BrassTranscripts vs Tactiq: Honest Comparison

A sales rep finishes a 45-minute Zoom call. Tactiq's Chrome extension already emailed a summary with action items. The rep also wants the full timestamped transcript with speaker labels for the CRM and a SRT file for the highlights reel. That second part is where Tactiq and BrassTranscripts stop being the same tool.

This is an honest comparison between two services that often get lumped together as "AI meeting transcription" but actually solve different problems. Tactiq is a live Chrome extension. BrassTranscripts is an upload-and-transcribe service. Knowing which one fits a given workflow saves money and rework.

Quick Navigation

• Real-Time Extension vs Upload-and-Transcribe Service
• What Tactiq Does Well
• Where Tactiq Gets Limited
• What BrassTranscripts Does Well
• Where BrassTranscripts Costs More on Light Use
• Privacy and Data Handling
• Use Case Recommendations
• Workflow Comparison: Sales Discovery Call
• Honest Verdict
• Frequently Asked Questions

Real-Time Extension vs Upload-and-Transcribe Service

BrassTranscripts is an upload-and-transcribe service that accepts recorded audio or video files from any source and returns SRT, VTT, TXT, and JSON outputs in 1-3 minutes per hour of audio. Tactiq is a Chrome extension that transcribes Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams calls live as the meeting is happening.

That difference shapes everything else in this comparison. Tactiq lives inside the browser tab where the call is happening. The transcript builds line by line while people are talking. When the call ends, a summary lands in the user's inbox.

BrassTranscripts lives at a URL. A user drags a file into the upload area, pays per file, and downloads four formats. The recording could have been made anywhere — a Zoom call recorded to disk, an iPhone voice memo, a Riverside podcast session, a phone interview captured on a Zoom H5. The service does not care where the audio came from.

Both are AI-powered. Both produce transcripts. They serve different moments in a workflow.

What Tactiq Does Well

Tactiq does live meeting capture better than uploading a file ever could. The Chrome extension installs in about a minute, joins Google Meet or Zoom calls automatically, and shows captions in the meeting tab. After the call, Tactiq delivers an email summary with action items and topic highlights — useful for someone running back-to-back calls who wants the highlights without reading 45 pages of transcript.

The free tier matters. Tactiq's free plan includes 10 monthly transcripts (page checked 2026-05-27), enough for a small-business owner running a handful of client calls per month to get real value without paying anything. That zero-cost entry point is a genuine advantage for light users.

Tactiq's paid plans start at $12 per user per month for Pro on monthly billing ($8 on annual), $20 per user per month for Team, and $40 for Business (page checked 2026-05-27 at https://tactiq.io/pricing). Inside the Google Meet, Zoom, or Teams workflow, Tactiq is purpose-built and well-executed.

Where Tactiq Gets Limited

Tactiq's strength is also its constraint. The Chrome extension only captures what happens in Chrome. A meeting recorded in the Zoom desktop app without Tactiq running gets no transcript. A call captured on someone else's machine never reaches Tactiq's servers. The extension has to be running on a participant's browser during the call.

The platform list is narrow. Tactiq supports Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams (page checked 2026-05-27). A Webex meeting, a Riverside podcast recording, an in-person interview captured on a phone, a sales call recorded by a dialer like Aircall — none of these are Tactiq's territory.

Transcript ownership is a Chrome-extension question. If Tactiq is uninstalled, the data lives in Tactiq's cloud account, not on the user's machine. Users on the free tier hit the 10-transcript monthly cap and either upgrade or lose access to new transcripts that month. The free tier is a sampler, not a long-term workflow.

Summary quality on long meetings is a known limitation of every AI summary tool, Tactiq included. A 90-minute strategy session compressed to a paragraph loses nuance. The transcript itself is what supports the summary, which is why having a clean, timestamped full transcript matters when the meeting was important.

What BrassTranscripts Does Well

BrassTranscripts transcribes any recorded audio or video file regardless of where or how it was captured, producing automatic speaker labels, 4 output formats (TXT, SRT, VTT, JSON), and pay-per-file pricing with no subscription. The service is built for the moment after a recording exists, not for the live capture itself.

The format coverage is the everyday workhorse. A YouTuber needs SRT for captions. A podcaster needs VTT for the web player. A researcher needs TXT for coding interviews in NVivo. A developer needs JSON for downstream analysis. BrassTranscripts produces all four from a single upload at no extra cost.

Speaker labels arrive automatically on every transcript. The system separates each speaker's turns with timestamps. For interviews, depositions, panel discussions, and customer calls where knowing who said what is the entire point, this matters more than a live caption.

Pricing is per file, not per seat. A file 1-15 minutes costs $2.50. A file 16-120 minutes costs $6.00 flat — a 90-minute interview and a 30-minute interview both cost $6.00. There is no monthly seat fee, no commitment, no upgrade prompt.

