Meetings are an essential part of running any business, and taking accurate meeting minutes is an excellent way to ensure the most important parts of your meetings are documented. Ideally, the software you choose to support meeting minutes should be embedded in the natural flow of the entire business’s strategy and operations, where teams engage, make decisions, create new directions, and move ahead together.
For some organizations, taking meeting minutes can be highly productive and creative. That's because the team has the tools to use them efficiently, tie them into overarching business goals, and use them to make important decisions. The best meeting minutes software naturally fits into the way business is actually done.
Broadly speaking, that means two things:
- It fits into your meeting workflow in an organic way
- It facilitates the use of productivity tools your team already uses
In this article we'll discuss:
- How to choose a meeting minutes software
- The best meeting minutes software
- The Fellow difference
- Key Takeaways
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How to choose a meeting minutes software
There are a few options to consider when choosing a meeting minutes software. With so many solutions on the market, it can be overwhelming trying to find the one that's right for your organization. Here are some things to look out for when doing your research:
Security
With everything being online these days, security is paramount in a digital landscape. Meetings can involve sensitive information, so you'll want to pick a meeting minutes software with a clear and robust security policy to ensure your data is being continuously protected.
Integrations
One of the key functionality elements of a great meeting minutes software is how well it integrates with other productivity tools, especially the ones your organization already uses. These solutions are meant to make your life easier, so it's important to review what tools they integrate with so they don't become a productivity blocker for you or your team.
AI functionality
Automation is the way of the future, and applying it to the way you take meeting minutes is no exception. The software you choose should have AI functionality as a pillar in its feature set, either in the form of an AI meeting copilot or AI powered recording, transcription, and summaries.
Pre-meeting support
An outstanding meeting minutes software should set up your meetings for success before they even start. This can look like a robust library of templates to guide your calls from beginning to end, or pre-meeting reminders to fill out the agenda before the call starts. Even better would be a software that comes with a set of meeting guidelines built in to prompt meeting organizers to make smart meeting choices, like keeping attendees to under 7, or ensuring meetings are booked with enough time in advance.
Simplicity
Ultimately, you want to choose a meeting minutes software that simplifies your organization's meeting workflow, and doesn't make it more complicated than how you would run meetings without it. Look for an uncomplicated, clean user experience that makes sense for how you and your team run business day-to-day.
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The best meeting minutes software
1. Fellow.app
Fellow is the best meeting minutes software designed to foster efficiency and excellent meeting habits for you and your team. It is an all-in-one AI meeting management solution to help you have fewer, shorter, more effective meetings. In terms of security, Fellow’s meeting minutes software is SOC 2 Type II & GDPR Certified. It adheres to global privacy laws and security standards to help you meet your compliance obligations, and ensure your data is being continuously protected.
Fellow seamlessly integrates with over 50 productivity tools, and has an expert-approved library of ready-to-use meeting minutes templates. Its AI meeting copilot automatically records, transcribes, and summarizes your meetings, and enables you to automatically share the meeting minutes with relevant stakeholders.
Its simplistic and intuitive design connects with your calendar, and gives you peace of mind knowing every meeting that gets booked in your organization will be created with best practices built in. Fellow's meeting guidelines feature set automatically prompts users to create meetings with a clear purpose, the ideal amount of attendees, and enough time in advance so everyone can show up prepared.
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2. Meeting Booster
MeetingBooster is a software that enables you to organize meeting minutes, schedule meetings, edit agendas, track time, follow up on action items, generate meeting minutes, and more. It does allow meeting participants to review and discuss meeting minutes, however, it doesn't currently have AI functionality in its interface.
3. Magic Minutes
Magic Minutes allows you to set up agendas for meetings in advance, take minutes during the meeting, and create action items that can be tagged to specific individuals. In terms of automation, it can either automatically send minutes out after a meeting is finished, or wait for approval. You’d also need to granularly decide which attendees get which parts of the meeting minutes.
4. Tadum
Tadum is a meeting agenda and minutes app with a heavy focus on accountability. It allows users to collaborate on meeting agendas, track metrics such as KPIs and OKRs, and force accountability. It boasts fast meeting preparation, and consistent meeting agenda formats for your team. Since Tadum also doesn't sport any AI functionality, it does rely on manually sharing meeting minutes after the the meeting has ended.
5. Beenote
Beenote is designed for board meetings, executive meetings, and team meetings. It comes in a free version and in two paid versions; Beeteam, for team meetings, and Beeboard for board or executive meetings. It's worth noting that Beeboard boasts better security for its respective tier only.
