Granola

by Granola Inc.

Don’t want to install Granola? Drop the file here.

The first 20 minutes of any recording are transcribed free: a recording up to 20 minutes transcribes in full, a longer one is previewed, and a pack from $6 (500 minutes) transcribes the rest and opens every export, and credits never expire.

AI notepad that augments your own notes with meeting-context transcripts.

macOS  ·  free trial / from $18/mo

TL;DR

Best for founders, PMs, and operators who take their own meeting notes and want AI to enhance — not replace — them. Pricing: free trial / from $18/mo.

Category
Products
Pricing
free trial / from $18/mo
Platforms
macOS

What it is

Granola is a macOS-native AI notepad designed for people who already take their own notes during calls. Instead of dropping a meeting bot into Zoom, Granola transcribes system audio locally on the Mac, then merges the visitor's own typed notes with the transcript to produce an enhanced recap. The product is built by the team behind Reddit's video product and has been a developer-and-PM favorite since its 2024 launch. Templates, shared workspaces, and Slack/Notion exports ship in paid tiers. Pricing and product details listed here were last reviewed by Neugence on 2026-05-12; check the vendor site for current values before quoting.

Best for: Founders, PMs, and operators who take their own meeting notes and want AI to enhance — not replace — them.
Watch out for: macOS-only as of 2026; no Windows or Linux build; English-first.

Install / use

granola.ai — Free trial, Pro $18/mo, Business $35/user/mo

What people actually do with Granola-style transcription

The tool is the means. These are the jobs — each one priced at published rates, each one wired up on its own page.

Wire it into ZoomSlackNotionAirtableLoomMake.com

Features

Speaker diarizationNo
Word-level timestampsNo
Streaming / real-timeNo
Languages supportedNone
HIPAA eligibleNo

Granola vs Whipscribe

FeatureGranolaWhipscribe
CategoryProductsTranscription APIs
PricingNot verified$6–$24 one-time packs (credits never expire) · first 20 minutes free
Speaker identificationNot verifiedNamed in the summary, key quotes and chapters
Word timestampsNot verifiedYes
StreamingNot verifiedNo
Languages—99
PlatformsmacOSWeb, API, MCP

Alternatives to Granola

Frequently asked about Granola

Is Granola free?

Partly. Granola has a free tier with paid plans above it — published pricing: free trial / from $18/mo. Free-tier limits change more often than this page does; verify on the vendor's pricing page.

Does Granola work on Mac, Windows and Linux?

Granola runs on macOS. It is not listed for other platforms; check the vendor for anything beyond macOS.

How do I get started with Granola?

There is nothing to install — Granola is used in the browser. Create an account on the vendor's site and upload or connect your audio.

What are the limitations of Granola?

macOS-only as of 2026; no Windows or Linux build; English-first.

Who is Granola best for?

Founders, PMs, and operators who take their own meeting notes and want AI to enhance — not replace — them.

Is Granola open source?

No. Granola is a proprietary product from Granola Inc.. If you need source you can read and run yourself, the open-source tools in this directory are the place to look.

Can I use Granola in the browser?

No — Granola is a macOS application, not a web app. You install it rather than sign in to it.

Who makes Granola?

Granola is made by Granola Inc..

What kind of tool is Granola?

In this directory Granola is filed under meetings, notetaker as a product.

What are the alternatives to Granola?

There is a side-by-side page at /tools/granola-alternatives comparing Granola with the closest tools in the same category on price, platform and features.

Can I automate Granola-style transcription without running it myself?

Yes. If what you want is transcripts rather than the tool itself, Whipscribe does the same job as a hosted API: submit a file or URL, poll a job id, pull the result as txt, json, srt, vtt or docx. $0.012 a minute — about $0.72 an audio hour — bought as credits that never expire. The automation recipes on this site show it wired to Drive folders, Zoom recordings, S3 buckets and no-code platforms.

How is Whipscribe different from Granola?

Granola is another vendor's product; Whipscribe is a per-minute transcription service. Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and never used for training, and every job returns five formats plus an AI summary, quotes and topics. The first 20 minutes of any recording are transcribed free, and a pack from $6 (500 minutes) transcribes the rest and opens every export.

What does transcription cost if I use Whipscribe instead of Granola?

$0.012 a minute — about $0.72 an audio hour — bought as credits that never expire. There is no subscription and no monthly minimum: a 3-hour recording is about $2.16, a thousand-hour archive is about $720 once. The first 20 minutes of any recording are transcribed free, and a pack from $6 (500 minutes) transcribes the rest and opens every export, so you can see what your recording holds before paying anything.

Where is the Granola category heading?

Three things are moving across the whole speech-to-text market right now: summaries, action items and speaker insights generated on top of the transcript rather than sold separately; private, secured deployment where the audio never leaves a boundary you control; and agent access — transcription exposed as a tool that Claude, Cursor or a workflow runner can call directly. Whipscribe ships all three today: per-job insights, our own servers, and an MCP server.

Whipscribe is a hosted transcription service. If you want transcripts without running infrastructure, paste a URL or drop a file in the form below — you'll have a transcript in seconds.

Transcribe your recordings

Explore

Have the recording already?

Skip the setup and send the file or the link: see how to transcribe an MP3 of any length, transcribing a podcast episode and the SRT generator.

Rather have it done for you?

Free tools cost setup time. When you want a finished transcript instead: see an honest roundup of the best transcription services, the cheapest way to transcribe an hour of audio and how our transcription services work.