Granola

Granola is an AI notepad built for back-to-back meetings. It listens through your own machine instead of sending a bot into Zoom, Meet or Teams, puts a live transcript beside whatever you were already typing, and merges the two into one document you keep — your shorthand plus the words that were actually said. The vendor states that audio is not retained once the transcript exists, which is the design choice that makes it feel like a notebook rather than a recorder. It reads your calendar to work out which meeting you are in, runs on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android, and pushes finished notes into Notion, Slack, HubSpot, Attio or Zapier, with MCP connectors for everything else.

The limits follow from that same design. Because nothing is stored as audio, you cannot go back to the raw recording to settle a dispute; because there is no bot, it cannot capture a call you are not sitting on. The free tier keeps only a limited meeting history, so the searchable record that makes the product valuable sits behind Business at $14 per user per month, with SSO and meeting-consent controls held back for Enterprise at $35. Judged as a note-taker rather than a meeting archive, it is the strongest product in its category: choose it if you already type during meetings and want transcripts folded into your own notes. Check first whether the conferencing software you already pay for hands you transcripts you never read — that, not another notepad, is the comparison Granola has to win.