The notepad that finishes your sentences, with no bot in the call
Granola is an AI notepad for meetings that transcribes your computer's audio locally without sending a bot into the call, then merges the transcript with whatever sparse notes you typed yourself to produce a finished set of notes, action items, and follow-ups; it runs as a native app on macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, and Apple Watch, and has expanded into a shared team workspace with an MCP connector for AI assistants.
Overview
Granola started in 2023 as a reaction against the meeting-bot convention. Instead of dispatching a named participant into your Zoom room, the desktop app captures system audio locally and transcribes it in the background. The design premise is that you should keep typing your own rough notes during the call, because the act of writing is how you actually think, and Granola's job is to enhance those fragments afterwards with everything the transcript caught that you missed.
That premise earned it an unusually loyal following among founders, product people, and investors, and a customer list heavy with the companies those people work at: PostHog, Intercom, Figma, Brex, Linear, Vanta, Gusto, Asana, Cursor, and Mistral AI have all been cited by the vendor. The company raised a $43M Series B in May 2025 led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, then a $125M Series C in March 2026 led by Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins at a $1.5B valuation, which is a lot of capital for a notepad and signals the ambition to become a company-wide context layer rather than a meeting tool.
For a startup buyer, the arithmetic is friendly. The free Basic tier gives you AI notes, cross-meeting chat, shared folders, custom templates, and multi-language support, with limited access to older meeting history. Business at $14 per user per month is the cheapest serious team tier in this category and is where the CRM integrations, API access, and MCP connector live. Enterprise at $35 adds SSO and admin controls. There is no per-minute meter anywhere, which is a meaningful contrast with Fireflies.
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.
Not the right fit for
- Sales organizations that need call scoring, playbook adherence tracking, talk-time coaching, and rep-level analytics; Granola deliberately does not build revenue intelligence, so a sales manager will find it thin next to tl;dv or Fathom's Business tier.
- Teams that need video recordings of demos for training and coaching; Granola's desktop path stores no audio or video at all, only the transcript and notes.
- Anyone who needs to capture meetings they are not personally attending on a machine running the app; without a bot there is no way to send Granola to a call in your place.
- Buyers with strict non-US data residency requirements; notes are hosted in a US AWS VPC and no regional hosting is advertised.
- Organizations that want a mature enterprise procurement relationship; Granola is a fast-moving venture-backed company that has repositioned twice in three years.
How it works
- 1
You install the native app and connect your calendar. Before a meeting starts, Granola can surface a brief pulling together who is attending and what was discussed with them previously, which is the small feature people end up citing as the reason they stopped preparing calls manually.
- 2
During the call, the desktop app transcribes system audio in real time on your own machine. No bot joins the participant list, nothing appears on the client's screen, and on the desktop path Granola does not retain the audio recording at all. You type whatever you want in the app's notepad, usually a handful of shorthand fragments.
- 3
When the meeting ends, Granola merges your fragments with the transcript. The result reads like notes you would have written if you had had time, structured by whatever template you chose, with action items pulled out and a follow-up email ready to send. Templates are customizable, so a recruiting screen, a customer discovery call, and a board meeting can each produce a different shape of output.
- 4
Beyond individual meetings, Granola chats across the archive: ask what a specific customer said about pricing over six months and it answers from your accumulated notes. Business tier connects that context outward, pushing into Attio, Notion, Slack, HubSpot, Affinity, and Zapier, and exposing an MCP connector plus an API so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and Figma can read your meeting context directly rather than you pasting transcripts between tools.
Feature breakdown
26 features in 5 modulesCapture without a bot
The architectural decision that defines the product.- Local system-audio transcription
- The desktop app transcribes the audio playing on your machine in real time, so no bot joins the meeting and no participant named after a vendor appears to your client.
- No audio retention on desktop
- Granola states that desktop transcription happens in real time without storing the recording; mobile temporarily caches audio. The stored artifact is text, not media.
- Platform-agnostic capture
- Because it captures system audio rather than integrating per-platform, it works with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack Huddles, and anything else that makes sound on your computer.
- In-person meetings via mobile
- The iOS and Android apps capture face-to-face conversations, and an Apple Watch app exists for starting capture without pulling out a phone.
- Native apps across five platforms
- macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, and Apple Watch, rather than a web app with a browser extension bolted on.
Notes and templates
The enhancement model that makes Granola different from a summarizer.- Note enhancement
- Your typed fragments are merged with the transcript after the call, so the output keeps your emphasis and judgement instead of being a generic machine summary of everything said.
- Custom templates
- Define the output shape per meeting type (discovery call, one-to-one, candidate screen, board update) and Granola formats accordingly; available on the free tier.
