Granola

What it is

Granola is an AI meeting notepad that runs on your own machine and captures audio from the device itself — nothing joins the call as a participant. You type sparse notes during the conversation, and Granola merges them with the transcript afterward to produce a record that follows your structure instead of a generic summary template. Chris Pedregal and Sam Stephenson founded it in 2023.

It stopped being a single-user notepad in March 2026. Alongside a $125M Series C led by Index Ventures at a $1.5B valuation — Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, Spark, and NFDG also participating, for $192M raised in total against a $43M round at $250M a year earlier — Granola shipped Spaces, two APIs, and an updated MCP server. That release is what moved it onto ops shortlists rather than individual-contributor ones.

Why it shows up in ops stacks

• No bot in the participant list. Because capture happens on the device, Granola covers in-person conversations and any app that makes sound, not just Zoom, Meet, and Teams. For client-facing teams whose customers decline recording bots, or interviews where a visible “Notetaker has joined” changes how the candidate talks, that is the entire reason it lands on the list.
• Meeting context becomes queryable. Spaces separate a shared Team Space from personal My Notes, with folders nested inside and visibility set per space. Notes filter by company or person, so an account review pulls every conversation with that account instead of the one call somebody remembered to share.
• Two APIs, and they are not the same product. The personal API reads one individual’s notes and lands on Business. The enterprise API manages team-wide context and is Enterprise-only. Both exist so meeting history reaches an internal agent instead of sitting in a notes app.
• MCP ships in the paid tiers. Business includes MCP across apps, and the March 2026 update gave the server visibility into folders and shared notes, so Claude or ChatGPT can read the account history a team actually keeps.
• Enterprise buyers have signed. Vanta, Gusto, Thumbtack, and Asana run it, as do Cursor, Lovable, Decagon, and Mistral AI.

Pricing

Per user per month, from Granola’s own pricing page. Granola publishes one number per tier and does not split monthly from annual commit:

• Basic — $0. AI notes, AI chat within and across meetings, shared folders, custom templates, multi-language support, and a training opt-out. Meeting history is capped.
• Business — $14. Unlimited notes and history, the higher-tier reasoning models, integrations with Attio, Notion, Slack, HubSpot, Affinity, and Zapier, centralized billing and user management, MCP across apps, and API access.
• Enterprise — $35. Adds SSO, SCIM provisioning, org-wide auto-deletion windows, admin control over sharing and API access, a team-wide training opt-out, usage analytics, priority support, and org-wide notification that Granola is in use. SOC 2 Type II, encryption in transit and at rest, and retention windows set to your own compliance obligations.

At $14, Business undercuts the annual-commit seat price of the bot-based incumbents — Fireflies Business at $19 and Otter Business at $19.99 — and roughly halves their month-to-month rates of $29 and $30. Desktop and mobile are both covered: macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android.

Best for

• RevOps, CS, and recruiting teams whose calls include people who decline recording bots, and who still need a written record
• Anyone taking notes in person — field sales, on-site client work, interviews in a room, conference conversations — where the mobile apps work and a bot-based tool has nothing to join
• Teams that want meeting history readable by an agent over MCP or an API on a $14 seat rather than a revenue-intelligence contract

Alternatives — and when to pick them instead

• Fathom — the fastest-growing entrant here, and the pick when a free tier has to carry real usage: unlimited recording and summaries at $0 against Granola’s capped history. It joins as a bot, and its Team Edition at $29/user syncs to Salesforce and HubSpot, which Granola’s native integration list does not match.
• Otter.ai — pick it when transcription volume and a searchable archive matter more than note quality, or when the org already owns it. Business runs $19.99/user annually with unlimited transcription minutes and a 4-hour cap per meeting.
• Fireflies.ai — pick it for breadth of CRM and workflow connectors at a comparable price: $19/seat annually on Business, $39 on Enterprise. It and Otter both put a visible bot in the call, which is the trade being made.
• Gong — a different product, not a more expensive Granola. Pick it when the requirement is deal scoring, coaching, and pipeline risk. Granola does not forecast, score calls, or run a rep-coaching program.

Watch-outs

• Nothing announces the recording. No bot in the participant list means consent is entirely your obligation, and two-party-consent jurisdictions — California, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Washington, Florida, and the EU under GDPR — require notice. Guard: the org-wide usage notification is Enterprise-only at $35, so on Basic or Business, write verbal notice into the call template and the meeting invite before rollout, not after the first complaint.
• Coverage is per-device, not per-account. A meeting has notes only if an attendee ran Granola on their own machine. Guard: a bot-based tool covers a call from one connected calendar, while Granola needs the app installed and running for every person whose conversations must be captured — scope the rollout by headcount and audit install rates instead of assuming a team plan implies coverage.
• The API you need is a tier up from where you expect. Piping org-wide meeting context into a shared agent requires the enterprise API, which is Enterprise-only; Business gets the personal API, scoped to one person’s notes. Guard: name the consumer of the data before signing — if it is a shared agent or a warehouse, price Enterprise at $35, because moving up mid-term is a renegotiation.
• The free tier caps history, and history is the product. Basic limits how far back notes stay visible, which breaks the account-history use case that justifies Spaces in the first place. Guard: evaluate on Business across at least one full sales or hiring cycle — a two-week Basic trial cannot show whether the archive earns $14 a seat.