Grain

Name: Grain
Brand: Grain
Price: 02015 USD

Call recording and coaching that a five-person sales team can actually afford

Grain is a conversation intelligence platform that records, transcribes, and analyzes sales calls, then turns the archive into coaching material and CRM data; it captures meetings either with a bot or bot-lessly from the desktop app, produces AI notes and shareable clips, scores team performance with interaction insights and AI coaching, and syncs meeting fields into HubSpot and Salesforce, with published self-serve pricing that starts free and reaches team functionality at $15 per seat per month.

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Overview

Grain was founded in 2018 in San Francisco by brothers Mike and Jake Adams, and it started life as a clip-sharing tool for video calls: the pitch was that the memorable thirty seconds of a customer interview should be as easy to share as a tweet. That heritage still shows in the product, because Grain's clip and playlist model is better than most of the category, and it is the reason product and research teams adopted it before sales teams did.

The company has since repositioned squarely at revenue teams. The modern product records calls, transcribes them in more than 100 languages, produces AI notes against custom prompts and templates, and layers team performance insights, AI coaching, and CRM field sync on top. Grain now supports both capture modes, a bot that joins the meeting and a bot-less desktop path, which matters more in this category than it does in note taking, because a recorded call is the raw material for everything downstream and some prospects will not consent to a visible bot.

What separates Grain from the enterprise incumbents is that you can buy it with a credit card. Gong, Chorus, Clari Copilot, and Jiminny all route you into a demo cycle, an annual contract, and often a setup fee. Grain publishes a price list, offers a free tier capped at 20 meetings, runs a 14-day trial, and adds a 30-day money-back guarantee on paid plans. Starter lands at roughly $15 per seat per month billed annually and Business at roughly $29, which puts a full coaching stack inside the budget of a team that could not get Jiminny on the phone.

The caveats are real. Free viewer seats exist, so only recording users are billed, but the free plan's 20-meeting ceiling is a demo rather than a workable free tier for a working rep. The deepest analytics, the AI coaching layer, and the Salesforce and HubSpot connectors sit on Business, and Enterprise requires the whole workspace to move to Enterprise. Judged against Gong it is a lighter product; judged against a spreadsheet of call notes, which is what most small sales teams actually have, it is transformative.

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.

Not the right fit for

Enterprise revenue organizations that need forecasting, deal boards with pipeline risk scoring, and methodology enforcement across hundreds of reps; Grain is a coaching and capture tool, not a forecast system, and Gong or Clari exist for a reason.
Teams whose call volume is outbound cold calling through a dialer at hundreds of dials a day; Grain is built around scheduled meetings, and a dialer-native coach like Trellus fits that motion better.
Buyers who want a genuinely usable free plan; 20 meetings is a trial in disguise, and a working account executive burns through it in a fortnight.
Companies with hard EU or UK data residency requirements, since Grain does not advertise regional hosting the way an EU-native vendor like Demodesk does.
Anyone who wants deep custom scorecards with weighted criteria and rubric-level rigor out of the box; Grain's coaching is AI-generated feedback and interaction insight rather than a full scorecard engine of the Avoma or Demodesk kind.

How it works

1
You connect your calendar and choose a capture rule: send a bot to external meetings only, record everything, or capture bot-lessly from the desktop app so nothing appears in the participant list. Grain covers Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, and the desktop path picks up dialer calls and in-person conversations that a bot cannot reach.
2
After the call, Grain transcribes with speaker separation, generates AI notes against whichever template or custom prompt you assigned to that meeting type, and extracts action items. The transcript is the searchable object: you can query across the whole library and get answers with citations back to the timestamp where a customer actually said the thing.
3
Managers work from the insights layer rather than from individual recordings. Team performance and interaction insights surface talk ratios and engagement patterns across reps, AI coaching flags what a specific call did well or badly, and clips let a manager cut the ninety seconds where a rep fumbled a pricing objection and drop it into a coaching playlist that new hires watch during ramp.
4
The output flows outward. Meeting summaries and fields sync into HubSpot or Salesforce so the CRM record reflects what was said, Slack gets the recap, Zapier covers everything else, and an API plus an MCP server lets Claude, ChatGPT, and other assistants read the meeting library directly instead of you pasting transcripts around.

