Fellow.ai vs. ClerkMinutes: Which AI Meeting Assistant Is Right for Government Clerks?

If you're a city Clerk, county Clerk, or municipal employee responsible for documenting official government meetings, you've probably noticed the explosion of AI-powered meeting tools.

Fellow.ai is one of the most popular ones. It’s currently used by companies like Shopify, HubSpot, and thousands of corporate teams worldwide. It's raised $24 million in funding, earned 4.7/5 stars on G2, and built a reputation as a comprehensive meeting management platform.

But here's the critical question. Was Fellow.ai built for government work?

This comprehensive comparison examines Fellow.ai and ClerkMinutes to help you determine which platform actually meets the unique compliance, accuracy, and workflow requirements of local government operations.

Quick Comparison: Fellow.ai vs. ClerkMinutes

What Is Fellow.ai?

Fellow.ai is a comprehensive AI-powered meeting management platform that handles the entire meeting lifecycle before, during, and after meetings. Founded in 2017 and backed by $24 million in Series A funding, Fellow has grown into one of the leading meeting productivity tools for corporate environments.

Fellow.ai's Core Capabilities

• Automated Transcription & Recording: Fellow's "Copilot" feature automatically records meetings via bot or local recording, producing real-time transcriptions in 92-99 languages. Unlike many competitors that capture only audio, Fellow records both audio and video, allowing teams to replay meetings with screen shares and camera feeds visible. All recordings are saved to a secure library for later access.

• AI Summaries and Action Items: After each meeting, Fellow generates AI-driven summaries with human-level readability. These recaps are automatically emailed to attendees and absentees. The AI identifies and logs action items discussed in meetings, assigning them to owners and syncing them to task management tools like Asana, Jira, Monday.com, and ClickUp.

• Ask Fellow AI Assistant: This feature acts as a personal meeting chatbot. Users can query past meetings in natural language,for example, "What was decided in last week's project call?",and Ask Fellow searches transcripts to provide answers. It can even draft follow-up emails or status updates based on meeting content.

• Collaborative Agendas: Fellow provides shared meeting agenda documents for every meeting. Teams can collaboratively add talking points, attach documents, and take live notes during meetings. A library of 500+ meeting templates is available for common meeting types like one-on-ones, sales calls, and sprint retrospectives.

• Pre-Meeting AI Briefs: To improve preparation, Fellow offers AI-generated briefs before meetings that summarize previous discussions, highlight pending action items, and provide background on attendees or topics.

• Meeting Analytics: Fellow tracks metrics like attendance, punctuality, and individual talk time for each meeting. Managers can identify if meetings are too frequent or unbalanced. The platform supports meeting policies,for example, requiring an agenda for meetings or enforcing no-meeting days.

Fellow.ai's Target Market

Fellow explicitly markets itself from solopreneurs to enterprise teams. Notable customers include Shopify, HubSpot, Uber, and other tech companies and globally distributed teams. The platform serves a wide range of use cases:

• Small businesses and startups: Using Fellow to introduce discipline and save time in day-to-day meetings

• Sales teams: Recording client calls, syncing notes to CRM, structuring pipeline reviews

• Engineering teams: Managing sprint retros and project syncs with uniform templates

• Enterprises: Creating organization-wide systems of record for meetings with robust security (SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR compliant)

Fellow.ai Pricing

Fellow operates on a per-user subscription model:

• Free Plan: Limited AI recordings (up to 10 free)

• Team Plan: $7/user/month with more AI credits

• Business Plan: $15/user/month with unlimited recordings and advanced integrations

• Enterprise Plan: $25/user/month with SSO, user provisioning, domain control, and dedicated support

What Fellow.ai Does Well

According to user reviews on G2 and Capterra, Fellow excels at:

• Speed and accuracy: Users praise the "lightning-fast" processing of transcriptions and AI summaries, even for back-to-back meetings

• Integration depth: Native connections to 50+ enterprise tools streamline workflows

• User experience: The interface is described as "simple and intuitive" with minimal learning curve

• Security and privacy: Fellow never trains its AI models on user data and maintains enterprise-grade encryption (AES-256, TLS 1.2+)

One user wrote: "I no longer need to take notes myself, which allows me to remain fully present… The AI-generated summaries are impressively accurate."

Where Fellow.ai Falls Short for Government Use

While Fellow.ai is an excellent corporate tool, several characteristics make it problematic for government Clerks:

• No Government Compliance Features: Fellow was built for business efficiency, not government compliance. There's no built-in understanding of Brown Act compliance, Open Meetings laws, or public records requirements. The platform doesn't recognize the formal structure of government meetings or the legal documentation standards required by state and local regulations.

