Granola
Granola is an AI notepad for back-to-back meetings. It transcribes from your own device without sending a bot into the call, then merges your rough notes with the transcript into structured notes, action items and follow-ups.
What is Granola?
Granola is an AI notepad for people who spend their days moving from one meeting to the next. It is published by Granola, Inc., a Delaware company that also operates a British entity, Granola Labs Ltd, and it takes a deliberately different route from the AI notetakers it competes with: nothing joins your call. The application runs on your own machine, captures your microphone and system audio, and transcribes in the background while you stay in the conversation. Other participants see no extra attendee.
What you get out of it depends on what you put in. During the meeting you jot down as much or as little as you like in a plain notepad; when the call ends, Granola merges those rough notes with the transcript and produces a structured write-up that reflects what you were actually listening for, rather than a generic summary sent to everyone. The tool works across the whole meeting cycle: it syncs with Google Calendar or Outlook and prepares a Brief before external meetings covering attendees, previous discussions and open points; it captures the conversation as it happens; and it delivers notes, action items and follow-ups the moment the meeting ends.
Around that core sit a chat and an integration layer. Granola Chat answers questions across a single meeting or the whole history, and lets you pick the model. Native connectors push notes into HubSpot, Attio, Affinity, Slack, Notion and Gmail, while Zapier covers Salesforce, Jira, Asana, Linear and thousands of other apps. An MCP connector exposes your notes to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Figma, Gemini and Microsoft 365 Copilot, and a documented REST API with webhooks is available from the Business plan upward.
Granola runs on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android, with an Apple Watch app announced; there is no web version. It transcribes seventeen languages in total, though the interface itself is English only. Audio is never stored, notes are private by default, and the service holds SOC 2 Type II certification with data hosted on AWS in the United States.
What it does
- Transcribes your meetings from your own device audio, with no bot joining the call
- Merges the rough notes you typed with the transcript into clean, structured notes
- Prepares a Brief before external meetings: who is attending, what was said last time, what is still open
- Extracts action items and follow-ups the moment the meeting ends
- Pushes notes and deal context into HubSpot, Attio, Affinity, Slack, Notion or Salesforce
- Answers questions across one meeting or your entire history through Granola Chat
- Exposes your meeting notes to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other AI tools via its MCP connector
When to use Granola / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Granola is the right fit.
When to use Granola
- Salespeople and account managers who need call notes to land in HubSpot, Attio or Affinity without retyping anything
- Product managers and user researchers turning customer conversations into insights and feature requests
- Founders, consultants and freelancers running client calls where a visible recording bot would be awkward
- Anyone whose day is a chain of internal syncs, standups and one-to-ones and who wants the admin handled
- People who take notes in person, at conferences or on the move, using the iPhone or Android app
When not to use Granola
- Healthcare teams: Granola is not HIPAA compliant, will not sign a BAA, and must not be used for protected health information
- Schools and universities handling student education records, since Granola is not FERPA compliant
- Organisations that require EU, UK, Canadian or Australian data residency, as everything is hosted on AWS in the United States
- Sales teams looking for conversation intelligence: Granola does not score or analyse calls, only captures them
- Anyone needing to replay meeting audio, or wanting to work in a browser, since audio is deleted and there is no web version
How to use Granola
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Download the desktop app from notes.granola.ai, or install the mobile app from the App Store or Google Play
- Sign in with a Google Workspace or Microsoft account
- Connect your calendar so Granola can detect your upcoming meetings
- Grant the microphone and system audio permissions the app asks for
