of three and Gong by considerably more. The free viewer seats matter more than most buyers realize: the practical cost of giving a whole company access to customer calls is the number of people who record, not the number who watch. What you give up is depth. There is no forecasting engine, no weighted scorecard rubric, and no deal board of the kind Sybill or Avoma's revenue intelligence add-on provide. For a team under about fifty reps that wants recording, coaching clips, talk-ratio visibility, and CRM sync, the capability per dollar is excellent. For a team that wants the pipeline inspected, it is the wrong purchase at any price.
tl;dv
Freemium per-seat subscription, quoted in euros on the vendor's pricing page, with substantial annual discounts and a promoted 40 percent off annual plans.
- FreeEUR 0
- ProEUR 29
- BusinessEUR 39
- EnterpriseCustom
On annual billing tl;dv is fairly priced: about EUR 18 a seat for custom AI prompts and CRM logging, and about EUR 29 a seat for coaching analytics and SSO, which is broadly in line with Fathom Business and cheaper than most dedicated revenue intelligence tools. On monthly billing it is the most expensive option in this set, which is a deliberate squeeze toward annual commitment and worth naming as such. The clearest value case is a European sales team that wants coaching plus euro billing in one purchase; the weakest is a solo user or a small non-sales team, who will find Granola or Fathom cheaper and simpler for the same core notes.
Editorial verdict on each
Grain
Ease of UseGrain is the easiest way for a small sales team to start doing conversation intelligence at all. You can sign up with a card, record every external call within an hour, and be running coaching sessions off real clips by the end of the week, for roughly what one rep's lunch budget costs. The free viewer seats are the underrated part: they make the call archive a company asset rather than a sales tool. Be clear about what you are not getting. There is no forecasting, no deal board, and no weighted scorecard rubric, so if the problem you are solving is pipeline inspection rather than rep development, Avoma with the revenue intelligence module or a genuine enterprise platform is the correct answer. But for the two-to-fifty-rep team that has never listened back to a single call, Grain is the right first purchase, and the coaching tier at about $29 a seat is one of the better deals in this category.
Read the full Grain profiletl;dv
tl;dv is the best answer in this category for a European sales team that wants recorded calls, CRM logging, and real coaching analytics without buying a revenue intelligence platform. Playbook adherence scoring and the multi-meeting reporting layer are meaningfully more than any pure notetaker offers, the euro billing and German entity remove procurement friction for EU buyers, and video retention makes it usable for rep onboarding. Two things hold it back: monthly pricing is the highest in this set, so the value case depends on an annual commitment, and the free-tier limits are documented inconsistently enough that you have to test them yourself. If you are not running a sales team, Granola and Fathom will give you better notes for less money.
Read the full tl;dv profileGrain profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; tl;dv last reviewed 2026-09-27. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
The best in Conversation Intelligence
16 trackedConversation intelligence platforms record sales calls, transcribe them, and analyze the content for coaching, deal risk, and competitive mentions, turning the call archive into a searchable and scoreable dataset.
Gong's feature list unbundled into modules a ten-person team can buy, from scheduling through coaching.
Most of Gong's job from $19 a seat, built by a nine-person bootstrapped company.
An AI assistant that fills the CRM after every call moved Sybill from notetaker to the fastest-spreading rep-side tool in the category.
Practice the call against an AI buyer before you burn a real prospect: a coaching mechanism nobody else in the category ships.
Connect a calendar, set a capture rule, and the next meeting records itself; reps do nothing and the free tier covers 20 meetings.
The best in AI Meeting Note Takers
23 trackedAI meeting note takers join calls to record, transcribe, and summarize them, turning conversations into searchable notes, action items, and CRM updates without anyone typing.
The broadest platform in meeting AI: transcription, search, AI apps, and integrations that reach every corner of the small-business stack.
A free plan with unlimited recording and transcription that forced every paid notetaker in the category to justify its price.
A ten-person team out-writing the funded competition on note quality, then automating what the notes say.
Abandoned the meeting bot entirely for a local notepad that finishes what you type, a mechanism the rest of the category is now copying.
A five minute Chrome extension install with no bot to whitelist, and notes open automatically in a post-call tab the moment you hang up.
Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between Grain and tl;dv?
tl;dv is a meeting notetaker that grew a genuine coaching layer, and the two land at almost the same money: tl;dv Pro is about EUR 18 per seat on annual billing (EUR 29 monthly) against Grain Starter at about $15, and tl;dv Business at about EUR 29 annually (EUR 39 monthly) against Grain Business at about $29. Grain is the deeper conversation intelligence buy at that price: both bot and bot-less capture, transcription in 100-plus languages against tl;dv's 30-plus, talk-ratio interaction insights, free unlimited viewer seats for the whole company, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. tl;dv counters with playbook adherence scoring, which Grain does not attempt, multi-meeting AI reports delivered to an inbox, translation between languages, and euro invoicing from a German entity. Pick tl;dv if you are a European team that wants a local counterparty and reps scored against a defined playbook; pick Grain for the shared library, the clip workflow, and cheap company-wide access to calls.
Is Grain or tl;dv cheaper?
Grain starts at $0 (Free, capped at 20 meetings), then about $15 per seat per month on Starter billed annually. tl;dv starts at EUR 0 (Free), then EUR 216 per seat per year for Pro (EUR 18 per month equivalent; EUR 29 billed monthly). The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. Grain pricing model: Per-recorded-seat subscription across four tiers with free unlimited viewer seats, billed monthly or annually, plus a meeting-count cap on the free plan only. tl;dv pricing model: Freemium per-seat subscription, quoted in euros on the vendor's pricing page, with substantial annual discounts and a promoted 40 percent off annual plans.
Does Grain or tl;dv have a free plan?
Grain has a free plan. Free covers 20 meetings with AI notes and viewing of the team's meetings; free viewer seats cannot record, upload, or import. Trial terms: 14 days, plus a 30-day money-back guarantee on paid plans. tl;dv has a free plan. Free forever with unlimited video recording and transcription for Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, email and calendar integrations, and the mobile app, with AI usage capped at 10 meetings with AI notes and 10 Ask AI queries. Trial terms: Paid-plan trials are offered (length not published); the free plan needs no credit card.
Who should choose Grain?
Small and mid-sized sales teams, from two reps to about fifty, who want recorded calls, coaching clips, talk-time insight, and CRM sync without an annual contract or a procurement cycle, plus customer success and product teams who need to share evidence from customer conversations across the company.
Who should choose tl;dv?
European sales teams of roughly 3 to 50 people that want call recording, CRM logging, and genuine coaching analytics from a euro-billing vendor, plus product and marketing teams who want recurring reports mined from the whole call archive rather than one meeting at a time.
What are the best alternatives to Grain and tl;dv?
SaaSTracker profiles 16 products in Conversation Intelligence. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Avoma (Category Leader), Rafiki (Best Value), Sybill (Momentum). SaaSTracker profiles 23 products in AI Meeting Note Takers. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Fireflies.ai (Category Leader), Fathom (Best Value), Circleback (Momentum). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
