Granola is an AI notepad for meetings that never sends a bot into the call. The Mac or Windows app transcribes your microphone and system audio once you start it, then turns your rough typed notes into full meeting notes, with your own words in black and the AI's additions in gray. Basic is free ($0 per user per month) with no meeting or minute caps, but it shows only the last 30 days of notes. Business costs $14 per user per month, billed monthly, and unlocks the full history, most integrations and the API. Our verdict: a strong choice for people who want notes, not recordings. Teams that need audio to replay should look elsewhere.
How Granola works: your device listens, no bot joins
Granola captures audio from the computer itself, so nothing new appears in the participant list on Zoom, Google Meet or Teams, and no host permission or API setup is needed. It works on any call you can hear, as host or guest, and also on Slack huddles, Webex and in-person conversations. It never starts on its own. You click the notification that appears one minute before a calendar meeting with two or more attendees, open the meeting's note, or press New Note, and ad-hoc calls get a Take Notes prompt. A meeting you forgot to start cannot be recovered later.
The notes are the product. During the call you jot down whatever matters to you, or nothing at all, and Granola writes the enhanced version from the transcript, your notes and the calendar event. A Zoom In view shows the transcript quotes behind each line, which makes checking a summary quick. Desktop audio is transcribed in real time and then deleted, so there is no recording to replay or export [1]. The iPhone and Android apps handle in-person meetings and outbound phone calls only. They cannot capture Zoom, Meet or Teams audio, so virtual meetings always need the desktop app.
On the free Basic plan, notes older than 30 days are hidden in the app, Chat and MCP. They are kept, not deleted, and return when the workspace upgrades.
Plans in brief: free to start, $14 per user a month to keep everything
Prices shown are what Granola lists for visitors in the United States, in US dollars. Your price can differ by country, currency and local taxes such as VAT.
| Plan | Price | Billing | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $0 per user per month | Free; no card, no time limit | Unlimited meetings, 30-day history, Chat on the Auto model, one integration, MCP on recent personal notes |
| Business | $14 per user per month | Billed monthly only | Full history, model selection, CRM and workspace integrations, API and webhooks |
| Enterprise | From $35 per user per month | In the app, or a contract with annual billing | SSO and SCIM (50+ users or a 50-seat commitment), HIPAA with a BAA, Audit API, org-wide policies |
Billing is per workspace, the detail buyers miss most often. Every active member, admins included, is a paid seat on the same plan, and anyone who joins by invite or domain auto-join is billed from the day they join [2]. Sharing a note adds no seat. With no annual Business plan, Business comes to $168 a year per user by our arithmetic, billed monthly, and a 10-person team pays $140 a month, or $1,680 a year. Enterprise, from $35 per user per month, costs at least $21 more per user each month ($252 a year) and buys SSO, HIPAA and admin policies, not better notes.
Granola offers time-limited trials of Business and Enterprise, and an expired trial drops to Basic without a charge. Accepted students at accredited universities in the US, UK and Canada get 12 months of Business free, as do startups that raised a pre-seed or seed round from Granola's approved-investor list and never paid before. Nonprofits verified through Goodstack get 50% off Business. Cancelling keeps the paid plan until the period ends, then the workspace moves to Basic, and Granola does not publish a refund policy for subscription fees. Our Granola pricing guide walks through every billing rule.
Every active member of a paid workspace is billed, admins included, and anyone who joins by invite or domain auto-join is billed from the day they join. Review auto-join settings before moving to Business.
Where Granola earns its place
Bot-free capture is the headline, but the daily value sits in what happens after the call. Granola Chat answers questions about one meeting, a folder or your whole history, and cites the notes it drew on. Business and Enterprise offer model selection, while Basic runs on Auto. Recipes save the prompts you reuse, open with a slash in the chat bar and work on every plan. Templates shape the notes, though custom ones are created on desktop only. On Business, pre-meeting briefs (Google Calendar only) and follow-up email drafts (Gmail only) cover the edges of meetings with external guests.
For anyone who already works inside AI assistants, the MCP server is unusually generous. It is on every plan. Basic reaches personal notes from the last 30 days without transcripts, while Business reaches personal and public workspace notes with full history and transcripts. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other clients connect through a browser sign-in, with no API key involved. Business also opens the public API and webhooks. Slack is native on every plan; Notion, HubSpot, Attio and Affinity are native on Business. Salesforce runs through Zapier on paid plans, and the pricing page lists advanced integrations such as Salesforce on Enterprise.
Platform coverage is broad for a young product. Granola, Inc. started in London in 2023 and launched publicly in May 2024; today it runs on macOS 14 or later, Windows 10 or later, iPhone, Android (since July 2026) and Apple Watch, plus a web view for reading and editing notes. Transcription covers more than 30 languages on desktop and 17 on mobile. The interface is English only, though, and there is no live translation: the transcript stays in the spoken language, while summaries can be set to English or translated on request in Chat.
