Bluedot vs Granola
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentBluedot compared with Granola
Both are bot-free and both are aimed at people who take client calls. Granola costs $14, writes better notes because it enhances what you type, and stores no desktop recording at all. Bluedot costs $20 on Pro and keeps the video so you can replay and clip a moment. Choose Granola if the writing is the point and you never want the media to exist; choose Bluedot if you need to be able to hear it again.
Choose Bluedot if
Recruiters, consultants, and client-facing teams who need a recording they can replay and clip but cannot put a bot in front of the person they are talking to, and privacy-sensitive buyers who want a written no-training guarantee rather than a data processing agreement they have to negotiate.
Choose Granola if
Founders, product managers, investors, and anyone whose meetings are conversations rather than sales calls, especially people who already take notes by hand and want them completed rather than replaced, and small teams who want a shared meeting memory for $14 a seat.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Bluedot | Granola |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Meeting Notes | Meeting Notes |
| Starting price | $0 (Free, 5 meetings lifetime), then $14 per user per month billed annually (Basic) (free plan available) | $0 (Basic), then $14 per user per month (Business) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Per-user-per-month subscription with no minute or meeting meter on paid plans. Capability is tiered by recording type (audio versus video), recording length, template customisation, and integration depth. | Freemium per-seat subscription across three tiers, quoted per user per month, with no minute or meeting-count meter on paid plans. |
| Free plan | Five meetings for the lifetime of the account, one hour maximum per recording, with the Chrome extension, desktop and mobile apps, and basic integrations including Slack, Notion, Zapier, and Make. | Basic includes AI meeting notes, chat within and across meetings, shared folders, custom templates, multi-language support, and model-training opt-out, with limited access to older meeting history. |
| Free trial | No fixed-length trial; the free plan's five lifetime meetings serve as the evaluation | Not published as a fixed-length trial; the free Basic tier serves as the evaluation path |
| Best for | Recruiters, consultants, and client-facing teams who need a recording they can replay and clip but cannot put a bot in front of the person they are talking to, and privacy-sensitive buyers who want a written no-training guarantee rather than a data processing agreement they have to negotiate. | Founders, product managers, investors, and anyone whose meetings are conversations rather than sales calls, especially people who already take notes by hand and want them completed rather than replaced, and small teams who want a shared meeting memory for $14 a seat. |
| Setup time | Under ten minutes. Install the Chrome extension for browser calls or the desktop app for Zoom, Teams, and Slack, grant permissions, and record with one click. There is no calendar bot to configure. | Ten minutes. Install the desktop app, grant audio permission, connect your calendar, and the next meeting is covered. There is no bot to configure and no per-platform integration to authorize. |
| Learning curve | Very low. The only thing worth deliberate attention is template design on the Pro tier, because the difference between a default summary and a template shaped for your meeting type is most of the perceived quality of the product. | Low but not zero, because the workflow asks something of you: Granola is at its best when you actually type fragments during the call. Users who treat it as a passive recorder get generic summaries and conclude it is ordinary. |
| Platforms | Chrome extension, macOS desktop app, Windows desktop app, iOS and Android, Apple Watch, Web | macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, Apple Watch, Web access to notes, MCP connector |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II (independently audited), GDPR-compliant data processing controls | SOC 2 Type 2 (independently audited), GDPR with a DPA available on request |
| Founded | 2022 | 2023 |
| Headquarters | London, United Kingdom, with operations in Dusseldorf, Germany | London, United Kingdom |
| Ownership | Angel-funded | Venture-backed |
Strengths and limitations
Bluedot
Strengths
- Bot-free capture that still keeps the video, which is a combination Granola and Circleback deliberately do not offer and bot-based tools cannot offer without a participant in the room.
- The clearest published privacy position in the category: no training on customer data, no retention by AI providers, immediate deletion with backups cleared within thirty days, all stated on the security page rather than buried in a DPA.
- SOC 2 Type II with annual third-party penetration testing and AES-256 encryption, which is stronger assurance than most companies this size can show.
- No minute, meeting, or storage meter on paid plans, so the bill does not move with usage.
Limitations
- A twenty-person company with roughly 560,000 euros of angel funding. The product is good and the balance sheet is thin, which is a genuine continuity risk for anything you plan to depend on for years.
- The free plan is five meetings for the lifetime of the account, which is the stingiest free offer here by a wide margin.
- Basic at $14 is audio only with a one-hour cap, so the advertised advantage of the product costs $20 rather than $14.
