Is Granola or Spinach AI cheaper?

Granola starts at $0 (Basic), then $14 per user per month (Business) (free plan available). Spinach AI starts at $0 (Starter), then $2.90 per meeting hour (Pro) (free plan available).

Granola vs Spinach AI

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 assessment

Spinach AI compared with Granola

Granola charges a flat $14 per seat, captures silently with no bot, and keeps no desktop recording. Spinach charges $2.90 per meeting hour, sends a visible bot, and keeps the recording for a year on paid tiers. Choose Granola for confidential conversations and predictable per-seat billing; choose Spinach if you record selectively, want tickets created automatically, and would rather pay for consumption than headcount.

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.

Choose Spinach AI if

Engineering and project teams who want standups, retros, and planning meetings turned into tickets automatically, and small teams with a modest number of important meetings a week who would rather pay by the hour than per seat.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Granola	Spinach AI
Category	Meeting Notes	Meeting Notes
Starting price	$0 (Basic), then $14 per user per month (Business) (free plan available)	$0 (Starter), then $2.90 per meeting hour (Pro) (free plan available)
Pricing model	Freemium per-seat subscription across three tiers, quoted per user per month, with no minute or meeting-count meter on paid plans.	Three self-serve structures in one table: a free company-wide plan, a pay-as-you-go tier billed at $2.90 per meeting hour with unlimited users and no seat minimum, and a per-seat Business tier with a 50-seat minimum. Enterprise is quoted.
Free plan	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.	Starter is free and company-wide: recordings, transcripts, basic AI summaries, 100-plus languages, Google or Microsoft Calendar and Slack integration, and seven days of recording retention.
Free trial	Not published as a fixed-length trial; the free Basic tier serves as the evaluation path	No fixed-length trial; the free Starter plan is company-wide and serves as the evaluation
Best for	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.	Engineering and project teams who want standups, retros, and planning meetings turned into tickets automatically, and small teams with a modest number of important meetings a week who would rather pay by the hour than per seat.
Setup time	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.	Ten minutes. Sign in with Google or Microsoft, connect the calendar, add Slack, and choose which meetings the bot attends. Configuring the project management and CRM connectors takes another half hour and is where the product's actual value is unlocked.
Learning curve	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.	Low for capture. The part that takes deliberate work is deciding which meetings should create tickets and where, because an over-eager integration will fill a Jira board with noise faster than a human ever could.
Platforms	macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, Apple Watch, Web access to notes, MCP connector	Web, Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and Slack Huddles (beta), In-person capture
Compliance	SOC 2 Type 2 (independently audited), GDPR with a DPA available on request	SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA (BAA available on Enterprise)
Founded	2023	2021
Headquarters	London, United Kingdom	Remote-first; the operating company is StayIn, Inc., incorporated in the United States
Ownership	Venture-backed	Venture-backed, Y Combinator alumnus

Strengths and limitations

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.

Spinach AI

Strengths

The pay-per-meeting-hour tier with unlimited users and no seat minimum is unique here and is the right shape for a small team that records selectively.
The free Starter plan is company-wide rather than single-user, so a whole team can evaluate or even operate on it if seven-day retention is enough.
Ticket creation into Jira, Monday, Asana, Linear, ClickUp, and Trello is deeper than any other notetaker on this list, reflecting the product's agile origins.
Slack Huddles support, even in beta, covers a conversation surface almost nobody else in this category captures.

Limitations

The $19 Business tier carries a 50-seat minimum, which reads as a small-business plan and is not one. This is the most misleading thing in the pricing table.
At $2.90 per meeting hour, Pro becomes expensive quickly; a single heavy calendar can cost more than three seats of a flat-rate competitor.
Bot-based capture only, with a vendor-named participant visible in every call and no local silent path for client-facing work.
Free-plan recordings are deleted after seven days, and there is no cheap middle tier between that and hourly billing.

Pricing compared

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.

Spinach AI

Three self-serve structures in one table: a free company-wide plan, a pay-as-you-go tier billed at $2.90 per meeting hour with unlimited users and no seat minimum, and a per-seat Business tier with a 50-seat minimum. Enterprise is quoted.

Starter$0
Pro$2.90
Business$19
EnterpriseCustom

The hourly meter is the whole story and it cuts both ways. Someone in 20 meetings a week averaging 45 minutes consumes about 65 meeting hours a month, which at $2.90 an hour is roughly $190 a month for that one person's calendar. That is more than three seats of Granola Business, or nine seats of Krisp Core. Pro is therefore a bad deal for a busy calendar and an excellent one for a team with, say, six recorded hours a week: about $75 a month covering unlimited users, with advanced summaries, MCP connectors, CRM and Jira integration, and a year of retention. Because the meter counts meeting hours rather than people, a ten-person agency that only records client calls can cover everybody for less than the cost of two seats elsewhere. The free Starter plan is also unusually good for a whole company to sit on if seven-day retention is acceptable. Just do the multiplication before you sign up, because $2.90 an hour compounds fast.

Editorial verdict on each

Granola

Innovation

Granola 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 profile

Spinach AI

Spinach is worth shortlisting for one of two reasons and dismissing for everything else. The first reason is agile ceremonies: nothing else on this list turns a standup into Jira, Linear, or Asana tickets as directly, and if your meetings are engineering rituals that should produce work items, that is a real advantage. The second is the pricing shape: a free company-wide plan and a $2.90 per meeting hour tier with unlimited users lets a small firm cover everybody for the price of a couple of seats elsewhere, provided you record selectively. Do the multiplication first, though, because a full calendar costs about $190 a month on that meter, and the $19 Business plan that looks like the sensible answer carries a 50-seat minimum that puts it out of reach. Add a visible bot in every call, Enterprise-gated API and SSO, and a company that has not announced funding since 2022, and Spinach becomes a good fit for a narrow set of teams rather than a general recommendation.

Read the full Spinach AI profile

Granola profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Spinach AI last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.