Fireflies.ai vs Granola (2026)

Fireflies.ai

by Fireflies.ai

Granola

by Granola, Inc.

Pros

• ✓Most comprehensive free tier in the meeting intelligence category with unlimited transcription, unlimited AI summaries, and 100-plus language support at $0, enabling enterprise-level evaluation before any financial commitment.
• ✓SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and HIPAA compliance with a BAA at the Enterprise tier covers a wide range of regulated industries including healthcare, finance, and legal.
• ✓The 200-plus AI Apps for post-meeting automation, including sales call analysis, objection tracking, and BANT and MEDDIC extraction, provide workflow depth well beyond simple transcription.

Limitations

• ⚠AI credits are a one-time shared workspace pool that does not reset monthly; heavy users of AskFred and advanced AI summaries exhaust the allotment quickly, triggering auto-recharge at $5 per 50 credits unless explicitly disabled
• ⚠Notetaker bot joins meetings as a named participant on most plans; a Chrome extension provides bot-free recording as an alternative, but the bot remains the default and most visible capture method, which can create friction in sensitive client-facing calls
• ⚠Video recording is locked behind Business at $19 per seat per month annual, meaning teams that need to review screen content alongside transcripts must upgrade past Pro even for moderate usage needs

Pros

• ✓Captures audio from the device instead of sending a bot into the call, so it works with any meeting app, with apps for Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android and Apple Watch.
• ✓The free Basic plan includes unlimited AI meeting notes, AI chat, Recipes, templates, shared folders and the Slack integration, and its MCP server reaches Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other AI tools on every plan.
• ✓Enterprise adds HIPAA-compliant workspaces with a Business Associate Agreement, SCIM and an audit API at a published $35 per user per month, bought in the app.

Limitations

• ⚠Recording must be started manually for each meeting because Granola does not auto-join or auto-record calls, so a meeting nobody starts is not captured.
• ⚠Audio is deleted after transcription, so there is no recording to play back, and the free Basic plan shows only the last 30 days of notes in the app.
• ⚠HIPAA coverage, SSO, SCIM and a workspace-wide training opt-out require Enterprise, SSO is offered to teams of 50 or more users, and Business allows only a per-user opt-out.