Recipes store the prompts you ask after every call and open with a slash in Chat. They work on every plan, Basic included.
The limits to weigh before you commit
What the no-bot design gives up
The design that keeps bots out also removes things some teams rely on. No audio or video file exists, so you cannot re-listen to a disputed moment. The transcript cannot be edited either; you can only delete chunks and regenerate the note. Pre-recorded files cannot be uploaded for transcription. Auto-start for every meeting is not available, so a packed day depends on clicking each notification. Desktop transcription stops after 15 minutes without new audio or when the computer sleeps, and back-to-back meetings can merge into one note unless you click stop between them.
The free plan's 30-day window
On Basic, notes older than 30 days are hidden in the app and from Chat, MCP and the People and Companies views. They are kept, not deleted. They come back on upgrade, and the CSV export still delivers titles and summaries for your full history. That makes Basic a fair trial of the workflow but a poor archive. Plans are also all-or-nothing inside a workspace: there are no mixed tiers, so a team cannot keep a few heavy users on Business and everyone else free in the same space without splitting into two workspaces that share no notes.
Granola deletes meeting audio after transcription, so there is nothing to replay if a quote is disputed. Keep the transcripts you may need and avoid short auto-deletion periods.
Security, privacy and consent
Granola holds SOC 2 Type II, achieved in July 2025, and offers a standard DPA with EU and UK clauses, but no ISO 27001 certification yet. Data sits on AWS in the United States, with no regional residency. There is no built-in two-factor authentication; protection comes from your Google, Microsoft or SSO sign-in. HIPAA workspaces with a BAA are Enterprise-only [3], arranged through sales, and the BAA covers the desktop apps only. Granola is not FERPA compliant. Training is opt-out: Granola trains its own models on anonymized data unless each user switches it off, and third parties may not train on it.
Granola publishes its own post-mortems, four of them between 2025 and 2026; the most serious, an exposed transcription key in the iOS beta, left 333 testers' transcripts vulnerable until a March 2025 fix. Consent is yours to handle. Other participants see nothing unless you turn on the automated chat message or camera watermark, per-user options on every plan, or Heads Up, a pre-join notice for Google Calendar and Outlook that an Enterprise admin switches on. Granola's terms place recording-law consent on the customer.
How we score Granola
Our Toolkit Score of 3.9/5 weighs the capture design, the AI features, plans and billing, integrations, security and user sentiment, each on its own evidence. Granola gains on notes quality, MCP reach and a usable free plan. It loses ground on the missing audio, the monthly-only Business plan, US-only hosting and compliance gated to Enterprise. The full axis-by-axis breakdown follows.
Granola covers the core meeting-notes job without a meeting bot: the Mac and Windows apps capture the device microphone and system audio for any meeting the user can hear (Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, Slack huddles, browser calls, in-person talk), with no Zoom host permission or API setup; the iPhone, Android and Apple Watch apps capture in-person meetings, and iPhone and Android place outbound phone calls through Granola's dialer in about 40 countries. Around the transcript sit AI-enhanced notes (the user's own words kept apart from AI additions), templates, Recipes, Granola Chat, folders and Spaces, People and Companies views built from calendar attendees, a Customer calls folder on Business, transparency features (automated chat message, Granola Watermark, Heads Up on Enterprise), speaker tags on desktop for Meet, Zoom and Teams, transcript chunk deletion and per-user transcript auto-deletion from 1 day to 1 year. No plan caps meetings or minutes, and Business and Enterprise keep unlimited history. Held back by what the design leaves out: no audio or video is ever stored, so there is no playback and no audio file to export; no upload of pre-recorded files; transcripts cannot be edited (only chunks deleted); no automatic start for every meeting; no live translation; the phone apps cannot capture Zoom, Meet or Teams audio and take no inbound calls; Basic shows only the last 30 days of notes; exports run as a CSV of the notes you own, with no admin or company-wide export; voice typing and shared-screen snapshots are Mac only; and Granola states it does not offer conversation intelligence such as talk ratios, coaching dashboards or forecasting.
AI is the product: notes enhanced from the transcript, the user's typed notes and the calendar event, with a zoom-in to the quotes behind a line and regeneration with another template; Granola Chat across all meetings, one meeting, a folder or space, selected meetings or People and Companies, with cited sources and Coverage Notes, on desktop, iOS and Android; Recipes (saved prompts, single or multi-meeting) on every plan; pre-meeting briefs on Business and Enterprise; follow-up email drafts; Chat actions that draft a Gmail email, a Slack message or a Google Calendar event after confirmation; a workspace dictionary; and the Granola MCP server on every plan for Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and other clients. Business and Enterprise choose the Chat model among OpenAI, Anthropic and Google models; Granola says notes use a blend of models, primarily OpenAI and Anthropic. Granola publishes no Chat query quota and no AI-credit system. Held back by Basic Chat limited to the Auto model and the last 30 days, briefs that need Google Calendar and cover only meetings with people outside the organization, follow-up emails and Chat actions on Gmail and Google Calendar only (no Outlook yet), Chat actions on desktop only, no Chat on iPad, People and Companies that cannot be added by hand, no live coaching or sales analytics, and model training on anonymized (de-identified) data unless each user opts out (Enterprise is opted out by default), where opting out does not remove data already used.