Feature breakdown

29 features in 5 modules

Capture

Both recording modes, which is unusual at this price.

Bot-based meeting recording: A Grain notetaker joins Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams calls and records video and audio, which is the mode you want when the call is a demo you will replay for training.
Bot-less desktop capture: The desktop app records system audio without a visible participant, so client-facing calls and conversations where a bot would be awkward still land in the library.
Automated capture rules: Set policy centrally: record external meetings only, skip internal ones, or capture everything, so reps are not deciding call by call whether the manager gets to see it.
Recording uploads and imports: Existing audio and video files can be uploaded into the library so calls captured elsewhere still get transcribed and analyzed. Free viewer seats cannot upload or import.
Transcription in 100-plus languages: Speaker-separated transcripts across a wide language set, which matters for teams selling into more than one region.

AI notes and search

The layer reps interact with daily.

Automatic AI notes and summaries: Every recorded call produces structured notes and a summary without anyone pressing a button, available from the free tier.
Custom note templates: Discovery, demo, renewal, and QBR calls can each produce a different output shape; templates unlock on Starter.
Custom AI prompts: Beyond templates, you can specify your own prompt so the summary answers the questions your sales process actually cares about. A Starter feature.
Action item extraction: Commitments and next steps are pulled out separately from the narrative so follow-up does not depend on rep memory.
Ask anything across the library: Query the whole meeting archive conversationally and get answers with citations back to the specific timestamp, which is what makes the archive worth keeping.
AI follow-up emails: Drafts a recap email from the call; custom follow-up email generation is a Business-tier feature.

Coaching and team analytics

The reason a manager buys this rather than a note taker.

Team performance insights: Rollups across reps rather than per-call views, so a manager can see who is trending in the wrong direction without watching every recording. Available from Starter.
Team interaction insights: Talk ratio and engagement patterns compared across the team, which is the metric most commonly used to catch a rep who is presenting rather than discovering. A Business feature.
AI coaching: Automated feedback on what a call did well and badly, delivered per rep rather than requiring a manager to listen. Business tier.
Clips and highlights: Cut the thirty seconds that matter and share it as a link; this was Grain's original product and it is still better than most competitors' version of it.
Coaching playlists and projects: Group clips into themed collections, so a new hire's first week is a playlist of real objection handling rather than a slide deck.
Comments and reactions on recordings: Timestamped feedback on a specific moment, so coaching happens in the artifact rather than in a separate document.

CRM and workflow

Getting the conversation out of Grain and into the systems of record.

HubSpot and Salesforce sync: Meeting summaries and data write back to the CRM record so activity logging stops being manual. Both connectors sit on the Business tier.
Slack delivery: Recaps, clips, and alerts route into channels so the team sees the call without opening another tool.
Automatic team sharing: Teams rules share recordings with the right group automatically rather than depending on a rep remembering to post the link.
Zapier: Covers workflows outside the native connector list, including pushing recaps into project or ticketing tools.
API access: A public API for pulling recordings, transcripts, and metadata into internal systems or a data warehouse.
MCP server: Grain exposes an MCP endpoint so Claude, ChatGPT, and other assistants can read the meeting library directly, which is a genuinely modern touch in a category still emailing PDF reports.

Administration, seats, and security

How the bill is calculated and who can see what.

Free viewer seats: Only users who record are paid seats; viewers can watch, comment, and search without a licence, which materially lowers the real cost for a company that wants the whole team reading calls.
Per recorded user pricing: The seat meter counts people who record, not headcount, so a five-rep team inside a forty-person company pays for five.
Sharing and permission controls: Recordings can be kept private, shared with a team, or shared externally by link, with admin controls on the higher tiers.
Recording consent notice: The bot's presence in the participant list is itself the disclosure in bot mode; in bot-less mode the obligation to announce recording falls on you, which matters in two-party-consent states.
SOC 2 and GDPR posture: Grain publishes SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliance material, with a security page covering encryption in transit and at rest.
Enterprise administration: SSO and advanced admin controls sit on Enterprise, which requires every seat in the workspace to be on the Enterprise plan rather than mixing tiers.

