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Shortwave vs Read AI

ShortwaveRead AI

AI email client for Gmail that helps you reach inbox zero faster with AI search, summaries, and drafting.

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Read AI is an AI-powered meeting assistant that provides automated transcription, summaries, and real-time notes for Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams

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Votes00
PricingFreemiumFreemium
CategoryProductivityProductivity
Tags
emailai-emailgmail
transcribe-meetings
Best for
  • Gmail and Google Workspace power users
  • Professionals with high email volume
  • Sales, recruiting, and customer-facing teams
  • Meeting-heavy teams that span Zoom
  • Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams
  • Sales and customer-facing teams that need call notes synced to a CRM
Pros
  • Powerful, genuinely useful AI search and summaries
  • Fast, keyboard-driven interface that feels like a modern successor to Google Inbox
  • Strong inbox organization with bundles, splits, and AI filters
  • Native desktop, iOS, and Android apps
  • Team collaboration features like shared threads and assignees
  • Broad platform coverage across Zoom
  • Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams means a single notetaker works regardless of which video tool a given meeting uses.
  • Goes beyond raw transcripts with structured meeting reports, real-time notes, action items, and playback, turning long calls into scannable, reviewable outputs.
  • Deep integration ecosystem pushes meeting insights directly into HubSpot, Salesforce, Notion, Asana, Slack, and Atlassian, keeping notes where teams already work.
  • Developer and automation options—including a public API, an MCP server, and connections to Claude and ChatGPT—let technical teams route meeting data into custom workflows.
Cons
  • Gmail and Google Workspace only, with no Outlook, IMAP, or Exchange support
  • Paid tiers are expensive compared with most email clients
  • Daily AI usage quotas can be hit by heavy users on lower tiers
  • No permanent full-featured free plan beyond the trial and basic use
  • Learning curve for its many organization features
  • Account and installation behavior can be aggressive—the notetaker and app connections may attach to accounts and join calls with little friction, and removing it from platform app lists can take deliberate effort.
  • The free plan is capped at a small number of meeting transcripts per month, which makes it hard to evaluate the tool in real team workflows before paying.
  • Some higher-value capabilities like video playback are gated to upper pricing tiers, so the sticker price can understate what you actually pay for a complete workflow.
  • The consent and privacy dynamics of an auto-joining assistant may conflict with organizations that have strict meeting-recording policies.

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