Fellow vs Read AI

Fellow is a meeting management platform made by a Canadian company headquartered in Ottawa. It covers the whole meeting cycle: collaborative agendas prepared before the call, notes and decisions captured during it, and action items and recaps followed up afterwards, with a strong focus on recurring one-on-ones and team meetings run by managers.

Agendas live in a shared notes document attached to each calendar event, with a template library for one-on-ones, stand-ups, retrospectives and board meetings. Fellow's AI notetaker joins Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams calls to record, transcribe and summarize, and privacy controls let organizations decide which meetings are recorded and who can see transcripts. Action items sync to tools such as Asana, Jira and Slack. There is a free plan with limits, then per-user Team and Business plans that unlock AI notes, longer history and admin controls, plus an Enterprise tier.

Fellow fits managers and organizations that want to improve meeting habits, not just capture transcripts. Solo users who only need a recorder get more for less from Otter, Fireflies or tl;dv, and teams already standardized on Notion or Confluence may find the agenda features overlap with what they have. Compared with Fathom or Fireflies, Fellow is stronger on pre-meeting preparation, one-on-one workflows and governance, while the pure notetakers are cheaper for transcription alone. Its value depends on the whole team adopting it, so rollout matters.

Read AI is an AI meeting assistant made by Read AI, Inc., a Seattle startup founded in 2021 by David Shim, the former CEO of Foursquare, with Rob Williams and Elliott Waldron. It now joins Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet to produce transcripts, summaries, action items and highlights. The company has raised $81 million, including a $50 million Series B led by Smash Capital in October 2024.

What sets Read AI apart is scope: besides meetings it summarizes email and chat from Gmail, Outlook and Slack, and Ask Read answers questions across all of them with citations. Speaker Coach measures talk time, pace and engagement, mobile apps capture in-person meetings. Free allows 5 meetings a month with a one-hour limit. Pro unlocks unlimited transcripts and reports, Enterprise adds playback, video highlights and premium support for teams of five or more, and Enterprise+ adds HIPAA, SAML, SCIM and custom retention.

Read AI fits professionals in back-to-back calls across several platforms who want one searchable record of meetings, email and chat. Engagement scores feel intrusive to some guests, a bot joining calls needs clear consent practices, and playback is not part of Pro. Otter is strong for live transcription and in-person notes, Fireflies goes deeper on CRM sync and conversation analytics, and Granola records without a bot, which many prefer for external calls.

A practical tip: Pro costs $19.75 monthly or $15 a month billed annually, but video playback starts at Enterprise, which needs at least five licenses. Read AI also works as a connector in Claude and ChatGPT.