Slack runs on every plan (posting a link and summary to channels, folder auto-posting), and the MCP server on every plan reaches personal notes from the last 30 days on Basic and personal plus public workspace notes on Business, over OAuth with no API key. Business adds Notion, Zapier (two triggers whose payload includes the full transcript, and through Zapier Linear, Jira, Asana and Salesforce), HubSpot (a Meeting or Note on matched contacts, companies or deals), Attio and Affinity, plus the Granola API with personal keys and admin workspace keys and webhooks for note.generated, note.edited and note.access_granted; Enterprise adds the Audit API, the Legal Holds API, admin scope controls and, on the pricing page, advanced integrations such as Salesforce. Calendars are Google Calendar and cloud Microsoft 365 Outlook, read-only. Held back by a short native list (six named apps), Notion export one note at a time with no automatic or bulk sync, no HubSpot contact creation and no custom objects or field mapping (Zapier for those), Slack posting to channels only and needing a Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account, Salesforce through Zapier on paid plans (the pricing page lists advanced integrations such as Salesforce on Enterprise), an API limited to reading notes, transcripts, folders and spaces with no sandbox and one shared rate pool of 5 requests per second per workspace or user, no Apple Calendar and no on-premises Exchange.
There is no bot to admit, approve or remove: the desktop app captures audio on the device, works the same for Zoom, Meet and Teams whether the user hosts or not, and other participants see nothing unless the user turns on a transparency feature; a notification one minute before a calendar meeting with two or more attendees starts a transcript in one click, ad-hoc calls trigger a Take Notes prompt, and the user can type rough notes while Granola fills in the rest (it also works with no typed notes). Buyers track no minute pool, meeting cap or AI-credit balance. Windows grants permissions at install; Granola says setup takes under five minutes. Held back by a manual start for every meeting (auto-start for all meetings is not available and a meeting not captured cannot be recovered), macOS permissions for the microphone and screen and system audio recording, Bluetooth headsets dropping to lower quality when Granola uses their microphone, meeting-app devices that must match the system defaults or one side may be missing, transcription that stops after 15 minutes without new audio or when the computer sleeps, custom templates created and applied only on desktop, workspaces created only on desktop, sign-in limited to Google, Microsoft or SSO, an interface in English only, and apps more than 6 weeks out of date blocked until updated.
Basic is free ($0 per user per month) with no card and no time limit, unlimited meetings, Chat, Recipes, custom templates, shared folders, Slack and MCP, but only the last 30 days of notes visible in the app (older notes kept and returned on upgrade). Business costs $14 per user per month billed monthly ($168 a year by our arithmetic) with unlimited history, model choice, briefs, follow-up emails, the CRM integrations, the API and webhooks and no minute caps, below Otter Pro at $16.99 per user per month billed monthly (our arithmetic, same billing term). Registered nonprofits get 50% off Business, accepted students and startups get 12 months of Business free, and a new user signing up through a referral link gets 2 months of Business. Held back by no annual price for Business (annual billing only on Enterprise contracts), billing per workspace where every active member, admins included, is a paid seat from the day they join and one workspace cannot mix plans, Enterprise from $35 per user per month (from $420 a year by our arithmetic) for SSO and SCIM (50 or more users), HIPAA, the Audit API and org-wide policies, a trial whose length Granola does not publish, and no published refund policy for subscription fees (VAT already charged is not refunded).
Granola holds SOC 2 Type II (July 2025), offers a standard DPA with EU and UK SCCs on every plan, encrypts data at rest and in transit on AWS in the United States with daily backups, deletes meeting audio after transcription, offers HIPAA workspaces with a BAA on Enterprise, gives Enterprise the Audit API, the Legal Holds API, workspace-wide retention and sharing policies, model training off by default and Dedicated support, keeps a public status page, and publishes its own post-mortems of security issues with a vulnerability disclosure policy. Held back by Standard support on Basic and Business, no published uptime commitment, no EU, UK or other regional data residency, no ISO 27001 certification yet, no NHS DSP Toolkit, not FERPA compliant, a BAA that covers the desktop and laptop apps only, no built-in two-factor authentication (protection comes from the Google, Microsoft or SSO account), only the standard DPA (no custom DPAs), four security issues with published post-mortems between 2025 and 2026 (including an exposed transcription key in the iOS beta that left 333 testers' transcripts vulnerable, fixed March 2025), and User Terms that cap liability to a user at $100 and supply the service as is.
