Is Granola Safe? A Buyer's Checklist on Security and HIPAA

Granola is a sound choice for ordinary business meetings and a careful one for regulated data. No bot joins your call, the desktop apps never save meeting audio, and Granola holds a SOC 2 Type II report achieved in July 2025. The gaps sit in the plan gates. HIPAA workspaces with a signed BAA exist only on Enterprise, which starts from $35 per user per month, and that BAA covers the desktop apps only. All data lives on AWS in the United States. There is no built-in two-factor sign-in. Our read: safe enough for sales, product and internal calls; check every item below before patient records, student records or EU-residency rules enter the picture.

What Granola keeps, and what it never stores

Start with the data map, because it answers most privacy questions. On Mac and Windows, Granola transcribes your microphone and system audio in real time and does not record or save audio or video at any point ^[1]. Phones work differently: audio is cached during the meeting, transcribed afterward, then deleted from Granola's and third-party systems. What stays is text. Notes and transcripts are kept indefinitely unless you delete them or set a deletion period, and notes are also cached on your device for offline viewing.

• Transcript lifetime. Each user can auto-delete transcripts after 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months or 1 year, on every plan. Notes are not affected. On Enterprise a workspace policy overrides personal settings.
• Who reads what. Notes are private by default on every plan. Recipients of a shared note see the summary, not the full transcript; folder collaborators in the desktop app do get full transcripts.
• Sharing caps. Only Enterprise admins can set workspace-wide sharing limits, such as blocking public links, and the change applies retroactively.

The missing audio file is a privacy gain with a practical cost. There is no recording to replay, so a disputed quote can only be checked against the transcript. Transcripts cannot be edited, and redaction is manual: you delete sensitive chunks by hand, then regenerate the note so the removed text leaves the summary. Deleting a whole transcript is permanent. Our Granola transcripts guide covers the panel, the export routes and the speaker labels.

Compliance: HIPAA, GDPR and the hard gaps

The compliance story is solid for general business data and narrow for regulated data. Granola covers GDPR and UK GDPR with a DPA that carries EU and UK standard contractual clauses, with Granola acting as processor. A UK entity, Granola Labs Ltd, sits beside Granola, Inc. in Delaware. Subprocessor changes come with at least 10 days' notice and 30 days to object. The named transcription providers are Deepgram and AssemblyAI.

• HIPAA. HIPAA workspaces and a Business Associate Agreement are Enterprise only, arranged through sales; you cannot switch them on yourself. The BAA covers the desktop and laptop apps only, so phones stay out of PHI work, and Basic or Business accounts should hold no PHI.
• Data residency. Everything sits on AWS in the United States, encrypted at rest and in transit. No EU, UK or other regional residency is offered.
• Education records. Granola is not FERPA compliant.
• Deployment. No on-premises install, no private cloud, no bring-your-own model, no offline transcription.

That list closes doors for some buyers. A hospital that wants audio processed inside its own network has no Granola option, and neither does a firm whose policy requires EU hosting. Rivals gate regulated features too, so read their terms with the same care. Otter sells HIPAA as an Enterprise add-on with a BAA. Fireflies, which is not in our catalog, offers HIPAA and FERPA on Enterprise on request, tied to its Private Storage option and a signed agreement.

Sign-in, admin control and AI data

Granola has no passwords and no built-in two-factor authentication. You sign in with Google, Microsoft or SSO, so your protection equals your identity provider's policy. That works for a company enforcing MFA in Google Workspace or Entra ID. It is weak for a consultant on a personal Gmail account. SSO over SAML 2.0 or OIDC, plus SCIM provisioning, is Enterprise only and needs at least 50 active members or a 50-seat Enterprise commitment. By our arithmetic, the smallest workspace that qualifies for SSO therefore pays from $1,750 a month, or from $21,000 a year. Otter sets its SSO and SCIM bar at 100 users.

• Audit API (Enterprise). Logs sign-ins, note and transcript views, sharing, member changes, API and MCP use, exports and billing events. It serves only the last year, so archive events yourself. Share-link views by signed-out people are never logged.
• Legal Holds API (Enterprise). Preserves notes, transcripts and attachments; custodians see no change.
• AI-tool access. MCP works on every plan, so notes can reach Claude or ChatGPT from Basic. Admin control over member MCP, API and integration scopes is Enterprise only.
• Devices. Enterprise lists MDM and Intune app wrapping for iOS. Granola does not support Intune app protection during sign-in.

