Granola

What is Granola?

Granola is a meeting transcription and note-taking application for individuals and teams. A user starts it manually before or during a meeting, optionally writes rough notes, and lets Granola process the conversation in the background. The resulting notes can be edited, organized, searched, shared, and queried with AI.

The main distinction is that Granola uses audio from the computer or phone rather than adding an automated participant to Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or another call. This makes it closer to a private digital notepad than to a meeting bot. It can also capture in-person and phone-based conversations through its mobile apps.

How Granola works in practice

After installation, users sign in, connect a calendar if desired, and manually start capture for a meeting. Granola transcribes the device audio and combines the transcript with the user's notes and relevant calendar context. It then creates enhanced notes that can include a meeting summary, decisions, open questions, and action items.

The original notes remain useful because they give the user a way to mark priorities or add context while the meeting is happening. Afterward, the AI output can be revised rather than treated as a finished, immutable transcript. Granola also supports questions about a single meeting or broader collections of meetings, which is useful when preparing for a follow-up conversation or checking what was previously agreed.

Important capabilities

AI-enhanced meeting notes

Granola's core workflow is the combination of human notes and automated transcription. This can turn incomplete notes into a more structured record without requiring the user to write down every sentence. The output is intended for practical follow-up: summaries, decisions, action items, customer-research findings, and other reusable meeting information.

Search and chat across meetings

Users can search meeting history and ask questions about individual meetings, folders, people, companies, or multiple conversations. This gives Granola a meeting-intelligence function beyond simple transcription. For example, a user might look for previous decisions, recurring customer feedback, or unresolved issues across a series of calls.

Recipes and repeatable outputs

Recipes are reusable prompt templates for recurring tasks such as drafting follow-up emails, preparing customer research summaries, producing coaching feedback, or turning conversations into product requirements. They are useful when a team wants consistent outputs from a familiar type of meeting without recreating instructions each time.

Mobile and cross-platform capture

Granola is available for macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android, with Apple Watch support also advertised. Mobile capture extends the product to in-person meetings and phone conversations, while desktop capture works across many meeting services because it relies on device audio instead of a platform-specific bot.

Sharing and integrations

Notes can be organized into folders and shared with colleagues. Paid plans advertise connections to Notion, Slack, Zapier, HubSpot, Attio, and Affinity, along with API access. Granola also supports an MCP connector that can make meeting information available to compatible tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Claude Code, and Cursor. This can place meeting context inside broader research or work workflows, although availability depends on the plan and connected application.

Who is Granola for?

Granola is best suited to people whose work depends on frequent conversations and reliable follow-up. Typical users include founders, executives, sales and customer-success teams, product managers, researchers, recruiters, consultants, and investors. It can be particularly useful for customer interviews, sales calls, leadership meetings, product discovery, recruiting conversations, and recurring one-to-one meetings.

Its value is different from that of a general-purpose chatbot or a conventional AI meeting transcription tool. Granola emphasizes the relationship between live note-taking, enhanced notes, cross-meeting context, and repeatable meeting workflows. It is also different from a project-management system: it can identify tasks and decisions, but it does not replace a full system for assigning and tracking project work.

Pricing and access

Granola has a free Basic plan with AI meeting notes, limited meeting history, AI chat, shared folders, custom note templates, and multi-language support. The accessible history on Basic is reported as approximately the most recent 30 days, and MCP documentation indicates that Basic users have more limited transcript access.

The Business plan is advertised at $14 per user per month. It adds broader history, advanced models, integrations, API access, and centralized billing. Enterprise is advertised at $35 per user per month and adds organization-oriented features such as SSO, security and administrative controls, usage analytics, and retention and training settings. Pricing and feature availability may change, and enterprise arrangements can depend on contract terms.

Privacy and operational limitations

Granola says that notes are private by default and that it does not store meeting audio after transcription. For mobile capture, audio may be temporarily cached during processing and then deleted. The company states that providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic are contractually prohibited from training their models on customer data. Granola may use anonymized data to improve its service, while users can opt out; enterprise model-training opt-out is enabled by default according to the supplied product information.

Users should still obtain appropriate consent before recording or transcribing conversations. Granola requires manual activation, so it will not automatically attend every meeting or capture a call unless the user starts it. Because it depends on access to device audio, permissions, sound routing, and transcription quality, results can vary by meeting environment. The product also does not retain audio for later playback, and AI-generated notes and action items should be checked for accuracy before being shared or treated as authoritative.

Granola compared with adjacent tools

Compared with products such as Fireflies.ai or Fathom, Granola's defining workflow is device-based capture without a visible meeting bot. Compared with Notion AI, it is more specialized around meeting capture and conversation history rather than serving as an AI layer across a broad workspace. Its MCP support is useful for users who want to bring meeting context into tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, or coding and research workflows, but it does not turn Granola into a general-purpose agent platform.

Is Granola a good fit?

Granola is a good fit for users who attend many meetings, want to remain engaged instead of typing complete notes, and need searchable records of decisions and follow-up work. Its combination of human notes, device-audio transcription, cross-meeting chat, Recipes, and integrations is more useful than a basic transcript when conversations need to feed later research, sales, product, or executive workflows.

It is less suitable for someone seeking a general writing assistant, a full project-management workspace, automatic meeting attendance without manual activation, stored audio or video recordings, or specialized compliance controls beyond those available on the selected plan. Users with strict recording policies should review consent requirements, data-processing terms, retention settings, and the current enterprise documentation before adopting it for sensitive meetings.