- Action item extraction
- Commitments and next steps are pulled out of the conversation and listed separately from the narrative notes.
- Follow-up drafting
- Generates a follow-up email from the meeting so the recap goes out while the conversation is still fresh.
- Pre-meeting briefs
- Calendar sync produces a brief on attendees and prior discussion history before the call begins, which quietly removes most manual prep.
- Multi-language support
- Included on the free tier rather than reserved for paid plans.
Search, chat, and shared context
Where Granola stopped being a personal tool.- Chat within and across meetings
- Query a single conversation or the whole archive conversationally; available on the free tier, which is unusual.
- Shared folders
- Collaborative folders let a team pool notes on an account, a project, or a hiring loop; also on the free tier.
- Private by default
- Notes stay private to you until explicitly shared, which is the opposite default from tools that dump every call into a team library.
- Team sharing and usage controls
- Business adds centralized billing and user management; Enterprise adds organization-wide sharing controls and usage analytics.
- Advanced AI models
- Business unlocks what the vendor describes as advanced thinking models and features beyond the free tier's default processing.
Integrations and developer surface
Business-tier plumbing that turns notes into workflow.- CRM connectors
- HubSpot, Attio, and Affinity integrations push meeting context into the systems sales and investment teams actually run on.
- Notion and Slack
- Notes route into documentation and channels automatically rather than by copy and paste.
- MCP connector
- A Model Context Protocol endpoint lets Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Figma, Replit, and other assistants read meeting context directly, which is the most genuinely useful integration Granola ships.
- API access
- Available from the Business tier, with enterprise APIs positioned as part of the 2026 company-context strategy.
- Zapier
- Covers workflows outside the native connector list.
Security and administration
Reasonable for the price, with the model-training question handled properly.- Model training opt-out
- Third-party AI providers cannot train on customer data; Granola trains on anonymized data with an opt-out available on all tiers and disabled by default for enterprise customers.
- SOC 2 Type 2 and GDPR
- Independently audited SOC 2 Type 2, a GDPR data processing agreement on request, and a public trust center at trust.granola.ai.
- SSO and SAML
- Single sign-on is an Enterprise feature; Google Workspace and Microsoft login are available on lower tiers.
- Auto-deletion periods
- Enterprise administrators can set organization-wide retention windows after which notes are deleted automatically.
- Usage notification
- Enterprise offers organization-wide notification of Granola usage, so IT can see where a bot-free tool is quietly in use.
Use cases
4 documentedFounder in back-to-back investor meetings
Six conversations a day, each needing a different follow-up, and sending a recording bot into a fundraising call is socially awkward at best.
Granola captures silently from the laptop, the founder types three lines per meeting, and each call produces structured notes plus a drafted follow-up, with pre-meeting briefs handling the who-is-this-again problem.
Product manager running discovery
Interview notes are inconsistent across a research round and synthesis means rereading a dozen disorganized documents weeks later.
A custom discovery template enforces a consistent shape across every interview, and cross-meeting chat answers questions about recurring themes from the whole set without a manual synthesis pass.
Early-stage team wanting shared memory for $14 a seat
Five people all take notes differently, context lives in individual heads, and the CRM has one-line summaries that mean nothing to whoever picks up the account next.
Business-tier shared folders plus the HubSpot or Attio connector push meeting context into the CRM automatically, and the MCP connector lets the team query it from Claude alongside their other tools.
Investor or corp-dev associate tracking a pipeline of companies
Dozens of first calls a month, each needing to be remembered accurately six months later when the company comes back around.
The Affinity integration attaches notes to the relationship record, and asking Granola what a specific founder said about their burn rate last spring returns the answer from the archive rather than from memory.
Pricing
from $0 (Basic), then $14 per user per month (Business)Freemium per-seat subscription across three tiers, quoted per user per month, with no minute or meeting-count meter on paid plans.
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | $0 per user per month |
The history limit is the real constraint; everything else on Basic is a complete product for one person. |
| Business | $14 per user per month |
The cheapest serious team tier in the category and the one nearly every startup should be on. |
| Enterprise | $35 per user per month |
|
Billing notes
- Prices are published per user per month as of August 2026; the pricing page does not advertise a separate discounted annual rate.
- There is no per-minute or per-meeting meter on any tier, so heavy users do not face the overage surprises common with storage-metered competitors.
- The free tier's limitation is history retention rather than feature removal, which is a friendlier structure than capping minutes but means your archive silently ages out until you pay.
- Enterprise at $35 is priced against the top tiers of larger platforms; most teams under 50 people will never need it, since SSO is the main gate.
Value assessment: 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.
