Granola vs Fireflies: No-Bot Notes or Recorded Meetings?

Granola and Fireflies.ai do the same chore in opposite ways. Granola listens through your Mac or Windows computer's own microphone and system audio, sends no bot into the call and keeps no audio. Granola Business costs $14 per user per month, billed monthly. Fireflies, which is not in our catalog, sends a notetaker bot into meetings by default, stores the recordings and meters its AI extras with credits. Fireflies Pro costs $18 per seat per month, billed monthly. On the same billing term, that is $4 more per user a month by our arithmetic. Pick Granola for quiet, typed-plus-AI notes. Pick Fireflies when you need recordings, uploads or video.

How each one hears the meeting

Fireflies starts from a bot. Its notetaker, fred@fireflies.ai, is invited to a meeting or auto-joins your calendar meetings on Zoom, Google Meet, Teams and Webex, so it sits in the call as a participant. It also offers bot-free routes: a desktop app for Windows 10+ and macOS 12+ that detects a meeting and starts transcribing automatically while showing a Fireflies indicator to participants, a Chrome extension for Google Meet only, and a Google Meet SDK integration with no visible bot. Add a mobile app, a browser Web Recorder, phone dialers and file uploads.

Granola has a single route on the computer. The desktop app passes microphone and system audio straight to its transcription provider, and no bot joins Zoom, Meet, Teams or anything else ^[1]. It never starts on its own. You click the notification a minute before a calendar meeting with two or more attendees, open the meeting's note, or press New Note. Other participants see nothing unless you turn on Granola's automated chat message or its video watermark; the Heads Up pre-join page is an Enterprise feature.

Consent stays with you. Both vendors put the duty to tell participants on the user, and Granola's terms place it on the customer organization. On phones the gap narrows. Granola's iPhone and Android apps capture in-person meetings and outbound phone calls, but they cannot capture Zoom, Meet or Teams audio, so virtual meetings need the desktop app. Fireflies' mobile app records in-person conversations and voice notes and accepts uploaded recordings.

What you keep afterward: recordings, storage and credits

Granola keeps no audio. The desktop app does not record or save audio or video at any point, and the phone apps cache audio only until transcription, then delete it. There is no recording to replay or export, and you cannot upload a pre-recorded file. What remains is the transcript plus enhanced notes, where your typed words stay black and AI additions show in gray. Fireflies works the other way: it stores recordings, adds video from Pro (720p on Business, 1080p on Enterprise) and transcribes MP3, MP4, WAV and M4A uploads.

Storing recordings brings storage rules. Fireflies Free includes 400 minutes of storage, and once it fills you must delete older meetings. Pro gives 8,000 minutes per seat, pooled across the team, so three Pro users share 24,000 minutes. Business and Enterprise storage is unlimited. Each meeting recording stops at 2 hours on Free and Pro and at 3 hours on Business. Granola has no meeting or minute caps on any plan, and with no audio stored, there is no storage quota to watch.

Credits are the other meter. Fireflies transcription, note-taking and recap emails use no credits, but AskFred questions, AI Skills, custom summaries, soundbites and Voice Agents do, at one credit a minute for Voice Agents. Fireflies includes 20 AI credits on Free, 30 on Business and 50 on Enterprise. Extra Fireflies credits come in packs that start at 50 credits for $5 a month, need a paid plan and go into a team pool, and unused purchased credits do not carry over. Granola has no AI-credit system; Basic uses the Auto model in Chat, while Business and Enterprise get model selection.

Free plans: 30 days of history or 3 transcriptions

Granola Basic is free ($0 per user per month), with no card and no time limit, and it notes unlimited meetings. Its limit is history. Basic shows only the last 30 days of notes in the app, and the same window applies to Chat, the MCP server and the People and Companies views. Older notes are kept, not deleted, and come back when the workspace upgrades. Basic also includes templates, Recipes (saved Chat prompts), shared folders, the Slack integration and the mobile apps, so the free tier is a working notetaker rather than a demo.

Fireflies Free changed for new accounts. For sign-ups from September 2026, it includes 3 meeting transcriptions by default, and turning on Auto-join for calendar meetings removes that cap ^[2]. Inviting the bot by hand covers only that meeting. Unlimited transcripts are raw text; summaries and action items still draw on AI credits. Free also limits recordings to 2 hours, takes uploads up to 100 MB and 150 minutes per file at one credit each, and reserves transcript downloads for paid plans.

So the free tiers trade differently. Granola gives you every meeting without a bot but forgets the visible past after a month. Fireflies gives you an API and 50+ integrations on day one, but unlimited transcription only if the bot auto-joins your calendar, inside 400 minutes of storage. If a month of history is enough and a bot is not welcome, Granola's free tier goes further; if you need the API now, Fireflies' does.

