Grain vs Shmeetings
Comparing a privacy-first offline meeting assistant with a cloud-based video highlights platform
What is Grain?
Grain is a cloud-based meeting intelligence tool that allows you to capture and share "meeting moments" as video highlights. Grain records your Zoom, Google Meet, Teams calls, provides a transcription of those recordings, and permits you to select specific video moments to share with your team. Grain's target audience is product teams, researchers, and anyone else looking to share meeting insights with their team members.
Grain's major value proposition is video highlights. Video highlights allow you to identify key points within a recording, add tags, and compile those moments into a video reel for distribution to stakeholders who may have been absent from the original meeting. Grain also connects to tools such as Slack, Notion, and CRM systems to help distribute these video highlights across your organization.
Like many other cloud-based solutions, Grain uses a bot to join your meetings and stores all of your recordings on their cloud servers. Grain has a pricing model that starts at $15/month for an individual subscription and scales based on the size of your team.
The Core Difference
While both Grain and Shmeetings are meeting tools, they have distinctly different purposes.
Grain is designed to assist with sharing. Record a customer interview, clip the best parts, share with your product team. Record a sales call, highlight the objections, share with your manager. Essentially, every action taken with Grain revolves around creating and sharing video highlights.
Shmeetings is designed for personal use. Record a meeting, get a transcription and summary of the meeting, and save everything to your computer. There is no feature in Shmeetings to share anything. No video highlights. Only private transcription and AI-generated summaries of the recorded meeting.
If you need to share insights from a meeting with your team, Grain will do that effectively. If you want meeting transcription, but want to keep that information out of the cloud and avoid any additional collaboration overhead, Shmeetings will provide a simple solution.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Shmeetings | Grain |
|---|---|---|
| Data Privacy | 100% Local Processing Never leaves your computer | Cloud-based Recordings on Grain servers |
| Bot Joins Call | No Invisible to participants | Yes Grain bot joins as participant |
| Video Highlights | No Text-based transcripts only | Yes Create shareable video clips |
| Custom Prompts | Unlimited Any prompt, any length | Templates Only Pre-defined summaries |
| Works Offline | Yes No internet needed | No Requires internet |
| In-Person Meetings | Full Support Records from any audio source | No Video calls only |
| Pricing | $39 once Lifetime license | $15-29/month Per user subscription |
Privacy and Your Meeting Data
Grain stores your complete meeting recordings on its cloud server. This is necessary to enable the video highlighting features that Grain offers. To create and share video highlights, you must first upload the complete recording.
For some types of user research and customer interviews, this may be exactly what you are looking for. For internal discussions regarding strategy, personnel, or other sensitive business topics, the potential risks associated with storing video recordings of those meetings on an external server could outweigh any benefits.
Shmeetings processes everything locally (i.e., on your computer). No uploads. No shared clips. No video. Only audio transcription and text summaries created by AI, which remain on your local computer.
The two tools are optimized for different goals. Grain is optimized for sharing. Shmeetings is optimized for maintaining privacy.
Who Should Use Each Tool
Choose Shmeetings If You:
- Don't need to share meeting highlights
- Handle sensitive or confidential conversations
- Can't have bots joining your meetings
- Want custom prompts with sensitive context
- Need to transcribe in-person meetings
- Prefer a one-time purchase over subscriptions
Choose Grain If You:
- Need to create and share video highlights
- Do user research or customer interviews
- Want a searchable meeting library
- Need team collaboration features
- Have company approval for cloud recording
- Want CRM and Slack integrations
Pricing: One-Time vs Subscription
Grain has a pricing structure that begins at $15/month for the Starter Plan and rises to $29/month for the Business Plan with advanced features. Teams are billed based on the number of users.
Shmeetings has a flat cost of $39 one-time payment. No recurring monthly fees. No pricing tiers. By the end of three months of Grain Starter usage, you would have spent more money than Shmeetings costs to own.
| Plan | 1 Year | 3 Years | 5 Years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shmeetings | $39 | $39 | $39 |
| Grain Starter | $180 | $540 | $900 |
| Grain Business | $348 | $1,044 | $1,740 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Can Shmeetings produce video highlights like Grain?
No. Shmeetings captures only audio and generates text transcripts. If you require video recordings with shareable clips, then Grain or a similar cloud-based service would be the correct choice for that use case.
Does Grain store my meeting recordings?
Yes. Grain stores your complete video recordings on its cloud server. As mentioned previously, this enables the video highlighting and sharing features of Grain; however, it also means that your meeting data resides on an external system.
Can I use Shmeetings for user research interviews?
Yes. However, since Shmeetings is unable to generate video clips, you will only receive the transcripts and summaries that remain on your local computer. If the ability to share meeting insights with stakeholders is critical to your workflow, Grain is specifically designed to accommodate that requirement.
Can I use Shmeetings for in-person meetings?
Yes. Shmeetings can record from your microphone for in-person meetings or phone calls. Grain only works with video conferencing platforms like Zoom and Google Meet.
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