- When a meeting starts, click to launch Granola on it: nothing auto-joins and nothing auto-records
- Type as much or as little as you want in the notepad while the conversation runs
- Click End when the meeting finishes, and let Granola generate the enhanced notes
- Set your transcription and summary languages under Settings, Preferences, Language on desktop
- Decide whether your data feeds model training under Settings, Preferences, Data and sharing
- Choose a sharing level for each note, then connect the integrations or Recipes that should run after every meeting
Pros & Cons
Pros
- No bot in the meeting, so no notification to participants and no awkwardness on a client call
- Notes reflect your own attention rather than a generic summary sent to everyone
- A genuinely usable free plan with unlimited note-taking, capped only at thirty days of history
- Audio is never kept, which removes an entire category of risk
- Model-training opt-out is available on every plan, including the free one
- Broad, well-documented integration layer, including MCP into the main AI assistants
- Serious compliance posture: SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and UK GDPR, DPA with Standard Contractual Clauses and a published subprocessor list
Cons
- No data residency outside the United States, which rules the tool out for many EU and UK organisations
- No HIPAA compliance or BAA, no FERPA, and no ISO 27001
- Meeting history beyond thirty days requires a paid plan
- No audio playback, and no conversation intelligence or call scoring
- No web version or browser extension: you have to install an application, and the interface is English only
- On the Business plan each user must opt out of model training individually, and Granola cannot guarantee data was unused before you did
- Notes and transcripts are kept indefinitely unless someone actively configures a retention policy
Pricing & Plans
Granola offers a permanent free plan, Basic, at USD 0 per user per month, which allows unlimited note-taking but restricts how far back the history can be consulted. The lowest paid entry point is the Business plan at USD 14 per user per month, with Enterprise at USD 35 per user per month. No time-limited free trial is advertised, and the pricing page publishes no annual discount.
- AI meeting notes
- limited meeting history
- AI chat within and across meetings
- shared folders
- customised note templates
- multi-language support
- and the ability to opt out of model training at any time
- everything in Basic
- plus unlimited meeting notes and history
- advanced AI thinking models
- advanced integrations with Attio
- Notion
- Slack
- HubSpot
- Affinity and Zapier
- everything in Business
- plus enterprise-grade security and admin controls
- single sign-on
- priority support and usage analytics
- org-wide auto-deletion periods
- admin controls over sharing and API access
- an enforced org-wide training opt-out
- and org-wide notification that Granola is in use
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Granola handles your data.
GDPR overview
Compliance is claimed explicitly and backed by documents rather than a badge. Granola states it complies with both the GDPR and the UK GDPR, and publishes a standard Data Processing Addendum, last updated on 17 July 2026, which incorporates the EU Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK Addendum; custom DPAs are not offered. The Privacy Policy took effect on 24 July 2026. The customer is the controller and Granola the processor. Subprocessors are listed publicly at trust.granola.ai and customers may object to a new one within thirty days. Data subject rights are supported, with portability served by an in-app CSV export and other requests handled by email. A UK entity exists, Granola Labs Ltd in St Albans, but no Article 27 representative for the European Union is named anywhere on the site.
Who owns the data?
Customer Data belongs to the customer, not to Granola. The User Terms state plainly that content stored in a workspace is owned by the Customer, and the Security FAQ sets the roles out in GDPR terms: you act as the data controller, Granola acts as the data processor. The Privacy Policy nuances this slightly, describing Granola as a limited controller for the account data it needs to run your subscription and a processor for everything else. Practically, notes are private by default and nobody else sees them until you choose one of three sharing levels; administrators, including on Enterprise plans, cannot read an individual's private notes. In a company workspace, the employer as Customer controls provisioning, retention and export settings.
