Granola
Productivity · Freemium
Overview
A note taking app for meetings. It is made by Granola, a London company founded in 2023 that has raised funding from Spark Capital and others. It listens to your computer's audio in the background during a call, combines what it hears with the rough notes you type, and produces a clean, structured summary right after the meeting ends. No bot joins the call, so other people do not see a recording tool in the participant list. It started as a Mac app and has since added Windows, iOS, and Android. It is popular with founders, investors, and sales people who sit in back to back meetings.
What people use it for
People use it to capture meeting notes and action items without typing everything themselves, so they can pay attention in the room. Founders use it across investor calls, hiring conversations, and team meetings. Investors run it through pitch after pitch and keep a searchable record of each company. Sales people use it to log discovery calls and follow ups, then push the summary into a CRM. Consultants and researchers use it for client interviews. Because it works from your own notes plus the transcript, people jot a few key points during the call and let Granola fill in the rest. Teams share summaries in folders or spaces, and use the built in chat to ask questions across many past meetings, such as what a given client asked for last quarter.
Key capabilities
Granola captures the audio playing on your computer, so it works with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and other meeting apps without adding a bot to the call. It merges your typed notes with the transcript and generates a summary using a template you choose. An AI chat answers questions across your meeting history. It offers shared folders and Spaces for teams, with access controls. The Business plan adds unlimited meeting history and integrations with Notion, HubSpot, Slack, Affinity, Attio, and Zapier, plus an MCP connection and API access. The Enterprise plan adds single sign on, admin controls, usage analytics, organization wide auto deletion, and a team wide opt out of model training. It runs on macOS and Windows, with iOS and Android apps that can also take notes for in person meetings and phone calls. The free Basic plan includes AI notes and chat but limits how much history you can keep.
Limitations
Granola is not fully hands off. It works best when you type rough notes during the meeting, so it still asks for attention on the call, and a meeting where you write nothing produces a thinner summary. The free plan limits how much meeting history you keep. It captures audio on the device where the meeting plays, so there is no way to record a call you are not on. Action items stay inside Granola unless you move them, since there is no native link to task tools like Linear, Asana, or Todoist. It is a younger product than established rivals like Otter, so some polish and integrations are still missing. Accuracy also drops on heavy accents and crosstalk, as with any transcription tool.
Insight
The appealing part of Granola is what it does not do. No bot joins the call, nothing announces itself to the other side, and it just cleans up the notes you were already taking. For people in meetings all day, that feels lighter and less awkward than a recording bot. The cost is that it is not magic: if you stop taking notes entirely, the output gets weaker, so it rewards a small amount of effort in the room. It began as a Mac tool and still feels most complete there, though Windows and mobile have closed much of the gap. Action items also tend to get stuck inside the app. It works best for someone with back to back calls who wants a reliable record without changing how the meeting feels. It is less suited to teams that need every task routed automatically into a tracker.
Pricing
Freemium
Website
Last checked 2026-08-30