Choose Granola if you want a bot-free notepad that turns rough notes into a structured record. Choose Fathom if you want an automated archive with recordings, clips, search, and sales workflows. Choose Fireflies if the point of recording meetings is to query them months later across the whole workspace. The decision is about what your team needs to capture and retain, not which demo summary sounds smarter.
All Granola and Fathom prices, limits, and product specifications below are from official vendor pages and are current as of 2026-07-20; the Fireflies figures were checked as of 2026-07-27. All three products are changing quickly, especially Fathom’s bot-free beta, so confirm the linked pages before a rollout.
Granola vs Fathom vs Fireflies AI meeting notes: quick comparison
| Decision point | Granola | Fathom | Fireflies |
|---|---|---|---|
| Default capture model | Desktop app captures microphone and system audio without joining the call | Bot joins Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams; a bot-free Mac beta is also rolling out | Notetaker bot joins Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and more; a Chrome extension and a Google Meet SDK path capture without a visible bot |
| Saved media | No stored audio or video on desktop; transcript and notes are retained | Recording, transcript, clips, and summary can be retained; bot-free Transcript Only saves no recording | Configurable per workspace: audio plus transcript and summary, transcript and summary without a recording, or summary only |
| In-meeting workflow | User can write rough notes, view the live transcript, then enhance the notes | Automated capture, highlights, and post-call assets; bot-free beta adds live summary and scratch pad | Automated capture; the Chrome extension adds a live transcript, live notes, and in-call AskFred |
| Platform coverage | Any desktop meeting platform on macOS or Windows; iPhone supports in-person meetings | Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams on Mac or Windows; bot-free beta is currently Mac-only | Broad bot coverage across major conferencing platforms; the bot-free Chrome extension is Google Meet only and does not record video |
| Team organization | Private-by-default notes, shared spaces and folders, reusable templates, cross-meeting chat | Team call view, folders, comments, mentions, playlists, keyword or AI alerts, customer and deal views | Notebook with keyword search across the workspace, channels, comments and bookmarks, user groups, topic tracking, and Global AskFred across past meetings |
| Integrations | Google or Microsoft calendar; Slack, Notion, HubSpot, Attio, Affinity, Zapier, plus API and MCP access on Business | Google or Microsoft calendar; Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce, Close, Zapier, Make, API, and MCP, with availability varying by plan | A directory of 100+ apps including Slack, Notion, HubSpot, Salesforce, Linear, Google Docs, and storage tools, plus a GraphQL API with webhooks documented as available on all plans |
| Published entry price | Basic $0; Business $14/user/month | Free $0; Premium $20/user/month monthly; Team $19/user/month monthly with two-user minimum | Free $0; Pro $10/user/month billed annually or $18 monthly; Business $19/user/month billed annually or $29 monthly |
| Best fit | Product, engineering, recruiting, and leadership calls where a visible recorder is undesirable | Teams that need searchable recordings, clips, coaching, or CRM-centered automation | Teams that treat meetings as a long-lived, searchable archive and want broad integration and API reach |
The table summarizes official Granola capture documentation, Granola pricing, Fathom capture modes, and Fathom pricing, all checked on 2026-07-20, together with the Fireflies product overview, Fireflies integrations directory, and Fireflies pricing documentation, checked on 2026-07-27.
Recording mode is the biggest difference
Granola does not enter the meeting as a participant. You open a scheduled note or Quick Note, and the desktop app sends microphone and system audio to its transcription provider in real time. Granola says it saves no audio or video; it retains the transcript and notes. Listening to device audio lets it work across meeting platforms, but it will not join a call you forgot to start.
Fathom’s established workflow uses a visible bot on Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, producing a recording for clips and playlists. As of 2026-07-20, eligible Mac users with English meetings can try a bot-free beta. Its modes are Transcript Only, Audio Only, and Audio & Video by bot. Transcript Only saves no recording; Audio Only captures locally; full audio and video still uses a bot. Windows remains on the previous workflow, according to Fathom’s device compatibility page.
Bot-free still requires a consent policy. Fathom’s beta can post a recording notice in the meeting chat; if that notice is disabled, the app prompts the host—not the attendees—to confirm consent responsibility. Granola also advises users to obtain consent. Do not treat either local capture mode as automatic participant disclosure.
