Grain vs Happy Scribe Comparison 2026
Both cover transcription & show notes. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
Notes and clips from calls, free tier included
Transcripts and subtitles in 60-plus languages
At a glance
- Happy Scribe starts cheaper, at $8.50.
- Both have a genuinely free tier.
Side by side
Grain | Happy Scribe | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $15 | From $8.50 |
| Pricing model | Free plan, paid tiers | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Billing | Monthly or annual | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | Not stated | None |
| API | Yes | Not stated |
Shaded rows are where the two answers disagree and both listings have answered. A row where one side has not stated a fact is left plain, because silence is not a difference.
Grain
Notes and clips from calls, free tier included
Grain records and transcribes meetings, writes notes and lets a moment be clipped out and shared without anybody rewatching the recording. Its free plan carries unlimited meetings and unlimited notetaker seats, capped at forty-five minutes each and thirty days of history, which is a real working tier rather than a demo. Paying removes both limits and adds custom prompts. The conversational intelligence in the higher tiers is aimed at sales teams and does nothing for a solo creator.
Our note
The 45-minute limit rather than the seat count is what decides whether the free plan works, so check your typical call length before anything else. Against tl;dv, Grain gives away seats and caps duration while tl;dv gives away duration and caps the AI, which makes the choice a question about your calls rather than about the products.
Happy Scribe
Transcripts and subtitles in 60-plus languages
Happy Scribe does machine transcription and subtitles, and will sell you a human pass over the top when the machine is not good enough. The export list is long, including the subtitle formats an editor actually needs. Minutes are metered per year rather than per month, which suits lumpy production.
Only on this side
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.