Model training is on by default

Granola trains its own models on anonymized (de-identified) data unless each user opts out with one toggle in Settings, and Enterprise workspaces are opted out by default ^[2]. Third parties such as OpenAI and Anthropic may not train on your data. On Business, every member must opt out individually, and the toggle is not yet in the Android app. Opting out does not remove data already incorporated into models. One Chat model needs a policy too: with Fable 5.1, available on Business, Anthropic keeps agent logs for 30 days. It never runs in HIPAA workspaces.

Consent: what other people on the call see

By default, nothing. No bot appears, no participant entry is added, and speaker tags notify no one. That makes Granola discreet, and it shifts the legal duty onto you. Granola's help says the user must obtain consent, and under its User Terms the Customer, usually the employer that created the workspace, is solely responsible for the consents recording laws require. Granola calls its own tools notice, not consent, and advises saying out loud that you take notes in person and on phone calls.

• Automated chat message (every plan, per user). Posts once transcription starts and someone else has joined: Zoom and Teams on macOS and Windows, Slack huddles on macOS, Google Meet through the Chrome extension.
• Granola Watermark (every plan, per user). A camera overlay while transcribing; needs macOS 14 or later, or Windows 11.
• Heads Up (Enterprise). A pre-join page through Google Calendar add-ons or automatic links, plus automatic Outlook links that need a Microsoft 365 admin. It stays off until an admin turns it on.
• Enforcement (Enterprise). Admins can require the chat message and watermark; Granola may then stop transcribing after a countdown if the camera is off.

The security record, in Granola's own post-mortems

Granola publishes post-mortems, which counts in its favor, and four issues are on file. The largest: an AssemblyAI API key shipped in the iOS TestFlight beta from November 2024 left transcripts of 333 beta testers vulnerable until the key was revoked in March 2025 ^[3]. Granola says one other IP address reached 29 transcriptions from 16 testers in a 12-minute window, matching a researcher's controlled testing. The production macOS app was unaffected. Granola then added Workstreet as a security partner.

The other three are smaller. Fixes in May and June 2025 cut off 187 users who had been removed from linked Google Workspace accounts but kept access. A May 2025 patch closed a path for legacy unmanaged Google accounts to join workspaces through domain auto-join. A desktop navigation vulnerability reported in June 2026 was fixed that month; Granola says it found no evidence of exploitation. The DPA promises incident notice typically within 72 hours. Read the contract too. Under the User Terms, liability to an individual user is capped at $100.

The safe setup has a price: seats and plans

Most controls above sit on Enterprise, so the bill belongs on the checklist. Granola prices per user per month and bills per workspace: every active member, admins included, is a paid seat on the same plan, with no mixed tiers. Business costs $14 per user per month, billed monthly, and Granola sells no annual Business plan. Enterprise starts from $35 per user per month, can be bought in the app with no seat minimum, and carries annual billing only on Enterprise contracts.

The trigger for Enterprise is one requirement, not team size. Any one of PHI, SSO, the Audit API, a workspace retention policy, Heads Up or enforced notices forces it. By our arithmetic, a 10-person practice that needs HIPAA pays from $350 a month on Enterprise instead of $140 a month on Business. Without those needs, Business covers a team of any size. The free Basic plan shows only the last 30 days of notes in the app; older notes are kept and return on upgrade, as our Granola pricing guide explains.

The bottom line

Granola passes the basic security check: SOC 2 Type II, no bot, no stored desktop audio, private notes by default and published post-mortems. It fails specific checks, and those decide the purchase. PHI needs Enterprise and stays on the desktop apps. EU residency, FERPA and built-in 2FA are not available on any plan, so if one of those is a hard requirement, no Granola plan will meet it. Training stays on until each user opts out, except on Enterprise. If you need PHI handling, SSO, the Audit API, workspace retention policies, Heads Up or enforced notices, budget Enterprise from day one. If you need none of them, Business is enough.