Six real options, what each one actually produces, and the seven questions that decide which is right for your county. Written for clerks who have to file an official record — not a meeting summary.
Last updated August 13, 2026
For a county clerk who has to file an official record — motions, seconds, roll-call votes, minute order numbers — rather than a meeting summary, the realistic 2026 shortlist is Govably, ClerkMinutes, CivicPlus Agenda & Meeting Management, and Granicus (Legistar, Peak, or OneMeeting).
General-purpose AI notetakers — Otter, Fireflies, Copilot, Zoom AI Companion — are the wrong category. They summarize discussion. They do not produce a parliamentary record, they do not know what a second is, and they cannot number a minute order. They are cheap for a reason.
The single question that sorts the market: does the tool write the whole minutes document, or does it hand you a transcript and a summary you still have to turn into minutes? Only the first kind saves a clerk the three-to-five hours.
Most vendor comparison charts are a list of features nobody evaluates on. These are the questions that change which tool you should buy, in the order they matter for a county clerk.
| Question | Why it decides the purchase |
|---|---|
| Does it write the whole minutes document? | The difference between a tool that saves twenty minutes and one that saves an evening. A summarizer leaves the parliamentary work — motions, seconds, tallies — on the clerk. |
| Does it capture motions, seconds, and vote tallies as structured fields? | If those live only inside prose, you cannot audit them, renumber them, or fix one without rewriting the paragraph. |
| Can it tell your members apart by voice? | Without speaker identification you are back in the recording, scrubbing to find who moved. Ask whether it learns your board over time or re-guesses every meeting. |
| Will it take the recording you already have? | A tool that only works with its own capture hardware is a much bigger project than a tool that takes your existing YouTube, Zoom, or vendor link. |
| Does the output match your minutes format? | Counties have house style: headings, numbering, the exact motion sentence. A draft in the wrong format is a reformatting job, not a finished document. |
| Does it number minute orders automatically, and renumber when items move? | Manual sequence numbers are the most common source of published errors, and the hardest to correct after the fact. |
| What does year three cost? | The headline license is rarely the number. Ask for the escalator, the implementation fee, and which capabilities are separately priced modules. Our TCO worksheet walks the lines. |
Every row here describes what the product is built to do and the buyer it fits. Where a vendor publishes prices we quote them; where they do not, we say so rather than guess.
| Option | What it is | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Govably | AI that writes the complete official minutes from a recording link or a pasted transcript — motions, seconds, roll-call tallies, attendance, and sequential minute order numbers, in your own template. Agenda builder, packets, approval workflow and citizen portal are in the same plan. Pricing is one flat plan by entity size, quoted on a call; unlimited users and meetings. | Counties and cities whose bottleneck is minutes, that record on YouTube or a video vendor already, and that do not want per-seat or per-meeting caps. Also the fit when you want to keep your current agenda platform and add minutes to it. |
| ClerkMinutes | Self-serve AI minutes for municipal clerks: upload a recording, get a draft with speaker identification and motion/second notation, export to Word or PDF. Published tiers are $99/month (5 meetings, 3 team members, 3 boards) and $249/month (10 meetings, 10 team members, 10 boards), with a custom tier above that and a 14-day free trial. | A small municipality with one or two boards and low meeting volume that wants to start today on a credit card, without a procurement process or a sales call. |
| CivicPlus Agenda & Meeting Management | The former CivicClerk: end-to-end agenda item submission, approval workflow, packet assembly, minutes, citizen portal, and a tie-in to CivicPlus codification and websites. Unlimited users and storage. Quoted per entity; some capabilities, including electronic voting and side-by-side video, carry additional fees. | Counties already standardized on CivicPlus for the website and code, where a single vendor and a single invoice is worth more than best-of-breed minutes. |
| Granicus (Legistar, Peak, OneMeeting) | Three agenda products at different scales plus streaming and records-request tooling. Legistar is the legislative-management heavyweight; Peak and OneMeeting target small and mid-size governments. Pricing is not published and is quoted deal by deal. | Large bodies with real legislative workflow — ordinance lifecycle, committee referral, published legislative history — and organizations that need the streaming and the agenda system from one vendor. |
| BoardDocs (Diligent) | Board-governance-first agenda and policy platform, strongest in school districts and appointed boards. Minutes are captured against agenda items rather than drafted from a recording. | School boards and districts already running BoardDocs governance, where policy management is the center of gravity. |
| General AI notetakers (Otter, Fireflies, Copilot, Zoom AI) | Transcription plus a discussion summary. No concept of a motion, a second, a roll call, or a minute order. Output is prose, not a record. | Internal staff meetings. Not a public body's official record — and cheap enough that clerks try them first, which is why so many counties conclude "AI minutes don't work" after testing the wrong category. |
| Word and email (what most counties do now) | Free software, entirely manual. The clerk types from notes and scrubs the recording to confirm movers and tallies. | Nobody, once you price the staff time honestly — but it stays the default because the cost is a person's evenings rather than a line in the budget. See replacing Word and email. |
Pricing shown for ClerkMinutes is from its published pricing page as of August 13, 2026. CivicPlus and Granicus do not publish prices for these products; see what CivicPlus actually costs for how to find real contract numbers.
You do not need a six-month RFP to tell these apart. You need one real meeting.
If you run two boards, meet monthly, and have a purchasing card, the fastest path to relief is a self-serve tool you can start this afternoon. You do not need a sales call to find out whether AI minutes help you.
If you run eight to thirty boards and committees, hold multiple meetings a week, need unlimited people in the system without counting seats, want the agenda side and the minutes side to be the same system, or have a minutes format nobody else has managed to match — that is where a quoted, configured platform earns its price, and that is the case we would make for Govably.
And if your real problem is that agendas go up late rather than that minutes go out late, minutes software is not your fix. Start with the posting rules for your state.
Govably publishes this page, and Govably is one of the options on it — read it with that in mind. Everything stated about another vendor here comes from that vendor's own published materials or from public records, and is accurate to the best of our knowledge as of August 13, 2026. ClerkMinutes prices and plan limits are quoted from its public pricing page; CivicPlus capabilities and fee notes are from CivicPlus product materials. Vendors change their products and prices; verify anything decision-critical against the vendor directly before you buy. Found something wrong? Email team@govably.com and we will correct it.
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