Use cases

4 documented

Sales manager with four reps and no coaching system

Deals are lost and nobody can say why, because the manager sat in on maybe one call in ten and the CRM notes say things like 'good call, sending pricing'.

Automated capture puts every external call in the library, interaction insights flag the rep whose talk ratio is 78 percent, and a coaching playlist of three real objection-handling clips replaces the weekly meeting where everyone described their calls from memory.

Founder still doing most of the selling

The founder runs discovery, demos, and negotiation, and the first sales hire has no idea how any of it sounds.

Grain records everything the founder does, clips of the best moments become the onboarding curriculum, and the new rep's own calls get AI coaching feedback without the founder having to listen to all of them.

Customer success lead who needs product to hear the customer

Churn reasons and feature requests live in CS heads, and the product team discounts secondhand reports of what customers said.

Clips of customers describing the problem in their own words go into Slack and a shared project, free viewer seats let the whole product team watch without buying licences, and the argument moves from opinion to evidence.

RevOps admin fixing CRM hygiene

Activity logging is incomplete, next steps are missing on half the open opportunities, and the pipeline review runs on stale data.

Business-tier HubSpot or Salesforce sync writes summaries and fields back automatically, Zapier handles the edge cases, and the API pulls transcript data into the warehouse for win-loss analysis.

Pricing

from $0 (Free, capped at 20 meetings), then about $15 per seat per month on Starter billed annually

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.

Plan	Price	Includes
Free	$0 per seat per month	20 meetings AI notes and summaries Recording, transcription, and clips View the team's meetings Free viewer seats for non-recording users Useful for evaluating the product, not for running on. A working rep exhausts 20 meetings in about two weeks.
Starter	about $15 per seat per month, billed annually	Everything in Free with unlimited meetings Custom AI prompts Custom note templates Team performance insights Higher monthly rate if not billed annually The tier most small teams should start on; it removes the meeting cap and adds the first layer of manager visibility.
Business	about $29 per seat per month, billed annually	Everything in Starter AI coaching Team interaction insights including talk ratio comparisons Custom AI follow-up emails HubSpot and Salesforce integrations and priority support The real conversation intelligence tier. If you are buying Grain to coach or to sync the CRM, this is the line item.
Enterprise	Custom quote	Everything in Business SSO and advanced admin controls Security review and custom terms Dedicated support All seats in the workspace must be on Enterprise The all-seats requirement is the trap: you cannot put two admins on Enterprise and leave the reps on Business.

Billing notes

Prices are quoted per seat per month billed annually; monthly billing costs meaningfully more, and Grain does not require an annual contract to buy.
Only recording users consume a paid seat. Viewers, commenters, and searchers are free, which makes company-wide access to the call library much cheaper than the headline price implies.
Upgrades mid-cycle are prorated and downgrades generate credit, so adding a rep in the middle of a quarter is not punitive.
A 30-day money-back guarantee applies to paid plans, and there is a 14-day free trial, so the evaluation risk is close to zero.
Enterprise pricing is quote-based and requires the entire workspace to move to that tier, which is a step change in cost rather than an increment.

Value assessment: 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.

Strengths & limitations

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.
MCP server and API access mean the archive is queryable from Claude or ChatGPT rather than trapped behind Grain's own search box.
Custom AI prompts on a $15 tier is unusually generous; most competitors reserve prompt-level customization for their top plan.
Nine years of operating history, $20M raised including a Tiger Global-led Series A, and a customer base spanning sales, CS, product, and research, so it is not a one-motion product.

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.
CRM connectors are HubSpot and Salesforce only on the native list; Pipedrive, Close, and the long tail need Zapier or the API.
No advertised EU data residency, which will fail a procurement checklist that Demodesk passes trivially.
The Enterprise tier's all-seats requirement means there is no cheap way to add SSO to an otherwise Business-tier workspace.

Head-to-head comparisons

5 alternatives

Grain vs Avoma

from $19 per seat per month (Startup, billed annually)

Avoma is the more complete conversation intelligence product, with real weighted scorecards, smart trackers, and separately priced revenue intelligence, but the full stack lands near $53 per seat once you add the modules. Grain gives you capture, coaching clips, talk-ratio insight, and CRM sync for about $29. Choose Avoma if you want methodology scoring, deal risk alerts, and forecasting in one vendor; choose Grain if you want the coaching loop working next week for half the money.