Cross-platform indifference is the broader point. BrassTranscripts handles a recorded Microsoft Teams meeting, a Webex call exported to MP4, an iPhone voice memo from a hallway interview, and a Zoom recording downloaded after the fact with the same workflow: upload, wait, download.

Where BrassTranscripts Costs More on Light Use

Tactiq has a $0 free tier with 10 monthly transcripts. BrassTranscripts has no free tier — every file is paid, starting at $2.50. A user who transcribes 3-5 short meetings per month and only needs the summary will pay nothing with Tactiq and $7.50-$12.50 with BrassTranscripts.

For a single-user, light-volume use case where speaker labels and SRT output do not matter, Tactiq's economics are better. The honest answer is that BrassTranscripts is not designed to compete on a $0 entry point. It competes on the quality of the file output and on usage patterns where pay-per-file beats per-seat billing.

The crossover happens around the point where output formats or cross-platform support matter. A user transcribing files from three different sources — recorded Zoom calls, in-person interviews, and a podcast — cannot use Tactiq for two of those. The math changes.

Privacy and Data Handling

BrassTranscripts retains uploaded audio for 24 hours and transcripts for 48 hours, then deletes both, and does not train AI models on user data. The retention window is short by design: enough time for a user to download all four formats, not enough for the data to linger.

Tactiq processes meetings through its own infrastructure to produce the AI summary, store the transcript in the Tactiq cloud, and surface it later in the dashboard. Users who care about retention specifics should read Tactiq's data and privacy policy at the source, since the policy is the authoritative description of what Tactiq does with meeting content.

For workflows under stricter privacy expectations — legal depositions, medical research interviews, HR investigations — the question is not which service is more or less private in the abstract. The question is which retention and processing terms match the engagement. BrassTranscripts publishes its retention policy in plain numbers: 24 hours for audio, 48 hours for transcripts. Tactiq's terms vary by plan and require reading the published policy.

Use Case Recommendations

When Tactiq Wins

A user who lives in Google Meet calls all day, wants captions appearing in the meeting tab, and is happy with a paragraph-length summary in their inbox afterward — Tactiq is the right tool. The free tier covers light users at no cost. The Pro plan covers heavy users for $12 per user per month. The Chrome extension friction is acceptable for someone whose calls happen entirely in Chrome.

This is also the right choice when the goal is meeting notes, not a publishable transcript. The summary plus action items workflow is what Tactiq is built around.

When BrassTranscripts Wins

A user who records sales calls in Aircall, runs customer interviews on Zoom, captures hallway conversations on an iPhone, and needs the same transcription workflow for all three — BrassTranscripts handles every source the same way. The output formats cover everything from CRM notes (TXT) to YouTube captions (SRT) to web player captions (VTT) to developer pipelines (JSON).

BrassTranscripts also wins when speaker labels matter. Interviews, depositions, panels, focus groups — anything where the value of the transcript depends on knowing who said what. Tactiq's speaker data comes from the meeting platform; outside Google Meet, Zoom, and Teams, that data does not exist.

The pay-per-file pricing wins for irregular use. A consultant who transcribes 2 hours one month and 12 hours the next pays $12 and $72 respectively with BrassTranscripts. The same usage on Tactiq's Pro tier costs $12 per user per month regardless.

When You Might Use Both

Tactiq for live captions during a routine Google Meet team standup. BrassTranscripts for the official transcript of an important customer interview, board meeting, or sales discovery call where speaker labels and SRT output earn their keep. The two services do not conflict, and the per-call cost of upgrading to BrassTranscripts on top of a Tactiq subscription is the per-file fee — $2.50 or $6.00.

For sales teams, this pattern shows up often: Tactiq runs in the background for every internal call, and BrassTranscripts handles every customer-facing call worth archiving properly. See the sales call transcription and analysis workflow for how transcripts feed into discovery analysis and objection patterns.

Workflow Comparison: Sales Discovery Call

Picture a 45-minute Zoom sales discovery call. The AE wants the transcript with speaker labels, an action-item summary, and a SRT file for a 90-second highlight clip to send the prospect.

With Tactiq

The AE installs the Chrome extension before the call. During the call, Tactiq captures the transcript live in the meeting tab. Captions appear on screen for accessibility. When the call ends, Tactiq emails a summary with action items within a few minutes.

The transcript is available in the Tactiq dashboard as a text export. Speaker separation is based on Zoom's speaker data. To produce a SRT file for the highlight clip, the AE would need to either export the Tactiq transcript and convert it to SRT in another tool, or run the recorded Zoom file through a separate transcription service.

Total cost: $0 if under the 10 monthly free transcript cap, otherwise $12-$20 per user per month.

