While Recall.ai and Skribby both offer meeting bot APIs, they have some important differences. Recall.ai offers a smoother developer experience and over 99.9% reliability compared to 42% reliability for Skribby. We’ve extensively tested Skribby’s performance – below, we’ll dive into what sets Recall.ai apart.

Testing reliability and developer experience

To inform our findings, we extensively tested Skribby and Recall.ai in 300 calls across Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom. 

During our testing, Skribby experienced extensive reliability issues. For example, on Google Meet, Skribby’s bots either never made it into the meeting or got kicked out immediately 66.7% of the time. With Skribby, we also encountered long wait times for bots to join meetings – on average, over a minute for Google Meet. In our tests, Recall.ai bots successfully joined calls 100% of the time and took an average of just 15 seconds to join a Google Meet meeting. 

We also evaluated the ease of setting up meeting bots with Skribby’s API, and found that Skribby does not provide all the resources developers may need during implementation. Their documentation is difficult to search, and they don’t offer sample apps or an “Ask AI” feature to help developers navigate their API docs. When sending bots to meetings, Skribby doesn’t provide logs to help you troubleshoot when bots don’t successfully join or record meetings. In comparison, Recall.ai provides detailed logs and documentation, many sample apps, and an “Ask AI” feature in API docs to help developers quickly find what they need.

Recall.ai: More features and broad platform support

When we tested Attendee, we ran into edge cases that their platform did not account for. For example, we found that Attendee bots would not join if the host was in another meeting. This is a fundamental limitation of their API, and they don’t offer a workaround for this situation. In contrast, Recall.ai allows bots to join and remain in a call even if the host is not present or in another meeting.

More ways to record meetings

Recall.ai offers multiple ways to capture meeting data, with a Meeting Bot API and a Desktop Recording SDK, plus a Mobile Recording SDK launching soon. This allows users to record chats that happen on video conferencing platforms, in person, and on the phone, with or without a bot. Skribby only supports recording through sending bots to meetings on video conferencing platforms, which restricts flexibility for users.

Wider platform coverage

The other main difference between Recall.ai and Skribby is platform coverage. Recall.ai’s unified API works across all major video conferencing platforms, supporting Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Slack Huddles, Webex, GoTo Meeting, and more. Meanwhile, Skribby only supports Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet.

Real-time audio and video

Recall.ai includes both real-time audio and video streaming capabilities in every pricing plan. However, Skribby users must purchase an add-on to get real-time audio from meetings, and Skribby does not support real-time video streaming at all. 

Supporting interactive agents

Many companies are looking to build interactive AI agents that can have real-time conversations directly in meetings. Recall.ai’s Output Media feature enables two-way AI agent interactions by sending data back into meetings, streaming audio output and displaying images or video. In contrast, Skribby bots are receive-only – they can capture and transcribe content, but can't stream anything into the meeting.

Perfect diarization

Recall.ai offers perfect diarization, meaning that speech remains accurately attributed and labeled with speaker names even when multiple people are talking at once. While Recall.ai allows you to get separate audio streams per speaker, Skribby only offers mixed audio that merges overlapping speakers and makes attribution more difficult. Skribby also does not accurately label transcripts with participant names, so it’s harder to understand who said what during a conversation.

Recall.ai vs Skribby pricing breakdown

Though Recall.ai charges $0.50 per hour for a Pay As You Go plan and Skribby charges $0.35 per hour, Skribby has several hidden costs. For example, Skribby charges an extra $0.05 per hour for real-time audio and metadata, plus an additional $0.05/h for recording video, adding up to a total of $0.45/h. Recall.ai offers real-time and asynchronous audio and video recording at no extra charge.

Skribby also does not offer a free transcription option, meaning that users will always incur additional costs for transcribing meetings. Given the price of Skribby’s third-party transcription providers, the hourly costs for using Skribby can exceed $1.16/hour. Meanwhile, Recall.ai offers the option of using perfectly diarized, free transcripts generated by native meeting captions.

Recall.ai’s pricing also includes a free Calendar API, which connects Recall.ai with your users’ Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook accounts. This lets you automatically send meeting bots to select events on your users’ calendars, while enriching meeting recordings with calendar information like participant emails and meeting titles. Skribby doesn’t have a calendar integration at all, with no built-in way to dispatch bots to meetings on a calendar.

Given that Recall.ai includes all of the above features in its hourly pricing model, Recall.ai’s pricing is very similar to Skribby’s, while offering a much richer feature set. Moreover, Recall.ai offers volume discounts that allow customers to get an hourly recording rate below $0.50, while Skribby does not lower prices for high-usage customers. This makes Recall.ai’s pricing much more scalable than Skribby’s, supporting both enterprises and startups who want to build a core part of their product with Recall.ai’s API.

Recall.ai consistently comes out on top in terms of reliability, flexible meeting recording, diarized transcription, and developer experience. If you’re a startup or enterprise looking for a way to record and transcribe meetings across different video conferencing platforms, Recall.ai is the clear choice.