Learn more about your options and find the best meeting notes tool for your team.
Effective meeting management is essential, and one key aspect of this is the accurate documentation of meeting minutes.
Meeting minutes are crucial for capturing the essence of discussions, decisions, and actions during meetings. Choosing the right software can streamline this process, ensuring nothing gets lost in translation from the meeting room to the action plan.
Meeting minutes software tools are designed to streamline the process of documenting the outcomes of meetings, including the discussion points, decisions made, and tasks assigned. These tools vary in complexity and functionality, from simple note-taking apps to comprehensive project management platforms.
Before evaluating specific solutions, it's important to understand what to look for in a meeting notes tool. While every team and company may have their own unique requirements, most great solutions offer the following features and benefits:
Real-time collaborative editing
Auto-save of changes
Version history with the option of restoring earlier versions of your documents
Comments and user mentions
Fast and reliable search
Document organization that is easy to navigate
Embedding of various media, such as videos, slides, and diagrams
Integrations with other collaboration tools, such as Slack
Mobile device accessibility
Content export options in different formats
Another aspect that should go without saying (but is nonetheless often overlooked) is the ease of use.
Meeting minutes software that truly ticks all boxes should be accessible to the entire team. As is the case with many online collaboration tools, a steep learning curve can be detrimental to your team's productivity. An intuitive and user-friendly interface that allows your collaborators to immediately get the hang of the new tool is as important as a well-rounded feature set.
To make your decision easier, we have put together a list of the 5 best document collaboration tools:
Each one of these tools comes with its own unique strengths and feature sets. Depending on your team's specific requirements, some of these tools may fit your needs better than others. Learn more about your options and find the best document collaboration software for you and your team.
Nuclino is a unified workspace where teams can bring all their knowledge, docs, and projects together in one place. It has everything you may need to effectively manage meeting minutes – real-time collaborative editing, auto-save of changes, version history, comments, and more.
The visual editor of Nuclino is exceptionally easy to use even for non-technical people. It offers only the essential formatting options, enabling an easy and fast editing experience and making your documents look clean and consistent.
What makes Nuclino stand out among many other meeting minutes software solutions is its unique approach to organizing notes and documents. Instead of relying on the traditional folder system, where important meeting notes can easily get lost, Nuclino allows you to link related notes together. It works like your own internal Wikipedia, making it easy to browse and explore.
Nuclino also comes with an AI-powered assistant called Sidekick. It allows you to instantly summarize lengthy meeting minutes, extract action items and key points, and more.
But Nuclino is more than a simple meeting minutes tool. In addition to being able to organize your meeting notes in a nested list, you can visualize your work using a Kanban board, a table, or a graph.
This makes Nuclino a great solution for a wide range of use cases beyond taking meeting notes, including knowledge sharing, employee handbooks, employee onboarding and offboarding, sprint planning, process documentation, and many more. It works like a collective brain, allowing you to bring all your team's work together in one place and collaborate without the chaos of files and folders, context switching, or silos.
Nuclino is also tightly integrated with 50+ other apps, allowing you to embed slides, spreadsheets, diagrams, videos, and more directly into your documents.
What users say about Nuclino:
"Anyone trying to organize a series of documents/notes in an organization should check out Nuclino because it fits the bill. The design of the product is so good that it's actually fun writing new notes/docs in the app. Live multi-user collaboration rounds out the feature set."
— Capterra review (read more reviews of Nuclino)
Pricing: Free, advanced features starting from $6/user/month
Rating on Capterra: 4.7/5
For teams already using Google Workspace, Google Docs offers a simple and effective way to manage meeting minutes. After Google Docs first came out in 2006, it quickly transformed the way we collaborate and share documents. People were eager to leave the cluttered and confusing interface of Microsoft Word behind and embraced the intuitiveness of Google Docs.
Today, Google Docs remains the most popular collaborative word processor, with millions of users worldwide. This meeting notes software is free, flexible, and user-friendly. It supports real-time collaboration, allowing multiple users to edit documents simultaneously, and features tools for commenting and tracking action items.
Looking for more tools similar to Google Docs? Check out this list of Google Docs alternatives.
What users say about Google Docs:
"Incredibly easy document creation, collaboration, and sharing. Zero learning curve to create meeting minutes, take notes, co-author reports or policies, or any number of other content-creation tasks. Tagging people and adding action items is fast and efficient. Works great if folks are on the Gmail domain and almost as well if they are not. It's Google, so you know the search works. Automatic outlining in the left pane is a nice feature."