Strengths & limitations
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.
- The MCP connector is a real differentiator: meeting context becomes readable by Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and Figma without any copy-paste ritual.
- Sensible privacy defaults: notes private until shared, no audio retention on desktop, model-training opt-out on every tier, SOC 2 Type 2 audited.
- Extremely well capitalized after a $125M Series C at a $1.5B valuation, with a customer list of engineering-led companies who are hard to impress.
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.
- Notes are hosted in a US AWS VPC with no advertised regional hosting, which is awkward for a company headquartered in London selling to EU buyers with residency requirements.
- The company has repositioned quickly from personal notepad to team workspace to enterprise context layer in three years; the enterprise story is much newer than the core product and should be piloted, not assumed.
Head-to-head comparisons
3 alternativesGranola vs Fathom
from $0 (Free plan, unlimited recording and transcription)Fathom records and summarizes for you and offers a free tier with unlimited recording plus optional video capture, CRM field sync, and sales scorecards on paid tiers. Granola enhances the notes you type yourself, never uses a bot, and charges $14 a seat for unlimited history. Choose Fathom if you want a searchable archive of recorded sales calls with coaching on top; choose Granola if meetings are conversations you participate in and you want the notes to sound like you wrote them.
Full Granola vs Fathom comparisonGranola vs Fireflies.ai
from $0 (Free), then $10 per user per month billed annually (Pro; $18 monthly)Fireflies is a platform play: bots, 100-plus languages, conversation intelligence, voice agents, an email assistant, and 200-plus integrations, metered by storage minutes and AI credits. Granola is a focused product with no meter and no bot. Teams that want one vendor covering transcription, analytics, and automation across a large org should look at Fireflies; teams that want the best notes for the least money and complexity should take Granola.
Full Granola vs Fireflies.ai comparisonGranola vs Circleback
from $20.83 per user per month (Individual, billed annually)Both avoid the bot and both are judged on note quality, but Circleback writes the notes for you, transcribes in more than 100 languages, and carries a much deeper automation layer (1,000-plus integrations plus API, webhooks, CLI, and MCP), at roughly $21 to $25 a seat with only a 7-day trial. Granola costs $14, has a free tier, and expects you to type fragments it then enhances. Pick Circleback when post-meeting admin is the real cost; pick Granola when the notes themselves are the point and budget matters.
Full Granola vs Circleback comparisonImplementation & onboarding
- 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.
- 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.
- Onboarding
- Entirely self-serve, including the Business tier. Enterprise adds priority support. Template design is the only configuration worth spending an hour on.
- Migration notes
- No bulk importer for another notetaker's archive, so historical transcripts stay with your old vendor. Because desktop capture stores no media, there is also nothing to migrate on the audio side. Existing notes can be imported into shared folders manually, and the API on Business makes bulk export practical if you later leave.
Platform, API & security
- Platforms
- macOSWindowsiOSAndroidApple WatchWeb access to notesMCP connector
- API
- API access from the Business tier, plus an MCP connector consumed by Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Figma, and Replit; enterprise APIs were positioned as a headline of the 2026 Series C strategy.
- Compliance
- SOC 2 Type 2 (independently audited)GDPR with a DPA available on request
- Data residency
- Notes are stored in a US-hosted AWS Virtual Private Cloud; no regional hosting options advertised.
- SSO
- SSO and SAML on the Enterprise tier; Google Workspace and Microsoft login on lower tiers.
- Security notes
- Encryption at rest and in transit with daily backups. Desktop transcription happens in real time without retaining the recording, and mobile only caches audio temporarily. A vulnerability disclosure policy, trust center, and status page are published at trust.granola.ai and status.granola.ai.
Support & resources
- Channels
- In-app AI support chatEmail supportPriority support on Enterprise
- Documentation
- Help center at docs.granola.ai covering subscriptions, desktop and mobile setup, calendar sync, transcription, integrations, and the API.
- Community
- Strong informal presence among founder and product communities; no large official user forum.
Company
- Founded
- 2023
- Headquarters
- London, United Kingdom
- Ownership
- Venture-backed
- Founders
- Chris Pedregal, Sam Stephenson
- Employees
- Not disclosed
- Funding
- Approximately $192M raised, including a $43M Series B in May 2025 led by NFDG and a $125M Series C in March 2026 led by Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins at a $1.5B valuation.
Funding history
| Round | Amount | Year | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | Included in the reported $67M pre-Series-C total | 2023 | Early backing from Lightspeed and Spark Capital. |
| Series B | $43M | 2025 | Led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross (NFDG), with Lightspeed and Spark participating; total funding reached $67M. |
| Series C | $125M | 2026 | Led by Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins at a $1.5B valuation, up from roughly $250M less than a year earlier. |
Timeline
- 2023Founded in March by Chris Pedregal and Sam Stephenson, building a bot-free AI notepad that enhances the notes you type rather than replacing them.
