The Only Meeting Assistant Comparison You Actually Need

Choosing a meeting assistant is like picking the perfect coffee order. You think they are all variations of the same thing until you actually try them. Suddenly, the small details start to matter.

After putting the most talked-about tools through weeks of testing — Shadow, Granola, Otter, Fireflies, and Cluely — the real differences come down to three things that determine whether the tool will actually stick in your workflow: staying invisible in meetings, automating the follow-up work, and letting you take your notes anywhere you want without being trapped in their platform.

The “Bot-Free” Secret No One Tells You About

Most AI meeting assistants show up in your call like a mysterious extra guest. It is not the end of the world, but it is awkward when a client pauses to ask, “Who’s that?” Bot-free tools skip the awkwardness entirely by recording and processing in the background without adding a visible participant. Shadow, Granola, and Cluely handle this perfectly. If you care about smooth client calls, this alone is worth considering.

Why Automation is the Real Productivity Hack

A transcript is nice. A transcript that pushes action items into Asana, posts recaps in Slack, or emails the team without you lifting a finger is better. That is where automation separates the hobby tools from the ones that actually save time. Shadow and Fireflies get this right. The difference is that Shadow pairs it with local export, which means you can build repeatable systems that do not depend on their platform to run.

The File Format That Future-Proofs Your Notes

Most platforms want your notes locked in their dashboard forever. If you stop paying, your history becomes a hostage situation. Local Markdown export is the escape hatch. It keeps your records future-proof and compatible with anything from Notion to GitHub. Shadow offers automatic Markdown export, making it easy to plug meeting content into other tools or directly into ChatGPT for deeper work.

What Happens When You Combine All Three

One non-technical user told us they built a working web app in GPT-5 without touching a line of code. The key was that their meeting assistant, Shadow, structured every step, exported it in clean Markdown, and made it easy to feed back into ChatGPT for iteration. The magic was not just in the meeting capture but in what they could do with the output afterward.

The Price Reality Check

Shadow: $8/month
Otter: $16.99/month
Granola: $18/month
Fireflies: $18/month
Cluely: $20/month

If you only want bot-free recording, Granola or Cluely can do it. If you only want automation, Fireflies works. If you want bot-free, automation, and local export in one, Shadow is the only one here that checks every box and it happens to be the cheapest (nudge nudge, wink wink.

The Bottom Line: Priorities

Pick your priorities first. Privacy means choosing a bot-free tool. Time savings come from automation. Long-term flexibility comes from owning your notes. If you can find one tool that does all three without adding complexity, it is worth locking in. Right now, Shadow is that tool.

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