Spellar AI vs Granola (2026)

Spellar AI

by Spellar LTD

Granola

by Granola, Inc.

Pros

• ✓No bot joins calls: Spellar records natively on Mac, iPhone, and iPad audio without sending a participant into the meeting, eliminating the privacy concern and awkward presence that bot-based tools like Fireflies.ai, tl;dv, and Fathom introduce
• ✓Cross-meeting memory lets users query what was said across all past recordings with cited, sourced answers linked to the exact moment in the original transcript, rather than searching through individual session notes manually
• ✓Every premium AI model is included in the base subscription: GPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity are all available without additional cost and are switchable per meeting, per template, or per individual question

Limitations

• ⚠No free tier: Spellar Pro starts at $18.99 per month (or $11.99 per month annual) with no permanent free plan, unlike Fathom and Fireflies.ai which both offer free tiers with meaningful usage limits
• ⚠No SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001 certification: Spellar covers UK GDPR and CCPA compliance but has not completed third-party security audits, which limits enterprise procurement in regulated industries where Fathom and Fireflies.ai have confirmed certifications
• ⚠Mac, iPhone, iPad, and web only: no Windows client means organizations on Windows-first environments cannot standardize on Spellar, and Windows users in mixed-device teams must use the web app which lacks native OS-level audio capture

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