Full Grain vs Avoma comparison

Grain vs Sybill

from $0 (Free), then $30 per user per month (Pro)

Sybill is a rep-facing AI assistant that autofills the CRM and runs a deal workspace, and its Free tier is more usable than Grain's. Grain is manager-facing: playlists, interaction insights, and a shared library the whole company can watch on free viewer seats. Pick Sybill if the pain is admin work and deal context for individual sellers; pick Grain if the pain is that nobody has ever heard your reps sell.

Full Grain vs Sybill comparison

Grain vs Claap

from EUR 0 (Basic), then about EUR 24 per user per month (Pro, billed annually)

Claap, now owned by lemlist, bundles recording with AI coaching, CRM auto-complete, and deal insights on its Business tier at roughly EUR 48 per seat, and it is the better fit if you also want async video and an outbound platform in the same family. Grain is cheaper, older, and stronger on clips, playlists, and free viewer access. Take Claap for a European sales stack built around lemlist; take Grain when budget and library sharing dominate.

Full Grain vs Claap comparison

Grain vs Trellus

from $34.99 per user per month (promotional rate on Power and Parallel)

Trellus lives inside the dialer and coaches during the call, which is what a cold-calling SDR team needs; Grain analyzes scheduled meetings after they finish, which is what an AE team needs. They solve different halves of the same problem. An outbound team running hundreds of dials a day should buy Trellus, and a team running discovery calls and demos should buy Grain; a team doing both often ends up with one of each.

Full Grain vs Trellus comparison

Grain vs Fathom

from $0 (Free plan, unlimited recording and transcription)

Fathom is a strong free note taker with unlimited recording and adds scorecards and CRM sync on its paid tiers, which makes it the value benchmark for a small team. Grain trades that generous free plan for a deeper coaching and sharing layer, free viewer seats, and better clip workflow. If cost is the only constraint, Fathom's free tier wins; if you need the manager view and the shared library, Grain is worth the line item.

Full Grain vs Fathom comparison

Implementation & onboarding

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.
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.
Onboarding: Entirely self-serve on Free, Starter, and Business, including the CRM connectors. Enterprise adds a guided path. Priority support ships with Business.
Migration notes: There is no bulk importer for a competitor's recording archive, though individual audio and video files can be uploaded and will be transcribed and analyzed. If you are leaving Gong or Chorus, plan to leave the historical library behind or export it selectively. Coming from a note taker like Fathom or tl;dv, the transition is additive rather than a migration, since you are adding manager tooling rather than replacing capture.

Platform, API & security

Platforms: Web appmacOS and Windows desktop apps for bot-less captureChrome extensionMobile accessMCP server
API: Public API for recordings, transcripts, and metadata, plus an MCP server so Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI assistants can query the meeting library directly.
Compliance: SOC 2 Type IIGDPR
Data residency: US-hosted; no regional hosting option is advertised.
SSO: SSO on the Enterprise tier, which requires the entire workspace to be on Enterprise.
Security notes: Encryption in transit and at rest, granular sharing permissions, and admin controls over what can be shared externally. In bot-less capture mode the recording disclosure obligation sits with the user rather than being handled by a visible participant, which is the mode to think carefully about in two-party-consent jurisdictions.

Support & resources

Channels: Email supportIn-app chatPriority support on Business and aboveDedicated support on Enterprise
Documentation: Help center covering capture rules, integrations, coaching workflow, billing, and the API.
Community: No large official forum; Grain maintains an active blog and template library instead.

Company

Founded: 2018
Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States
Ownership: Venture-backed
Founders: Mike Adams, Jake Adams
Employees: Roughly 70 (reported 2024)
Funding: About $20M raised across two rounds, including a $16M Series A in April 2022 led by Tiger Global.

Funding history

Round	Amount	Year	Notes
Seed	About $4M	2021	Early backing ahead of the Series A; Grain launched publicly as a clip-sharing product for video calls.
Series A	$16M	2022	Led by Tiger Global's John Curtius, with the Zoom Apps Fund, Unusual Ventures, and Freestyle VC participating.

