Best Granola Alternatives in 2026

Why teams look for alternatives

Teams look for Granola alternatives when they want a bot to join and record calendar meetings without anyone pressing start, or when they want a recording to play back. Others want transcription that stays on their own machine, coaching and forecasting for a sales team, or a record that reaches beyond meetings.

Granola makes a few deliberate choices. Recording starts manually for each meeting, the audio is deleted once it is transcribed, and only the transcript and notes are kept. Its own models train on anonymized customer data by default, with an opt-out for each user on every plan. Each alternative below makes a different choice on at least one of those points.

Choose Otter.ai when you want a bot to join and record calendar meetings automatically. Its notetaker joins Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, transcribes live with speaker labels and keeps recordings in its app, and the free plan includes the Otter MCP server. Paid plans start from $8.33/mo billed annually.

Choose Fireflies.ai when you want every call recorded, with video, in many languages. Its Notetaker joins scheduled calls on Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Webex, offers video recording and downloads from Pro, and transcribes more than 100 languages in beta beyond its main ones. Integrations cover more than 100 apps, including CRMs, recruiting tools and dialers. Paid plans start from $10/mo billed annually.

Choose Fathom when you want recordings and summaries on a free plan, with or without a bot. Fathom records Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Slack Huddles, offers bot-free capture in its Mac desktop app, and updates live summaries during the call. It became part of Superhuman in September 2026. Paid plans start from $15/mo billed annually.

Choose tl;dv when your team sells and wants a European vendor. The company is based in Aachen, Germany, with European data hosting. Its recorder works with or without a bot, custom note templates run sales frameworks such as MEDDIC, SPIN and SPICE, and notes sync to the major CRMs. Paid plans start from $18/mo billed annually.

Choose Avoma when meetings need to feed coaching and forecasting. Avoma records with a bot or with bot-less native recording, writes AI notes and follow-up emails, and adds call scoring with custom scorecards, deal risk alerts and roll-up forecasting, plus a scheduler and lead router. Plans start from $19/mo billed annually.

Choose Spellar AI when you want help during the call and your data kept out of model training. Spellar also records without a bot, and its live AI copilot answers questions and takes notes during the meeting. Transcription can run on-device, recordings can be kept on the device only, and Spellar states that user data is not used to train any AI model. Plans start from $15/mo billed annually.

Choose Shadow when you want bot-free capture that starts on its own, with every meeting stored as local files. Shadow detects meetings on a Mac and starts and stops recording automatically, transcribes on the device, and saves each meeting as plain Markdown that opens as an Obsidian vault and that AI agents can read. Paid plans start from $8/mo billed annually.

Choose screenpipe when you want more than meetings remembered. screenpipe records your screen and audio continuously on your own machine and keeps the full history on your own disk, where AI clients can search it through a local MCP server. Scheduled agents can work from that history, including recipes that draft meeting follow-ups for review. It has a free plan on one device, and paid plans start from $21/mo billed annually.

Most of these change one thing about how Granola works. Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai and Fathom add a bot that records calendar meetings on its own, and tl;dv and Avoma point the recordings at sales work. Spellar AI and Shadow stay bot-free while keeping more on the device, and screenpipe widens the record from meetings to the whole working day.

Granola

by Granola, Inc.

Currently reviewing

Bot-free AI meeting notepad for Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android and Apple Watch. Captures device audio from any call without joining it. Free plan, Business $14 per user per month.

Frequently asked questions

Related comparisons

Browse all workflow agents

Compare pricing, capabilities, and integrations across every agent in this category.