Granola vs Otter: which is right for your meetings?

Two different ideas of meeting notes

Granola works like a notepad that listens. During a call you jot down a few words, and afterward Granola uses the transcript to expand them into proper notes. You see your own notes and the enhanced version side by side. The result is personal and short, shaped by what you thought was important.

Otter works like a court reporter. It writes down everything, labels speakers, keeps the recording, and adds a summary and AI chat on top. The result is complete, which helps when you need the exact words, but you read or search more to find what matters.

Granola vs Otter at a glance

Checked on each company's pricing and security pages in October 2026. Prices are per user per month.

Sources: granola.ai/pricing, granola.ai/security, otter.ai/pricing, trust.otter.ai. Otter was running limited-time discounts; list prices are shown.

Free plans

The free plans limit different things. Granola's Basic plan doesn't advertise a minute cap, but it only keeps 30 days of meeting history. Otter keeps your 25 most recent conversations, caps you at 300 minutes a month, and stops each conversation at 30 minutes. If your calls are long, Granola's free plan is more usable day to day; if you need to look back months later, neither free plan is ideal.

Bot vs no bot

Granola has never used a bot. It captures audio on your computer or phone, so it works with Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Slack huddles and in-person meetings, and nobody sees an extra participant.

Otter is best known for its notetaker bot, which joins calls from your calendar. Its desktop app for Mac and Windows now records without a bot too. The bot is easy and visible; device recording is quieter, which means you need to tell people yourself. Read more in our guide to an AI note taker without a bot.

Privacy and data handling

Both tools transcribe in the cloud. Neither runs speech recognition on your computer.

• Granola says it doesn't store meeting audio, only the transcript and your notes. It uses Deepgram and AssemblyAI for transcription and AI providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic for summaries, and says those providers can't train on your data. Granola trains on anonymized data unless you opt out in settings; Enterprise has training off by default.
• Otter stores audio and transcripts with US-based cloud providers including AWS. Its privacy policy says it trains its AI on de-identified audio and transcriptions. It also faces a pending privacy class action, which we summarize in Is Otter AI safe?

A reminder that applies to every tool: recording laws vary, and some places require everyone's consent. Let people know you're recording.

A third option: Hark

Hark sits between the two. Like Granola, it never sends a bot and works with any meeting app. Like Otter, it keeps the full recording and transcript. The difference is where the work happens: on your computer.

• Records your microphone and computer audio as separate tracks, so it hears both sides of a call on Windows and Linux.
• Transcribes locally, live and then again more accurately after the meeting. Audio isn't uploaded for transcription and there are no minute limits.
• Recognises voices you've named before, so returning colleagues are labeled automatically (you confirm the suggestion).
• Your own notes editor during the meeting, plus AI meeting notes by Claude in a choice of styles with the $12/month subscription.
• Free forever for everything that runs on your computer, with a 2-day preview of the AI features.

The honest limits: English only, no phone app, no team sharing or CRM integrations, and on a Mac Hark records the microphone only, not the computer's audio. AI features send transcript text to Claude. If you live on your phone or need a team workspace, Granola or Otter will suit you better. More comparisons: Granola alternatives, Otter alternatives and local AI transcription.