Timeline

2018Founded in San Francisco by brothers Mike and Jake Adams, initially as a way to clip and share the memorable moments from video calls.
2021Raises seed funding and grows through the remote-work boom as product, research, and customer teams adopt clip sharing.
2022Raises a $16M Series A led by Tiger Global with participation from the Zoom Apps Fund, framing the product as a library for virtual meetings.
2024Repositions toward revenue teams, adding team performance insights, AI coaching, and deeper HubSpot and Salesforce sync.
2026Ships bot-less desktop capture alongside the bot, transcription in more than 100 languages, and an MCP server so AI assistants can query the meeting archive.

Integrations

Zoom
Google Meet
Microsoft Teams
Google Calendar and Microsoft calendar
HubSpot
Salesforce
Slack
Zapier
Public API
MCP server for Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI assistants

Frequently asked questions

10 questions

What is Grain?

Grain is a conversation intelligence platform for sales teams. It records and transcribes calls, generates AI notes, turns moments into shareable clips and coaching playlists, reports talk ratio and team performance insights to managers, and syncs meeting data into HubSpot or Salesforce. It sells self-serve with published pricing rather than through a demo-gated enterprise cycle.

How much does Grain cost?

There is a free plan capped at 20 meetings. Starter is about $15 per seat per month billed annually and adds unlimited meetings, custom AI prompts and templates, and team performance insights. Business is about $29 and adds AI coaching, team interaction insights, custom follow-up emails, and the HubSpot and Salesforce integrations. Enterprise is quote-based and requires every seat in the workspace to be on that tier. Monthly billing costs more than annual.

Is the seat price per recorded user or per team member?

Per recorded user. Viewers, commenters, and searchers get free seats, so a five-rep sales team inside a forty-person company pays for five licences while everyone else can still watch and search calls. This is the single biggest reason Grain's effective cost is lower than the sticker price suggests.

Does Grain use a bot to record, or can it record without one?

Both. A Grain notetaker can join Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams to capture video, or the desktop app can capture system audio bot-lessly so nothing appears in the participant list. Bot mode is better when you want video for demo playback; bot-less mode is better for sensitive calls and for dialer or in-person conversations a bot cannot reach.

What coaching features does Grain actually have?

Team performance insights on Starter, and on Business the interaction insights that compare talk ratio and engagement across reps, AI coaching that gives per-call feedback automatically, plus clips, coaching playlists, and timestamped comments. What it does not have is a weighted scorecard engine with custom rubric criteria, which is where Avoma and Demodesk are stronger.

Does Grain handle two-party consent and recording law?

Partly, and the mode you choose matters. When the bot joins, its presence in the participant list is itself a disclosure, and admins can control capture rules centrally so recording policy is not left to individual reps. In bot-less desktop mode there is no visible participant, so the obligation to announce that the call is being recorded falls entirely on the user. In two-party-consent states and under GDPR you should be announcing it verbally regardless.

How long does Grain keep recordings?

Paid plans are not sold with a published per-seat storage meter the way some competitors are; the hard cap on Free is 20 meetings rather than a storage quota. Retention specifics and any deletion policies are worth confirming with Grain directly before you build a compliance process on top of them, since Grain does not publish a retention schedule the way it publishes prices.

Does Grain write back to the CRM?

Yes, on the Business tier. HubSpot and Salesforce sync meeting summaries and data to the relevant records so activity logging and next steps stop being manual. Other CRMs need Zapier or the API. If Pipedrive or Close is your system of record, check the connector list before you buy.

How is Grain different from a meeting note taker like Fathom or Granola?

Note takers serve the person in the meeting; conversation intelligence serves the manager who was not. Grain does the note taking, but the reason to buy it is the layer above: coaching playlists, cross-rep talk-ratio comparison, AI coaching feedback, and a shared library the whole company can watch. If nobody is going to review anyone else's calls, you do not need Grain and a note taker will do.

Who owns Grain and is it financially stable?

Grain Intelligence Inc. is an independent venture-backed company founded in 2018 in San Francisco by Mike and Jake Adams. It has raised about $20M, including a $16M Series A led by Tiger Global in 2022, and employs roughly 70 people. It is not owned by a larger platform, unlike Clari Copilot or Chorus.

Editorial verdict

Grain 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.

Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.