Beenote allows users to plan a meeting agenda, take notes, organize follow-up, and distribute the agenda and the minutes. More features include a timekeeper, decisions registry, private meeting modes, and apps.
6. Hypercontext
Hypercontext is an app that combines meeting management, goal-setting, and morale-boosting into an all-in-one platform. It supports one-on-one and team meetings with collaborative agendas, and is built specifically with managers in mind.
Some notable drawbacks include a lack of integration options, and no meeting automations such as pre-meeting prompts or reminders to set the stage for a productive session.
7. Tactiq
Tactiq deserves a mention for its hyper focus on one important purpose: live transcription of Google Meet and Zoom meetings. It creates instant speech-to-text searchable transcripts that are fairly accurate. It's worth noting that transcription is the main feature Tactiq offers, as opposed to a holistic meeting management solution.
Transcription can be a good option for meeting minutes, but they need to be able to be shared with all meeting participants at scale. Tactiq's model is mainly based on transcribing meetings for a single user, the meeting organizer, as opposed to creating a hub for every meeting participant to be able to review all the important elements of the meeting once the call has ended.
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The Fellow difference
With all the choices of apps available for helping to organize meeting agendas, notes, and accountability, how is it that we argue one could stand above the others? What makes Fellow great is that it's not just a productivity tool or meeting minutes platform. With Fellow, planning, running, and following through on meetings is just the beginning.
Leveraging AI, you can focus on the discussion and engaging with your team while the AI meeting copilot records, transcribes, and summarizes your meetings for you. Once the meeting has ended, attendees will be automatically notified when all three elements are ready to be reviewed. This means you get a clear and accurate transcript of the meeting minutes with time stamps, along with chapters to separate the different topics of the meeting. The AI meeting copilot can even identify the key discussion points and action items, which are clearly laid out with your recording and summary, so nothing falls through the fracks.
On top of that, you’ll enjoy access to a treasure trove of meeting templates that can help you create format-fitting minutes and distribute them widely. You’ll also get tools for collaborating on agendas, noting action items as they emerge, setting OKRs, and sharing and receiving real-time meeting feedback. It's a purpose-built solution to help you and your team have better meetings.
Before the meeting
Before the meeting event has even been created, Fellow's meeting guidelines are ready to support every meeting organizer in your company. Because it connects to your calendar, the meeting guidelines can automatically detect if there are elements in the event that don't align with best practices, such as not having a clear meeting purpose or the optimal amount of attendees. This means that leaders focused on operational efficiency can work with confidence knowing their team is always using their time effectively.
When it's time for the meeting to start, users get access to a library of professionally designed agenda templates that are fully customizable, so you never have to start from scratch. Then Fellow's meeting automations ensure every participant is reminded to fill out the collaborative agenda in advance, so everyone comes to the meeting knowing what's going to be discussed and prepared to engage.
During the meeting
Fellow removes the need to designate a meeting minutes taker from someone on your team. Attendees can add their talking points to the agenda, leave comments or reactions, and seamlessly join the call with their meeting notes side by side with their video calls, thanks to the Fellow chrome extension. Because the AI meeting copilot records, transcribes, and summarizes the meeting, it creates a single source of truth, so each attendee can focus on the discussion and engaging with each other.
Fellow also enables easy, intuitive creation and tracking of tasks – which can even be pushed out to other productivity apps that are already used at your organization. This is a central pillar of Fellow’s integration into the way businesses and organizations really operate.
After the meeting
Immediately after the meeting, Fellow removes the need to manually communicate takeaways and next steps with the right people. Each meeting attendee is automatically notified when the recording, transcript, and summary are ready to be reviewed. This eliminates friction and tight bottlenecks of meeting minutes distribution.
Alongside the recording, transcript, and summary, attendees can also find the automatically assigned action items that have been generated based on the meeting recording. This means you can track them while keeping the right people accountable and informed. Plus, you can send these tasks to the project management tools your teams already use.
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Conclusion: Meeting minutes software should fit the way business is done
Choosing the right meeting minutes software can be challenging with the plethora of choices on the market, but it's ultimately a decision that will have a huge impact on operational efficiency in your organization.
The right software for your meeting minutes should tick off most of, if not all, of the following features: A robust security system, extensive integrations with other productivity tools, AI functionality to automate your workflow, pre-meeting support to set up your meetings for success, and a simplistic interface that's user friendly and easy to adopt across your organization.
Of all the software outlined in this article, one stands out among the rest which is designed to be flexible, powerful, and yet simple, fitting the way your team already works. Fellow is designed to be that tool which makes your teams immediately more efficient, integrated, and creative, without forcing them to give up any of the tools which they already love.
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