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Fireflies.ai vs Granola

Which one should you try?

Fireflies.ai

Freemium

Best for Sales and customer-facing teams

Visit Fireflies.ai See full review

Granola

Freemium

Best for Solo professionals and executives in high-volume meeting schedules

Visit Granola See full review

Pricing, capabilities and platforms side by side. Prices are as of the "Pricing checked" date in the table.

Fireflies.ai

Fireflies.ai

Fireflies joins meetings automatically as a bot participant, transcribes audio in real time, and generates summaries organized around topics, action items, and speaker breakdowns. The search layer is where it earns its place on sales and distributed teams: you can query across every recorded call in the workspace, not just the last one. The ceiling appears in compliance-heavy environments — Fireflies is cloud-only, so organizations with data residency mandates or on-premise requirements have no self-hosting path. Teams that hit that wall move to vendors with on-premise deployment options. For everyone else, the API lets you pull transcripts and metadata into your CRM or data warehouse.

Granola

Granola

Granola sidesteps that friction entirely by running locally on your Mac, Windows, or iOS device, capturing audio through the system rather than injecting a bot into the call. After the meeting ends, you trigger note enhancement manually — Granola structures what was said into summaries, action items, and searchable records without anyone on the other side knowing a transcript is being built. The workflow is fast for solo professionals and executives grinding through back-to-back calls. The ceiling appears when your team needs real-time collaboration, live transcription during the call, or CRM sync that isn't stitched together manually. Teams that hit that ceiling tend to move toward Fireflies or Otter, which offer in-call bot presence in exchange for the privacy trade-off.

AttributeFireflies.aiGranola
PricingFreemiumFreemium
PriceFree; Pro $18/mo ($10/mo billed annually); Business $29/mo ($19/mo annually); Enterprise $39/mo annual only$14/mo
Pricing checkedOct 19, 2026Jun 11, 2026
Free trialNot statedNot stated
Open sourceNoNo
Has APIYesYes
Self-hosted optionNoNo
PlatformsWeb, Chrome Extension, Desktop App (Windows/Mac), Mobile App (iOS/Android)macOS, Windows, iPhone, Android, Apple Watch
Released—2024-05
Pros
  • Automatic bot-join across major conferencing platforms, so no one on the team manually starts a recording or remembers to take notes — missed action items from unrecorded calls drop to near zero.
  • Full-text search across the entire call library, which means a sales rep can pull up every time a specific competitor was mentioned across six months of calls instead of asking colleagues to dig through their memories.
  • Speaker-attributed transcripts with talk-time analytics, so managers can see participation imbalances and conversation patterns across the team without sitting in on every call.
  • Structured action-item extraction in the summary, so the post-meeting document is organized around what needs to happen next rather than requiring someone to manually distill an hour of conversation.
  • API access for pulling transcripts and metadata into external systems, so conversation data reaches your CRM or data warehouse without a manual export step that nobody remembers to do.
  • No bot joins the call, so confidential client conversations, investor meetings, and sensitive executive discussions proceed without a visible recording indicator changing the dynamic in the room.
  • Post-call AI note enhancement structures raw audio into summaries and action items automatically, which means professionals running five or six meetings a day are not spending evenings reconstructing what was decided.
  • Local audio capture at the system level rather than a third-party stream, so the privacy exposure that comes with a bot-based recorder is avoided by design rather than by policy.
  • Shared folders and AI-powered search across meeting records, so a product or sales leader can surface decisions and context from past calls without asking someone to resend notes or dig through Slack.
  • API and MCP access for teams that want to route structured meeting output into other tools — meaning Granola can act as a data source for downstream workflows rather than a dead-end repository.
Cons
  • Cloud-only architecture means every call recording and transcript lives in Fireflies' infrastructure — teams under HIPAA, GDPR data residency requirements, or internal policies requiring on-premise storage hit an absolute wall and must evaluate self-hostable competitors instead.
  • The bot joining as a visible participant changes call dynamics with some customers or candidates who object to AI recording; there is no silent background capture option, so teams working with recording-averse contacts need an explicit opt-in conversation before every call.
  • Advanced analytics and longer transcript retention are paid-only features, which means the free tier works as a proof of concept but sales teams needing historical search depth beyond the storage cap will hit that limit quickly and face an upgrade decision before they have fully evaluated fit.
  • There is no live transcription during the call. If your use case requires seeing what is being said in real time — for accessibility, live note-taking by a second participant, or in-call coaching prompts — Granola's post-hoc model does not solve that problem, and teams with those requirements move to Fireflies or Otter instead.
  • CRM logging is not automatic. Sales teams that need customer conversation records to appear in Salesforce or HubSpot without a manual step are maintaining a copy-paste process or building their own API integration, at which point the time savings from automated note-taking shrink significantly.
  • No self-hosted option exists. Organizations under data residency or regulatory constraints that prohibit cloud processing of meeting audio cannot deploy Granola without validating the vendor's data handling architecture first — and some will not clear that bar regardless of the answer.
  • The tool is Mac, Windows, and iOS only. Teams with Linux users or Android-primary workflows hit a hard wall: those participants cannot run the local client, which breaks the privacy model for any call where the Linux or Android user is the one who needs the notes.

Made up your mind?

Fireflies.ai

Freemium

Best for Sales and customer-facing teams

Visit Fireflies.ai See full review

Granola

Freemium

Best for Solo professionals and executives in high-volume meeting schedules

Visit Granola See full review

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