Mavio vs Grain

Mavio vs Grain

Grain is a video tool that produces transcripts. Mavio is a meeting record that produces text. That framing sounds dismissive of Grain and is not meant to be — it is the most useful way to tell which one you actually need, because the two are optimised for different artifacts.

What Grain is genuinely best at

Grain's clip workflow is excellent, and for research and product teams it is often the whole reason to buy. You finish a user interview, scrub to the ninety seconds where the customer explains why the onboarding confused them, cut it, and paste the clip into the ticket. The engineer watches the customer say it rather than reading your paraphrase of it. That is a real change in how evidence travels through a company, and a transcript is a poor substitute for it.

If your job involves convincing other people of what a customer said, Grain's clips do that better than a summary will.

Mavio does not currently offer video highlight clips. If that feature is the reason you are shopping, this comparison ends here and the answer is Grain.

Where Mavio is the stronger fit

The bot. Grain joins your call as a participant. Mavio records on-device through the macOS and Windows desktop apps, the Chrome extension, or mobile, so nothing appears in the attendee list. For user research with customers who did not expect a third attendee, this is not a small thing.

Mobile. Grain has no mobile apps. Mavio has iOS and Android, which matters if you interview people anywhere other than at a desk — a store visit, a site walkthrough, a conversation at a conference.

AI depth over the whole history. Grain's strength is the individual moment. Mavio's is the accumulated record: summaries and action items on every meeting, search across all of them, and an assistant that can answer using your knowledge base and the earlier calls with the same people. After twenty customer interviews, "what did people say about pricing" is a question about the corpus, not about one clip.

Pricing

Grain's paid plans start at $19 per user per month. Mavio's Free plan is $0 forever with no card — unlimited transcription, AI summaries, and action items. Pro is $10 per month ($100 billed annually) and adds real-time transcription, 25 transcript languages, all integrations, and API access. Business is $25 per seat per month ($20 annually), adding Coach Mode, team analytics, and shared libraries.

Choosing

Grain if sharing video moments is the workflow — research teams, customer-evidence work, anything where the clip is the deliverable.

Mavio if you want the searchable written record across every meeting, need to record without a bot on the call, or work from a phone as often as a laptop.

A number of teams run both, using Grain for research sessions and Mavio for everything else. That is a legitimate answer, and cheaper than it sounds given Mavio's free tier.

Migrating from Grain to Mavio

1. Export your Grain recordings from the dashboard.
2. Create a Mavio account and connect your platforms.
3. Keep the export. Mavio cannot import Grain recordings or clips, so your existing library stays in Grain. Download anything you still need before cancelling.
4. Set up your workspace and configure recording preferences.