Transcription accuracy needs a pilot, not a winner label
Neither vendor publishes a reproducible head-to-head accuracy benchmark. Testimonials do not establish which is better for your calls; microphones, accents, cross-talk, language switching, and product names all matter.
Granola lets users add internal jargon. Its newer speaker-attribution feature can label individual display names in Google Meet on macOS or Windows with an extension, and in Zoom on macOS after setup. Without it, transcripts use “Me” and “Them.” It cannot distinguish people sharing one room device or reliably resolve overlapping speech. Granola’s language documentation lists English plus nine other desktop languages in multi-language mode, with more on iPhone; that mode does not support the jargon boost.
Fathom’s language documentation lists 38 transcription languages and it provides a team-level Transcription Dictionary. Admins can add 50 company terms, each up to 100 characters and six words, according to its dictionary documentation. These controls are not proof of universal accuracy.
Pilot both with a stand-up, architecture review, customer call, incident review, and mixed-accent call. Score names, speaker attribution, numbers, action-item ownership, and preserved disagreement. Review the transcript as well as the summary.
Integrations favor different workflows
Granola uses Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook for upcoming meetings and event context. Its $14 Business plan lists Slack, Notion, HubSpot, Attio, Affinity, and Zapier, plus API and MCP access. Folder rules can post notes automatically. Its Slack documentation covers private channels when the app is added, while its HubSpot integration associates notes with contacts, companies, or deals.
Fathom also requires a Google or Microsoft calendar. Official pages list HubSpot, Salesforce, Close, Slack, Zapier, Make, API, and MCP connections. Business adds CRM field sync, Deal View, coaching metrics, and scorecards. Salesforce can receive summaries and selected sections on Contact, Account, and open Opportunity records—useful for sales engineering, but excessive for many sprint ceremonies.
Test the edges: Fathom’s Slack integration sends clips and alerts only to public channels, and posted highlight clips cannot be deleted. Granola can post summaries to configured private channels. Fathom CRM matching relies on external attendees and primary-calendar data. Granola automation is folder-centric.
Team features: collaborative notes versus a call library
Granola starts from personal ownership. Notes are private by default until shared or added to a team-space folder. Granola Chat queries folders or the wider space, while templates and Recipes standardize notes and follow-ups. It suits teams building a curated knowledge base.
Fathom Team adds global search, team recordings, folders, comments, mentions, playlists, customer views, and alerts. Business adds Deal View and coaching. It better serves managers reviewing missed calls or recurring topics, at the cost of a larger media corpus to govern.
Privacy and retention deserve separate review
Both vendors state that they are SOC 2 Type II compliant, store data in the United States, encrypt customer data, and bar third-party AI providers from training on it; Fathom documents encryption in its DPA. Both may use de-identified data for their own models unless users opt out. Granola’s security FAQ gives Enterprise an organization-wide opt-out; Fathom’s security page gives team organizations a similar control.
The retention profiles differ in kind, not just degree. Granola keeps notes and transcripts indefinitely unless deleted or governed by an Enterprise policy—but it holds no desktop meeting audio, so there is less sensitive media to manage. Fathom can retain recordings indefinitely; its retention-policy documentation places standard automatic deletion on Business, while Enterprise pricing lists custom retention programs. In short: Granola minimizes retained media by design; Fathom gives you recording evidence, which in turn demands tighter access and deletion rules.
Pricing as of 2026-07-20
Granola Basic is $0 with unlimited meetings and a rolling window of the latest 30 days of history; older notes are stored but not accessible until you upgrade. Business is $14 per user monthly with unlimited history, integrations, centralized billing, and advanced models. Enterprise starts at $35 per user monthly with SSO, security, analytics, and retention controls. Every active workspace member is billed at that workspace’s tier.
Fathom Free is $0 with unlimited recordings, storage, and transcription; advanced summary templates cover only your first five calls each month, after which the general template remains available. Premium is $20 per user per month when billed monthly, or $16 per user per month when billed annually. Team is $19 monthly or $15 with annual billing, per user per month, with a two-user minimum. Business is $34 monthly or $25 with annual billing, per user per month, also with a two-user minimum. Enterprise is quote-based.
Pick Granola if…
- You want one bot-free workflow across Zoom, Meet, Teams, Slack Huddles, or another desktop meeting app.
- Your team values editable, curated notes more than stored audio, video, and clips.