Prices on the same billing term

Granola bills per user per month, per workspace, and every active member is a paid seat, admins included. Basic is $0; Business costs $14 per user per month, billed monthly, and Granola sells no annual Business plan ^[3]. Granola Enterprise starts from $35 per user per month, with annual billing available on Enterprise contracts. Fireflies Pro is $18 per seat per month billed monthly or $10 billed annually. Fireflies Business is $29 monthly or $19 annually, per seat per month. Fireflies Enterprise is $39 per seat per month, billed annually only.

Compare like with like. Billed monthly, Granola Business at $14 against Fireflies Pro at $18 is $168 against $216 per user a year, by our arithmetic. For five users that is $70 against $90 a month. Fireflies Business, the tier with unlimited storage and CRM autofill, costs $15 more per user a month than Granola Business; five users pay $145 a month against $70, a $75 gap by our arithmetic. Annual commitment changes the picture. Paid yearly, Fireflies Pro comes to $120 per seat, while twelve monthly Granola Business payments total $168, both by our arithmetic; that crosses billing terms, because Granola has no annual Business price.

At fifty seats on annual enterprise tiers, Granola Enterprise runs from $21,000 a year and Fireflies Enterprise $23,400 a year, both our arithmetic. Trials differ too. Granola offers time-limited Business and Enterprise trials without a published length, and an expired trial drops to Basic without a charge. Fireflies' 7-day Business trial needs a card, charges automatically unless cancelled and runs once per account. Granola publishes no refund policy for subscription fees; our Granola pricing guide covers its seat and cancellation rules.

Developers, AI tools and compliance

Both connect to AI assistants over MCP. Granola's MCP server works on every plan: Basic reaches your personal notes from the last 30 days without transcripts, Business adds public workspace notes and transcripts, and Enterprise admins decide. It signs in with OAuth and takes no API key. Fireflies runs its MCP server with OAuth through Google or Microsoft; Claude Desktop can use an API key instead. Fireflies' MCP shares its API rate limits, and its zero data retention does not cover data sent to AI tools that way.

The API gap is real. Fireflies opens its API on every plan, at 30 requests a minute and 500 a day on Free, 60 a minute and 5,000 a day on Pro. Granola's API and webhooks start at Business. Fireflies lists 100+ integrations, and Business adds Autofill CRM for HubSpot and Salesforce plus conversation intelligence. Granola covers Slack on Basic and Notion, Zapier, HubSpot, Attio and Affinity on Business. It reaches Salesforce through Zapier on paid plans, and its pricing page lists advanced integrations such as Salesforce on Enterprise.

For regulated teams, both reserve HIPAA for Enterprise. Granola's BAA, arranged through sales, covers the desktop apps only. Fireflies offers HIPAA and FERPA on Enterprise on request, tied to its Private Storage option and a signed agreement; Granola is not FERPA compliant. Granola stores data on AWS in the United States with no regional residency, while Fireflies stores in the US on AWS and GCP by default and sells Private Storage on Enterprise. Granola trains its own models on anonymized data unless each user opts out. Fireflies says it does not train on customer meetings. Note one access difference: a Fireflies Enterprise Super Admin can open every meeting, while Granola admins cannot view private notes.

Which one fits your team

Choose Granola when the people across the table should not see a notetaker. Consultants, investors and anyone on client calls get notes with no participant entry, and the free Basic plan already covers unlimited meetings. It suits note-takers who type a few lines and want AI to fill in the rest. It is weaker when you need the actual recording, video, transcription of files you already have, FERPA, or an API without paying.

Choose Fireflies when the archive is the product. Sales and support teams who replay calls, clip soundbites, push fields into a CRM or transcribe uploaded audio will use what it stores. Accept the bot, or run the desktop app and live with automatic starts. Budget for credits if you lean on AskFred. Teams that need FERPA coverage, video at 720p or 1080p, or a free API for an internal tool also land here, since Granola offers none of those on any plan.

Granola's public ratings come mainly from its phone app stores, which judge the mobile apps more than the desktop capture doing most of the work. Weigh them that way. If Otter.ai is also on your shortlist, our Otter.ai vs Granola comparison puts a third model beside these two.

The bottom line

The choice is about what you want left after the call. Granola leaves notes and a transcript, takes no audio, never sends a bot, and costs $14 per user per month on Business, billed monthly, with a free Basic plan that forgets after 30 days. Fireflies leaves recordings, video and a searchable archive, at the price of a bot by default, storage tiers and AI credits. If nobody will ever replay a meeting, Granola is the lighter fit. If replaying is the point, choose Fireflies.