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Smooth Like Butter Like a Criminal Undercover
Once you look past the recording limit and small gimmicks, I think Butter is pretty solid.
For client and small team calls, it's definitely a solid Zoom alternative that has a refreshing, modern UI. The UX is going to be fairly similar and easy to grasp for most folks. Instead of the buttons being on the bottom, they're now on the side. When sharing your screen, you're greeted with a similar control panel as you get in Zoom that you can drag around for quick access to features like mute, etc.
The recaps are quite a nice feature where you can quickly and easily see everything associated with a call. Need the chat log? Boom. It's there to download. Wanted those notes? They're there as well, and many, many more. So even if you aren't recording the video of a session, there's a very helpful log of the activity and resources.
I would like to see the following, however:
Local Recording - I get cloud recording is expensive, I don't think anyone will argue with that point, and when you're talking about long-term viability and sustainability, that's something to easily look past. That being said, even if it's just for desktop app users, local recording would be a great alternative. I know there was a suggestion to just use local recording software to record the meetings, but it's not quite the same, nor does someone necessarily want to open multiple programs to chomp away at their CPU/GPU the entire time if just one program could be responsible for both conducting and recording.
Webhooks/Integrations - I think the next step for Butter is the ability to integrate with as many things as possible. Currently you can connect your calendar and very easily add Butter links to upcoming events, but it would be nice for it to integrate with booking tools...maybe even TidyCal? wink wink.
Overall, it's a fairly solid and capable meeting tool. I don't think I'll use a majority of the features being marketed, such as the agendas (though that feature does seem to work well). Just give me a way to seamlessly transition to it for everything I do and I'll be good to go!
Jakob_Butter
May 9, 2024Ahh, this was a lovely read, SapphireWolf!
Let me take things 1-by-1:
Local Recording:
It conceptually makes sense, but we've tested it, and the issue is that local recordings also record DMs, the host navigating the interface, etc. - which made them useless to a lot of our users. So we discontinued the local recording option =/
Our recordings are different from e.g. Zoom, Meet in that we need to capture all the stuff going on in Butter (Polls, Flashcards, Miro boards, etc.).
That being said, recording is something we're working a lot on these days!
Webhooks:
We're very aware of this and I'm sure it will happen! It's just a question of time - and users telling us a bit more WHAT they'd like to use them for. So if you have any specific requests on use cases, please send them to friends@butter.us - that'll help us prioritize this!