Reuse rights
You can reuse your own content freely and without asking: notes, summaries and transcripts are yours, editable in the app and exportable at any time through the in-app CSV export, which Granola presents as covering the GDPR Article 20 right to data portability. You can push the same material into your own tools with no further permission, whether through the native HubSpot, Attio, Affinity, Slack, Notion and Gmail connectors, through Zapier, through the MCP connector into assistants such as Claude or ChatGPT, or through the documented REST API available from the Business plan. Individual notes can be deleted at will. What Granola reserves for itself is narrower and separable: it may use de-identified data to improve its own models, and every plan can switch that off in Settings. Third parties such as OpenAI and Anthropic are contractually barred from training on your data at all.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
All customer data is stored on Amazon Web Services servers located in the United States, inside a virtual private cloud. It is encrypted at rest and in transit using AWS's encrypted database system, and backed up daily. Granola also cites firewalls, VPC configuration and anti-virus and malware protection as complementary measures. Meeting notes are additionally cached locally on your own device so they open quickly and remain readable offline. Regional data residency is not available: Granola states clearly that it does not currently offer EU, UK, Canadian or Australian hosting, while acknowledging that customers ask for it and promising an update if that changes. Transfers out of the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland are covered by Standard Contractual Clauses. The domain resolves to a US-located Amazon address, an anycast node consistent with that hosting.
Where Granola works
Country-level availability.
Not available in
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Granola.
- Consent is your responsibility, not Granola's: you must tell participants you are capturing the conversation, and recording laws differ by jurisdiction
- Notes and transcripts are kept indefinitely by default, so retention has to be configured deliberately rather than assumed
- Transcript auto-deletion is permanent and breaks note regeneration and chat quality for the affected meetings
- On the Business plan each person must opt out of model training themselves, and Granola cannot guarantee that data predating an opt-out was never used
- Effortless capture can quietly erode the habit of listening and synthesising: if the tool always writes it down, you may stop deciding what matters
- US-only hosting and the absence of HIPAA, FERPA and ISO 27001 can turn a personal tool choice into a compliance problem once colleagues adopt it
- The contracting entity may be Granola, Inc. in Delaware or Granola Labs Ltd in the UK depending on your agreement, and the Platform Terms are only available as an external PDF
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Straightforward for an individual. You install a desktop or mobile application, since there is no web version, sign in with a Google Workspace or Microsoft account, connect your calendar and grant microphone and system audio permissions. There is no bot to configure and nothing to set up on the video platform itself; you simply start Granola manually on each meeting. Integrations connect in a few clicks. On the corporate side the work is heavier: SSO and SAML, admin controls and a documented network allowlist for filtering tools such as Zscaler.
Deployment
Apps stores
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Granola
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Granola.
Frequently asked questions
Does Granola send a bot into my meetings?
Is there a free plan, and what does it limit?
How much does the paid version cost?
Which platforms does Granola run on?
Is my data used to train AI models?
Does Granola keep the audio of my meetings?
Where is my data hosted?
Is Granola GDPR compliant, and does it have certifications?
How many languages are supported?
Is there an API, and who can use it?
Should you pick Granola?
Granola is one of the clearer propositions in a crowded category. Rather than competing on how much a bot can record, it removes the bot altogether and bets that the most useful meeting notes are the ones shaped by the person who was actually paying attention. That choice runs through the whole product: capture happens on your own machine, audio is never kept, notes are private until you decide otherwise, and the output reads like something you wrote rather than a transcript summary sent to the whole invite list.
The supporting work is more mature than the simplicity suggests. SOC 2 Type II certification, a published Data Processing Addendum with EU and UK Standard Contractual Clauses, a public subprocessor list, a model-training opt-out available even on the free plan, and three published vulnerability post-mortems point to a vendor that expects procurement scrutiny. Named customers such as Brex, Vanta, Linear and Vercel suggest it survives that scrutiny.
The reservations are just as clear, and they are structural rather than cosmetic. Everything is hosted on AWS in the United States with no regional residency option, which will end the conversation for a number of European and public-sector buyers. There is no HIPAA compliance and no BAA, so healthcare is explicitly out of scope, and FERPA is absent too. There is no web version, no audio playback, and no conversation intelligence for sales teams who want call scoring rather than call notes.
For individuals and teams whose main problem is that they are in too many meetings, the free plan is generous enough to answer the question properly before any money changes hands, and USD 14 per user per month is a modest step up. For regulated industries and residency-bound organisations, the answer today is no.
- Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.
- Opens in a new window.