Total time to delivery: summary arrives within minutes of call end; full transcript available immediately in dashboard.

With BrassTranscripts

The AE records the Zoom call to the cloud or to local disk. After the call, the AE downloads the recording and uploads the audio or video file to BrassTranscripts. Processing takes 1-3 minutes per hour of audio, so a 45-minute file is ready in 1-3 minutes.

The download produces four files:

• TXT for the CRM notes field
• SRT for the highlight clip
• VTT for the prospect-facing follow-up page
• JSON for any downstream analysis (a tool like Gong, or a custom CRM enrichment script)

Speaker labels separate the AE and the prospect with timestamps. The full transcript is the input — the AE pastes it into an LLM prompt for action-item extraction, deal-stage analysis, or objection pattern detection.

Total cost: $6.00 for one file.

Total time to delivery: 1-3 minutes after upload.

The Honest Read

Tactiq is faster to the summary because the summary is generated as part of its core workflow. BrassTranscripts is faster to the timestamped transcript with speaker labels and SRT output because the workflow is built for that delivery shape.

For an AE who runs 20 discovery calls a month and only needs the summary, Tactiq's monthly pricing wins. For an AE who needs CRM-quality notes plus SRT highlight clips on the calls that matter most, BrassTranscripts at $6.00 per important call wins on output, and the two tools coexist.

Honest Verdict

Tactiq is the right choice for live meeting capture inside Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams when the goal is summaries and captions, the user's team lives in Chrome, and the free tier or $12-$40 per user per month pricing fits the budget.

BrassTranscripts is the right choice for after-the-fact transcription of recorded files from any source when the goal is speaker-labeled transcripts, multi-format output (TXT, SRT, VTT, JSON), and pay-per-file pricing without a subscription.

Most users do not have to pick one. Tactiq covers the live caption use case; BrassTranscripts covers the recorded file use case. The total cost of using both is often lower than the cost of forcing one tool to do the other tool's job.

For the deeper dive on each meeting platform's native transcription and where third-party tools fit in, see the Zoom meeting transcription guide, the Google Meet transcription guide, and the Microsoft Teams transcription guide. For a broader comparison against the rest of the AI transcription market, see the Otter.ai alternatives comparison.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the core difference between Tactiq and BrassTranscripts?

Tactiq is a Chrome extension that transcribes Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams calls live while you sit in them. BrassTranscripts is an upload-and-transcribe service that takes a recorded audio or video file and returns TXT, SRT, VTT, and JSON outputs in 1-3 minutes per hour of audio. Tactiq is built for live meetings; BrassTranscripts is built for after-the-fact recordings from any source.

How much does Tactiq cost compared to BrassTranscripts?

Tactiq has a free tier with 10 monthly transcripts and paid plans starting at $12 per user per month (Pro), $20 per user per month (Team), and $40 per user per month (Business), with discounts for annual billing (page checked 2026-05-27). BrassTranscripts charges $2.50 for files up to 15 minutes and $6.00 flat for files 16-120 minutes, with no monthly commitment. A user transcribing 4 hours per month pays $24 with BrassTranscripts and $12-$20 with Tactiq depending on plan.

Can Tactiq transcribe a recorded file that was not captured live?

Tactiq is built around its live Chrome extension capturing meetings as they happen on Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams. If a sales call was recorded on an iPhone, a podcast was recorded in Riverside, or an interview was recorded on a Zoom H5, that file needs a service that accepts uploads. BrassTranscripts accepts uploaded audio and video files regardless of where they were recorded.

Does BrassTranscripts work during live meetings like Tactiq does?

No. BrassTranscripts processes pre-recorded files only, with no live captions, meeting bot, or calendar integration. The trade-off is processing-time accuracy versus real-time speed. A user who needs live captions on a Google Meet call should use Tactiq; a user who needs the official transcript of a recorded meeting should use BrassTranscripts.

Which service handles speaker labels better?

BrassTranscripts produces automatic speaker labels (Speaker 1, Speaker 2, and so on) on every transcript, with each speaker's turns separated and timestamped. Tactiq also separates speakers in its live transcripts using the meeting platform's speaker data from Google Meet, Zoom, or Teams. For recordings captured outside those platforms — phone calls, in-person interviews, podcasts — Tactiq is not the right tool, and BrassTranscripts handles speaker identification independently.

Can a team use Tactiq and BrassTranscripts together?

Yes, and many workflows benefit from both. Tactiq handles live captions and quick summaries during a Google Meet or Zoom call, useful for note-taking in the moment. BrassTranscripts produces the longer-form transcript with timestamped speaker labels and SRT or VTT output for the recorded version of important calls — sales discoveries, customer interviews, deposition recordings — where the official transcript matters more than the live caption.