Read AI vs Shadow (2026)

Read AI

by Read AI, Inc.

Shadow

by Taper Labs

Pros

• ✓Joins Zoom, Teams and Google Meet meetings from a connected calendar and writes reports with summaries, action items, key questions and transcripts, plus summaries of email and Slack and Teams messages.
• ✓Scheduled agents such as Monday Briefing and End of Week, and the Ada email assistant that proposes times and books meetings, run without a prompt for each task.
• ✓Every plan from Free to Enterprise+ is publicly priced with self-serve signup, and a remote MCP server gives Claude, ChatGPT and other MCP clients 14 tools.

Limitations

• –The Free plan includes 5 meeting transcripts a month, the Salesforce, HubSpot, Notion, Jira and Zapier integrations start on Pro, and audio and video playback start on Enterprise.
• –HIPAA compliance, SAML and SCIM and custom data retention are on Enterprise+, which requires a minimum of 5 licenses.
• –Read joins meetings on Zoom, Teams and Google Meet, and other platforms such as Webex are captured through the desktop app. The MCP server is an open beta release.

Pros

• ✓No bot joins the call: Shadow captures system audio and the microphone on the Mac, so nothing appears in the participant list on Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams or Slack huddles, and Autopilot can start and stop recording with each supported meeting.
• ✓Transcription runs on the Mac and every meeting is saved as Markdown files the user owns, with no history limit on any plan, so the archive opens in Obsidian and AI agents such as Claude can read it without a connector.
• ✓Smart Screenshots capture what is shown on screen as well as what is said, and every Meeting Skill and Action Skill is an editable prompt, so users can build their own notes, follow-up drafts and voice-typing workflows without code.

Limitations

• –Runs only on Macs with Apple Silicon and macOS 14.2 or later. Windows is on a waitlist and there is no mobile app, so teams with mixed platforms cannot standardize on Shadow.
• –AI meeting notes, Skills and Ask require Plus or the two-week trial. Shadow's privacy policy says it is not intended for environments that require HIPAA compliance, and no SOC 2 report or trust center is published.
• –Integrations are limited to native Google Calendar plus webhooks to tools such as Zapier, n8n or Make.com, with no native CRM or project-management integration and no team or admin plan.