Granola vs Fireflies.ai (2026)

Granola

by Granola, Inc.

Fireflies.ai

by Fireflies.ai

Pros

• ✓Bot-free architecture across any meeting platform (Zoom, Meet, Teams, Webex, Slack) from Mac, Windows, and iPhone without appearing as a participant, eliminating bot friction in client-facing calls and regulated meeting environments
• ✓$1.5B valuation from $125M Series C (March 2026) with enterprise customers including Vanta, Vercel, Gusto, Asana, Cursor, Lovable, Decagon, and Mistral AI, plus SOC 2 Type 2 certification completed July 2025 validating security posture for enterprise procurement
• ✓Business plan at $14 per user per month includes Attio, Notion, Slack, HubSpot, Affinity, Asana, Zapier, MCP integration, and personal API: competitive integration breadth at a price meaningfully below Otter.ai Business and Fathom Business tiers

Limitations

• ⚠Manual start required before each meeting: Granola does not auto-join or auto-record, so notes are missed if the user forgets to start the recording before a call begins
• ⚠Free tier notes older than 30 days require a paid upgrade to access: teams that discover the value of a specific meeting note after the 30-day window must upgrade to Business or Enterprise to retrieve it
• ⚠Org-wide model training opt-out and SSO require Enterprise at $35 per user per month; Business at $14 allows individual opt-out but not team-wide policy, which creates a compliance gap for teams in regulated industries below Enterprise budget

Pros

• ✓Most comprehensive free tier in the meeting intelligence category with unlimited transcription, 100 plus language support, API access, and mobile app at $0: enabling enterprise-level evaluation before any financial commitment
• ✓SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and HIPAA compliance with BAA at Enterprise tier covers the widest range of regulated industries including healthcare, finance, and legal, with broader compliance coverage than most direct competitors
• ✓200 plus AI Apps for post-meeting automation including sales call analysis, objection tracking, content calendar generation, 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