US App Store 4.96 from 14,664 ratings and Google Play 4.8 from 4,169 (read November 2026). Axis score 4.9: the mean of each platform's displayed rating with at least 30 reviews, weighted by review count (18,833 reviews; computed 4.92). Only the two app stores carry the axis, so it reflects the mobile and overall app audience; no review-site score could be confirmed (the G2 listing exists but its score could not be read, Capterra and TrustRadius could not be read, and Trustpilot shows a single review, too few to count). No complaint-theme data was available.
docs.granola.ai combines a help center that states the plan for most features (billing, seats, trials, transparency, transcription, languages, integrations, MCP, MDM deployment, SSO set-up, retention and deletion) with a developer reference for the public API, webhooks, the Audit API and the Legal Holds API, including rate limits, pagination, event lists, error codes and a dated API changelog; the Terms, Privacy Policy, DPA, vulnerability disclosure policy and security post-mortems sit in the same center, and a dated updates feed records releases. Held back by a large blog whose older posts contradict the pricing page and help center and have not been updated: posts saying there is no Android app, that Granola is not HIPAA compliant, that it supports 10 desktop languages, that macOS 13 is the minimum, that MCP is Business and above, that the API is Enterprise only or absent, a 14-day free-history glossary, and help pages that word the Enterprise price differently or describe training as opt-in in one DPA section and opt-out in another.
Weighted across the axes above (weights reflect what actually drives the decision in this category). How we score →
The app-store ratings rest on thousands of reviews from iPhone and Android users, which makes them far steadier than a small sample. They mostly reflect individuals using the apps day to day, not a team buying seats, setting up SSO or untangling per-workspace billing, so weigh the billing rules above separately. A high store score says little about whether the 30-day Basic window or monthly-only Business billing suits your team.
Who should pick Granola, and who should look elsewhere
Granola fits consultants, founders, investors and customer-facing staff who run many external calls from a Mac or Windows laptop and want clean notes plus searchable Chat without a bot announcing itself. A solo user can stay on Basic indefinitely if 30 days of history is enough. Once older notes matter, Business at $14 per user per month is the step, and small teams should count every member who might join through domain auto-join before they upgrade.
Look elsewhere if you need a recording to replay, files to transcribe, a tool that joins every meeting by itself, or data kept in the EU or UK. Healthcare teams below Enterprise and schools needing FERPA are out. Granola says it focuses on documentation and retrieval, not conversation intelligence, so it offers no talk ratios, coaching dashboards or forecasting. Otter Pro costs $16.99 per user a month billed monthly, or $8.33 billed annually, for up to 5 billed users and 1,200 minutes a month. At the same monthly term, Granola Business costs $2.99 less per user than Otter Pro. Otter's Notetaker joins Zoom, Teams and Meet calls automatically and Otter imports audio and video files, which Granola cannot do; our Otter vs Granola comparison covers the trade.
Frequently asked questions
Does Granola work with AirPods or a headset?+
Yes. On a Mac, Granola captures system audio whatever the output device, AirPods included, but a Bluetooth headset's microphone drops to lower quality, so Granola suggests choosing the built-in mic in the transcript window.
Can people I share a note with read the full transcript?+
No. Recipients of a shared note and web links see the summary, not the full transcript; collaborators in a shared folder in the desktop app do get full transcripts. Sharing a note adds no paid seat.
What happens when I delete my Granola account?+
Deleting the account in Settings > Profile permanently removes it and every note you own, including notes in shared folders, and cannot be undone. It does not cancel billing, so cancel in Settings > Billing and export your notes first.
Is there a minimum age to use Granola?+
Yes. Granola's User Terms bar anyone under 16 or under the age of majority in their jurisdiction.
The bottom line
Granola does one thing very well: it turns meetings into good notes without putting a bot in the room, and it keeps no audio afterwards. Our score reflects strong notes, generous MCP access and a free plan with no meeting caps, set against real gaps. There is no recording to fall back on, no file uploads, no regional data residency, no annual Business price, and HIPAA only on Enterprise. If notes are what you need and your calls run through a Mac or Windows laptop, start on Basic and upgrade when 30 days stops being enough.
- [1] Granola help: Security, Privacy & Data FAQs (2026-11) https://docs.granola.ai/help-center/consent-security-privacy/security-privacy-data-faqs
- [2] Granola help: Subscriptions and billing (2026-11) https://docs.granola.ai/help-center/managing-your-account/subscriptions-and-billing
- [3] Pricing plans (2026-11) https://www.granola.ai/pricing