Pricing: Free, advanced features starting from $5/user/month
Rating on Capterra: 4.5/5
Confluence by Atlassian is a powerful content collaboration tool that is designed to help teams create, organize, and discuss meeting minutes within the context of larger projects. It's particularly useful for teams that manage complex projects requiring extensive documentation. Its powerful enterprise capabilities and extensive configuration options helped it amass over 60,000 customers.
Its strength lies in its seamless integration with other products in the Atlassian suite. If you are already using other Atlassian tools, such as Jira or Bitbucket, Confluence is likely to easily fit into your workflow.
It comes with a certain learning curve, but if you are looking for a meeting minutes tool with advanced customization options and enterprise-level features, Confluence is definitely an option worth considering.
Looking for more tools similar to Confluence? Check out this list of Confluence alternatives.
What users say about Confluence:
"A great collaboration tool where all project documents (from major project plans to reports to release cycle to simple meeting notes) can be organized and shared in one centralized location. Spaces are well organized and structured. There are page shortcuts, page trees, breadcrumb trails that aid users in navigating between pages and information. I can highlight people in my reports or meeting notes by tagging them."
Pricing: Free, advanced features starting from $2.50/user/month
Rating on Capterra: 4.6/5
Zoho Writer is a part of Zoho's suite of online office tools called WorkDirve. It offers a robust word processor that's well-suited for crafting detailed meeting minutes.
Zoho Writer supports real-time editing by multiple users, document versioning, and commenting, making it easy for teams to collaborate on meeting minutes. One of the key advantages of Zoho Writer for meeting minutes is its organizational capabilities. Documents can be categorized and stored in folders within the cloud, making it simple to access previous meeting minutes or related documents whenever needed.
Another aspect that makes Zoho Writer stand out is its integration with other Zoho applications and third-party services. For example, integration with Zoho Calendar can streamline the process of scheduling meetings and linking relevant documents.
What users say about Zoho Writer:
"Writer is an easy-to-use program, much like Google Docs and WPS. You can get most of all your word processing done in Writer as well as collaborate with other users. There are a lot of support for other outlets such as DocuSign and it's easy to integrate into other programs. It's free, so there's no sense in worrying about the price."
Pricing: Starting from $6.99/month
Rating on Capterra: 4.6/5
Integrated within the Office 365 suite, Microsoft OneNote is a comprehensive digital notebook that can be a great tool for capturing and organizing meeting minutes. OneNote has been around for quite some time, first released in 2003 as part of Microsoft Office. It's available across various platforms, including Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. While it started as a traditional note-taking app, it has since evolved to incorporate features for both personal and collaborative use.
OneNote integrates well with other Microsoft applications, facilitating efficient scheduling and note linking. The template feature also helps ensure consistent note-taking across meetings.
Looking for more tools similar to Microsoft OneNote? Check out this list of OneNote alternatives.
What users say about OneNote:
"Great for taking notes, especially in a work environment. If it is integrated into your Microsoft Outlook email it is easy to transfer meetings and notes between the two. You can also flag tasks that you need to follow up on in OneNote and then that will transfer to your To Do list in your Microsoft Outlook."
Pricing: Free, advanced features starting from $16.67/user/month
Rating on Capterra: 4.4/5
Launched in 2004, Evernote predates most modern note-taking and meeting minutes tools. Initially designed as a simple personal notes app, Evernote has evolved over the years into a comprehensive platform for capturing, organizing, and accessing information.
It allows users to capture meeting notes in various formats, organize them into notebooks, and tag them for easy retrieval. With features for sharing notebooks and real-time syncing across devices, it ensures that team members can access and update meeting minutes anytime, anywhere. Its straightforward organizational system and security features make it an efficient tool for teams looking to keep their meeting documentation organized and accessible.
What users say about Evernote:
"Evernote Teams (Business) is great for our productivity! I take notes with Evernote throughout the day and after meetings. I also look at my checklist and team list every day. Not to mention project planning, project management, task management, etc."
The best software for meeting minutes needs to help you ensure that valuable meeting insights are accurately recorded and easily accessible. A wide range of different document sharing tools can be used to capture meeting notes. Whether you're part of a small team or a large organization, looking for simplicity or depth, there's a solution available for you.
Choosing the right meeting minutes tool involves considering various factors like the team's size, the nature of meetings, required integrations, and budget. From the sleek, intuitive simplicity of Nuclino to the advanced, extensive feature set offered by Confluence, the right tool can make your meeting a lot more efficient and actionable.