• Generic Meeting Structure: Fellow treats all meetings similarly using a generic structure suitable for business stand-ups, one-on-ones, and team meetings. It doesn't recognize government meeting flow: call to order, roll call, public comment, consent calendars, action items, closed sessions, and adjournment.

• Business-Focused Accuracy: Fellow focuses on capturing action items and key discussion points. That’s perfect for internal business meetings where informal notes suffice. However, government meetings require verbatim accuracy for motions, votes, and official actions. Several user reviews note occasional AI mistakes, with one mentioning that pre-meeting briefs sometimes pull in "irrelevant info or misidentifies what's important."

The Core Problem: Fellow.ai Wasn't Built for Government Clerks

The fundamental challenge with using Fellow.ai for government work isn't that it's a bad product, it's that it solves different problems for different users.

Government meetings operate under an entirely different legal and procedural framework than corporate meetings. When a city council takes a vote, that action must be documented with precision that meets legal standards for official records. When a municipal committee discusses public comment, the Clerk must ensure that every contribution from both in-person and remote participants is properly captured for transparency requirements. When meeting minutes are published, they must meet ADA accessibility standards, not just "readable," but fully compliant with WCAG and Section 508 requirements.

Fellow.ai was designed to solve corporate productivity problems. That’s helping business teams remember action items, syncing tasks to project management tools, and enabling sales reps to log call notes in their CRM. These are valuable capabilities, but they're not the same as producing legally defensible official records.

Consider the typical workflow gap. Fellow excels at post-meeting efficiency. One HubSpot sales manager described using Fellow to provide structure and templates for her reps one-on-one meetings and pipeline reviews. But government Clerks face a different challenge. After a two-hour city council meeting, many Clerks spend 8-12 hours preparing minutes because they must:

• Ensure every motion is captured verbatim with the exact wording

• Document who made each motion and who seconded it

• Record roll call votes with precise vote counts

• Organize content according to the formal agenda structure

• Format everything according to agency-specific templates

• Ensure ADA compliance in the final document

• Meet publication deadlines that are often legally mandated

Fellow's AI might reduce this to 6-8 hours by providing a transcript and summary, but that's still a massive burden. More importantly, the Clerk must heavily edit the output because Fellow doesn't understand parliamentary procedure or government-specific terminology. The AI was trained on corporate meetings, not municipal government proceedings.

Another critical gap is public transparency. Fellow was designed for internal corporate use with privacy as a focus,which makes sense for business strategy discussions or sales calls with confidential client information. But government meetings with the exception of closed sessions are public records. Documents must be formatted for easy public access, searchability, and archiving according to government records retention requirements. Fellow's architecture prioritizes controlled access and security, not the public transparency that government agencies must provide by law.

Even Fellow's strengths can create problems in government contexts. The platform's meeting analytics track individual talk time and participation metrics. These are features that make sense for coaching sales reps or ensuring balanced team discussions. But in government meetings, this kind of analysis isn't relevant and could potentially raise concerns about monitoring elected officials or public commenters. Government Clerks need tools that understand their specific compliance obligations, not features designed for corporate performance management.

Security requirements also differ fundamentally. While Fellow is SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, and GDPR compliant, that’s not as relevant for local governments. 

The training and support gap compounds these issues. Fellow's customer support is designed for business users. Support staff understand challenges like syncing meeting notes to Salesforce or integrating with Slack workflows, but they're unlikely to understand the specific challenges of Brown Act compliance, the nuances of parliamentary procedure, or how to handle public comment documentation in hybrid meetings.

What Is ClerkMinutes?

ClerkMinutes is an AI-powered meeting minutes solution purpose-built specifically for local government agencies, including city councils, county boards, municipal committees, and special districts. Rather than adapting a corporate tool for government use, ClerkMinutes was engineered from the ground up to address the compliance, accessibility, and accuracy requirements that government Clerks face daily.

ClerkMinutes Key Capabilities

Here are the most popular use cases and features.  

• Agenda-Driven Organization: Upload your meeting agenda alongside your recording, and ClerkMinutes automatically reads the agenda structure to organize your minutes. The system identifies each agenda item in the recording and places all related discussion, motions, and votes under the appropriate headings,eliminating the need for manual reorganization of content.

• Parliamentary Procedure Understanding: The system recognizes and captures every element of parliamentary procedure: who introduced each motion, who provided the second, any amendments or substitute motions offered, withdrawn motions, and properly formatted vote records with outcomes linked to the correct agenda item. Motions receive the level of precision and attention they require in official government records.