- 2024Spreads by word of mouth through founder, product, and investor circles on the strength of the macOS app; early customers include PostHog, Intercom, Figma, Brex, and Linear.
- 2025Raises a $43M Series B led by NFDG and launches an AI workspace for teams, adding shared folders and collaborative context to what had been a personal tool.
- 2025Expands beyond macOS with Windows, iOS, Android, and Apple Watch apps, and ships an MCP connector so external AI assistants can read meeting context.
- 2026Raises a $125M Series C led by Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins at a $1.5B valuation, repositioning from meeting notetaker to company-wide AI context layer with enterprise APIs.
Integrations
- Google Calendar and Microsoft calendar
- Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Slack Huddles (via system audio capture)
- HubSpot
- Attio
- Affinity
- Notion
- Slack
- Zapier
- Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Figma, and Replit via MCP
- API access on Business and above
Frequently asked questions
10 questionsWhat is Granola?
Granola is an AI notepad for meetings. It transcribes your computer's audio locally without sending a bot into the call, then merges that transcript with the rough notes you typed during the meeting to produce finished notes, action items, and a drafted follow-up. It runs as a native app on macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, and Apple Watch.
How much does Granola cost?
There is a free Basic tier with AI notes, cross-meeting chat, shared folders, custom templates, and multi-language support, limited by how much meeting history you can access. Business is $14 per user per month and adds unlimited history, CRM integrations, API access, and MCP. Enterprise is $35 per user per month and adds SSO, admin controls, and organization-wide retention policies.
Does Granola join meetings as a bot?
No, and this is the point of the product. The desktop app captures the audio playing on your machine, so nothing appears in the participant list and clients never see a vendor-named bot in the call. The tradeoff is that you have to be in the meeting on a device running Granola; there is no way to send it to a call you are skipping.
Does Granola record and store audio?
On desktop it transcribes in real time and does not retain the recording; on mobile it caches audio temporarily. The stored artifact is text. That is good for privacy and bad if you wanted to replay a demo for coaching, which Granola simply cannot do.
Which meeting platforms does Granola work with?
All of them, functionally. Because it captures system audio rather than integrating per-platform, it covers Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack Huddles, and anything else that produces sound on your computer. In-person meetings are handled by the iOS and Android apps.
Is Granola good for sales teams?
Only partly. It captures calls well and pushes context into HubSpot, Attio, or Affinity, but it has no scorecards, no playbook adherence tracking, and no talk-time coaching analytics. A sales manager who wants to review rep performance should look at tl;dv or Fathom's Business tier instead, and treat Granola as the notes layer.
Is Granola secure and does it train on my data?
Granola holds an independently audited SOC 2 Type 2 and offers a GDPR data processing agreement on request. Third-party AI providers cannot train on customer data. Granola itself trains on anonymized data with an opt-out available on every tier including free, and enterprise accounts have that disabled by default. Notes are encrypted at rest and in transit in a US AWS VPC.
What is the Granola MCP connector for?
It exposes your meeting notes through the Model Context Protocol so AI assistants can read them directly. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Figma, and Replit can pull meeting context into their own workflows without you copying transcripts between tools. It is available on the Business tier and is one of Granola's more genuinely useful differentiators.
Who founded Granola and how is it funded?
Granola was founded in March 2023 by Chris Pedregal and Sam Stephenson and is headquartered in London. It has raised roughly $192M, including a $43M Series B in May 2025 led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, and a $125M Series C in March 2026 led by Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins at a $1.5B valuation.
What does the free plan actually limit?
Feature access on the free tier is generous: AI notes, chat across meetings, shared folders, custom templates, and multi-language support are all included. The constraint is meeting history, which is limited rather than unlimited. If your value from a notetaker comes from searching six months of past conversations, you need the $14 Business tier.
Editorial verdict
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.
Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.
Awards & badges
1 heldGranola holds 1 award from the SaaSTracker editorial program. Badges may be displayed by the vendor; each embed links back to this profile.
Innovation · AI Meeting Note Takers
“Abandoned the meeting bot entirely for a local notepad that finishes what you type, a mechanism the rest of the category is now copying.”
<a href="https://saastracker.org/products/granola"><img src="https://saastracker.org/badges/embed/granola/innovation-summer-2026.svg" width="180" height="180" alt="Granola: Innovation, AI Meeting Note Takers. SaaSTracker Summer 2026 Awards." /></a>