- Engineers and product managers want private notes by default, with deliberate sharing into project folders.
- A $14 per-seat Business plan covers the integrations you need.
Pick Fathom if…
- You need searchable recordings, clips, playlists, and review workflows for calls people missed.
- Salesforce or HubSpot field sync, deal views, scorecards, or coaching are part of the requirement.
- Automated capture matters more than keeping a recorder out of the participant list.
- Your Mac and English-meeting users can test the bot-free beta, while the rest of the team can accept the bot workflow.
Where Fireflies fits as a third option
Granola and Fathom differ over what a meeting leaves behind. Fireflies differs over what you do with that record afterwards. Its default capture is a visible Notetaker bot with wider platform coverage than either alternative—Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and others, according to its product overview. Two bot-free paths exist and both are narrower than the headline suggests: the Chrome extension captures Google Meet audio without a bot but does not record video and does not cover Zoom or Teams, and the Google Meet SDK integration captures audio and video without a visible bot while displaying participant recording notices. If you need one bot-free workflow across every platform, this is not it—that remains Granola’s argument.
What Fireflies retains is configurable rather than fixed. Its settings guide documents formats ranging from audio plus transcript and summary down to summary only with no recording, so a workspace can decide how much media it wants to own. The retrieval layer is the real differentiator: Notebook searches transcripts by keyword across workspace views with filters, channels, comments, and bookmarks, and Global AskFred queries across past meetings to summarize or extract decisions and action items spanning several calls. Fathom’s search is oriented around finding and replaying a call; this is oriented around answering a question without knowing which call holds the answer.
On the axes the rest of this article uses, Fireflies is broad rather than deep. Its language documentation lists 100+ transcription and summary languages with dominant-language auto-detect and a multi-language mode, and custom vocabulary accepts names, acronyms, and technical terms. Those are tuning controls, not evidence of better accuracy—the pilot advice above applies here unchanged. Its integrations directory claims 100+ apps including Slack, Notion, HubSpot, Salesforce, Linear, and storage tools, and its GraphQL API with webhooks is documented as available on all plans rather than gated to a higher tier, which matters if you intend to pipe meeting data somewhere else.
Governance is where an archive-first tool costs you the most. Fireflies documents SOC 2 Type II and GDPR posture on its security page, states that customer meeting data is not used to train models, and reserves a HIPAA BAA for Enterprise. Read the retention terms carefully: zero retention by third-party vendors is not the same as deletion from your own archive, and auto-delete—retention windows from one week to one year, applied to future meetings—is Enterprise-only. With auto-delete off, meetings are not deleted automatically. As of 2026-07-27, official pricing is Free at $0, Pro at $10 per user monthly billed annually or $18 billed monthly, Business at $19 billed annually or $29 monthly, and Enterprise at $39 billed annually. Storage is the limit that bites first: as of 2026-07-27 the storage documentation gives Free 400 minutes per user and Pro 8,000 minutes per user, pooled across the team and not reset monthly, with unlimited storage on Business and Enterprise. A team that plans to keep years of calls is really pricing Business, not Free.
Pick Fireflies if…
- Your reason for recording is retrieval months later—searching transcripts across the workspace and asking questions that span several meetings rather than replaying one call.
- You need bot coverage beyond Zoom, Meet, and Teams, or you want a documented GraphQL API and webhooks without moving to a higher plan to get them.
- You want to choose per workspace how much media to retain, from full audio down to summary only.
- You can accept the governance cost: unlimited storage and scheduled auto-delete both sit on the paid tiers, so an archive-first rollout should be priced and permissioned as Business or Enterprise from the start.
Bottom line
For product and engineering teams, Granola is the cleaner default for reviewed decision records. Fathom is stronger for a searchable call library with recordings and follow-through. Fireflies is the one to shortlist when the meeting archive itself is the asset—queried across months, wired into other systems through the API—and when you accept the storage and retention cost that comes with keeping it. All three still require consent, transcript review, retention rules, and a pilot.
Run the two that match your artifact model for two weeks; running all three at once usually just triples the consent conversations. Measure correction time, missed decisions, action-item ownership, integration failures, and actual reuse of recordings, clips, or past-meeting search. AI notes from any of these tools will contain errors—the pilot tells you which errors your team catches fastest. Pick the tool whose artifacts your team trusts and uses.