- CRM and ATS integrations, SSO, and custom retention are all on the $32 Business tier, which is expensive relative to what larger vendors include lower down.
Granola
Strengths
- The bot-free local-capture architecture is the right design for client-facing and confidential conversations, and it works across every meeting platform because it captures audio rather than integrating per-app.
- Note enhancement produces output that reflects your judgement about what mattered, which reads better and gets reused more than generic machine summaries.
- Business at $14 per seat with unlimited history, API, and MCP access is the cheapest capable team tier in the category by a wide margin.
- Native apps on macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, and Apple Watch, with genuine attention to interface quality, which is why the product spreads by word of mouth among founders.
Limitations
- No sales coaching layer at all: no scorecards, no playbook adherence, no talk-time analytics, so revenue teams need a second tool or a different vendor.
- No stored video or audio on the desktop path, which means no demo playback for onboarding new reps and no way to re-listen to how something was said.
- You have to be in the meeting on a device running the app; without a bot there is no proxy attendance, which rules out capturing calls you skip.
- The free tier's meeting history limit means your archive erodes unless you upgrade, and the exact retention window is described loosely rather than as a hard published number.
Pricing compared
Bluedot
Per-user-per-month subscription with no minute or meeting meter on paid plans. Capability is tiered by recording type (audio versus video), recording length, template customisation, and integration depth.
- Free$0
- Basic$14
- Pro$20
- Business$32
Priced against what it uniquely does, Bluedot is fair. Someone in 20 meetings a week pays exactly the same as someone in two, because nothing is metered: $20 per seat per month billed annually on Pro, about $240 a year, for bot-free capture that keeps unlimited-length video, custom templates, unlimited storage, an API, and MCP. Granola at $14 is cheaper and keeps no recording. Krisp at $8 keeps recordings but caps storage at 10 GB and writes weaker notes. Circleback at roughly $21 to $25 is bot-free with better language coverage but again no video. Bluedot is the only one of the four that lets you replay and clip a client call that had no bot in it, and $240 a year is a reasonable price for that specific capability. Where it is poor value is at the edges: $14 Basic withholds video and caps recordings at an hour, and $32 Business is a steep jump to get CRM writeback and SSO from a twenty-person company.
Granola
Freemium per-seat subscription across three tiers, quoted per user per month, with no minute or meeting-count meter on paid plans.
- Basic$0
- Business$14
- Enterprise$35
Business at $14 per seat is the best value in this category for teams that do not need sales coaching. You get unlimited history, the CRM connectors, API access, and the MCP endpoint for less than half what Fireflies Business or Fathom Business costs, and there is no minute meter to model. The catch is scope: you are paying for excellent notes and shared context, not for revenue intelligence, and if your reason for buying a notetaker is call scoring or forecast hygiene then Granola is cheap because it does not do the thing you want. Judged as a meeting memory layer, it is underpriced.
Editorial verdict on each
Bluedot
Bluedot occupies a gap nobody else fills cleanly: bot-free capture that keeps the video. Granola will not store the recording, Circleback will not either, and every tool that does keep video puts a participant in your client's call to get it. If you are a recruiter, a consultant, or a customer success team who needs to replay and clip conversations that cannot have a bot in them, Bluedot at $20 a seat billed annually with unlimited storage, custom templates, an API, and MCP is the obvious answer, and its published no-training, immediate-deletion, SOC 2 Type II posture is the most straightforward privacy statement in the category. The two things to weigh honestly are the tiering, because $14 Basic withholds video and caps recordings at an hour and $32 Business is where CRM writeback and SSO live, and the company, because twenty people on angel funding is a real continuity risk. Buy it for what it uniquely does, on Pro, and keep your own copies through the API.
Read the full Bluedot profileGranola
InnovationGranola is the best-designed product in this category and, at $14 a seat for unlimited history plus API and MCP access, one of the cheapest. The bot-free capture and the note-enhancement model are not marketing distinctions; they change what the output feels like and who is willing to use it in a client call. Buy it if your meetings are conversations you take part in and you want a shared memory layer that reads like human writing. Do not buy it as a sales tool: there is no coaching, no call scoring, and no recorded video to review, and the $1.5B valuation is riding on an enterprise context story that is still very new. For founders, product teams, and investors, it is the first thing to try; for a sales floor, it is the wrong shape.
Read the full Granola profileBluedot profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Granola last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.