• Consistent Speaker Attribution: Assign speaker identities once at the beginning of the process, and those names remain accurate throughout the entire meeting transcript. When the system encounters uncertainty about a speaker's identity, it flags the instance for your review rather than making assumptions. This prevents the generic "Speaker 1" labels and mid-meeting identification errors common in generic transcription tools.

• Agency-Specific Format Adaptation: Your municipality's unique formatting requirements, including heading hierarchy, indentation standards, level of detail, and approved layouts,are configured once and automatically applied to every subsequent meeting. This eliminates repetitive reformatting work and ensures consistency across all your official records.

• Verification-First Approach: When content is unclear or information appears missing, ClerkMinutes flags it for your verification rather than generating uncertain content. The system doesn't fabricate speaker names, vote tallies, outcomes, or motion language. This commitment to accuracy over completion is what allows Clerks to trust the output for legally binding official records.

• Complete Documentation Trail: Every line in your minutes connects to the source recording with precise timestamps, maintains version history, and includes source references. If minutes are ever challenged or questioned, you can demonstrate exactly when statements occurred and attribute them to specific speakers,essential for both compliance requirements and public accountability.

How ClerkMinutes Works

• Upload Your Agenda. Drag and drop your meeting agenda into the system. ClerkMinutes automatically reads and interprets it. Then, it uses the agenda structure to create the framework for your minutes.
  
  

• Upload Your Recording. Add your meeting audio or video file from Zoom, YouTube, or local storage. If you already have a transcript from another source, you can upload that as well. The system handles full-length files without requiring you to split them into segments or manually label participants.
  
  

• Confirm Speaker Identities. ClerkMinutes identifies speakers and presents them for your confirmation. With a single click, you verify who's who. Once confirmed, those identities remain consistent throughout the entire meeting record.
  
  

• Review and Finalize. Your meeting minutes are generated aligned to your agenda structure, organized into the correct sections, and formatted according to your municipal standards. Review everything in a single interface, approve sections as you go, make any necessary text adjustments, and export as Word document or PDF.

The entire process eliminates hours of manual reorganization, reduces fact-checking time, and removes repetitive formatting work.

Detailed Feature Comparison

When to Use Each Tool

Choose Fellow.ai If You:

• Work in a corporate or business environment

• Need to document internal team meetings, one-on-ones, or sales calls

• Want extensive integrations with business productivity tools (Slack, Asana, Salesforce)

• Have a distributed team needing multilingual transcription

• Don't have government compliance requirements

• Value analytics on meeting patterns and participation

• Need a general-purpose meeting productivity platform

Choose ClerkMinutes If You:

• Are a city Clerk, county Clerk, or municipal employee

• Document official government meetings (city council, county board, committees)

• Must meet Brown Act, Open Meetings laws, or public records requirements

• Need ADA-compliant documents automatically

• Require verbatim accuracy for motions, votes, and official actions

• Work with parliamentary procedure

• Must publish meeting minutes on tight legal deadlines

• Need support from teams who understand government operations

• Want dramatic time savings (75% reduction in preparation time)

Purpose-Built Tools for Government Work

Fellow.ai is a quality product that serves its intended market well. Corporate teams, sales organizations, and businesses benefit from its comprehensive meeting management capabilities, extensive integrations, and user-friendly interface. The 4.7/5 star rating on G2 and adoption by companies like Shopify and HubSpot demonstrate its value in corporate environments.

But government work isn't corporate work.

The compliance requirements, legal standards, accessibility mandates, and public transparency obligations that government Clerks face every day require a specialized solution. Using Fellow.ai for government meetings is like using consumer tax software to prepare municipal budgets, it might seem similar on the surface, but the requirements are fundamentally different.

ClerkMinutes delivers what government Clerks actually need:

• AI trained on government meetings and parliamentary procedure

• Automatic ADA compliance in every document

• Understanding of government meeting structures

• Accuracy that meets legal standards for official records

• Up to 75% reduction in minutes preparation time

• Support from teams who understand Clerk responsibilities

• Pricing designed for government budgets

Your community depends on accurate, accessible, compliant public records. Your agency depends on you to meet legal requirements. You deserve a tool that was actually built for the work you do.

If you're a government Clerk spending nights and weekends on minutes, concerned about compliance, or looking for a better way to handle meeting documentation, it's worth exploring purpose-built solutions designed for government work.

Learn more about ClerkMinutes and see how purpose-built government software can transform your workflow. Start your 14-day free trial today.