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Granola vs Hedy AI

Neither one sends a bot into your call, but they help at different moments. Granola is about the notes afterwards: you jot a few lines, it listens through your computer's audio, and it writes up clean notes when you're done. Hedy is about the meeting itself, showing suggested questions and talking points on screen while people are still talking. If you mostly forget what was decided, get Granola. If you mostly freeze in the moment, try Hedy.

Free plans and what they leave out

Granola's free Basic plan keeps only 30 days of meeting history, has no API, and its AI chat picks the model for you. Hedy's free plan caps you at 5 hours of meetings a month, and the live suggestions stop after the first 30 minutes of each session. Either is enough to see whether you like the approach before paying.

Paying for one

Granola Business is $14 per user per month and adds unlimited history, the API, and integrations with Notion, Zapier, HubSpot, Attio and Affinity. Enterprise is $35 and adds SSO, admin controls and Salesforce. The pricing page doesn't list an annual rate.

Hedy Pro is $12.99 a month, $99.99 a year (about $8.33 a month) or $299 once for lifetime access. Pro adds unlimited sessions, importing old recordings and YouTube videos, chat across sessions, MCP and API, and a choice of US or EU data storage. Team seats cost the same as Pro. Against the annual plan, the lifetime license pays for itself in its third year.

Devices, and where the audio goes

Granola lists apps for desktop, iPhone, Android and Apple Watch on every plan, and works with Zoom, Meet, Teams, Slack huddles and in-person meetings. Hedy covers iPhone and iPad, Mac, Windows, Android, Apple Watch and the web.

Hedy leans harder on privacy: it advertises on-device processing, and its Enterprise plan can force local AI processing or run your own models on a private cloud or your own servers. Granola's pricing page lists nothing comparable: no local-processing mode and no self-hosted plan, even at Enterprise.

Granola: Pick Granola if you want tidy notes after back-to-back calls, pushed into Notion, HubSpot or Attio, and don't need help during the meeting.

Hedy AI: Pick Hedy if you want live prompts on screen during interviews, pitches or negotiations, or a one-time $299 license instead of a subscription.

Facts checked Oct 18, 2026 against 3 sources

Which one should you try?

Granola

Freemium

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

Visit Granola See full review

Hedy AI

Freemium

Best for Business professionals and executives managing complex negotiations

Visit Hedy AI See full review

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

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.

Hedy AI

Hedy AI

Hedy listens to meetings in real time and pushes coached suggestions — follow-up questions, talking points, smart replies — directly to your screen as the conversation unfolds. It retains context across sessions, so when you walk into the twelfth call with Acme Corp it already knows the history. Notes, key decisions, and action items are captured without you lifting a pen. On-device audio processing is the privacy story: your audio never reaches the cloud, though transcripts are processed transiently. The ceiling appears when you need the tool to act on what it hears — it coaches, it does not execute.

AttributeGranolaHedy AI
PricingFreemiumFreemium
Price$14/moPro $12.99/mo or $99.99/yr; $299 lifetime
Pricing checkedJun 11, 2026Oct 19, 2026
Free trialNot statedNot stated
Open sourceNoNo
Has APIYesYes
Self-hosted optionNoNo
PlatformsmacOS, Windows, iPhone, Android, Apple WatchiOS, Android, macOS, Windows, Apple Watch, Web
Released2024-052024-06
Pros
  • 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.
  • Live in-meeting coaching suggestions delivered as the conversation unfolds, so you get the sharp follow-up question when it can change the outcome — not in a recap you read an hour later.
  • Cross-session memory organized by client or topic, which means you walk into a recurring meeting already briefed on prior decisions and open questions without manually reviewing old notes.
  • On-device audio processing with transient cloud transcript handling, so the vendor's privacy claim holds up under scrutiny for teams that cannot let conversation audio sit on a third-party server.
  • 30-plus language support with a custom vocabulary option, so non-native speakers and domain-specific teams — medical, legal, technical — get suggestions in context rather than generic filler.
  • Automatic extraction of action items, key decisions, and highlights after each session, so the post-meeting admin work that typically falls through the cracks is done before you close the call.
Cons
  • 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.
  • Hedy coaches; it does not act. When a sales team wants a completed client call to automatically log notes to a CRM or create a follow-up task in their project tracker, the Zapier integration requires a human to trigger it — teams with high call volume end up building that automation layer themselves or abandoning Hedy for a tool that closes the loop without manual intervention.
  • The five-hour monthly ceiling on the free tier hits fast for anyone using Hedy daily across back-to-back meetings — a full workday of calls can consume a week's allocation, forcing an upgrade decision earlier than expected.
  • Hedy is not self-hosted, and while the vendor offers EU data residency, organizations with strict data sovereignty requirements that prohibit any cloud transcript processing — even transient — cannot use the tool in its current architecture.

Made up your mind?

Granola

Freemium

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

Visit Granola See full review

Hedy AI

Freemium

Best for Business professionals and executives managing complex negotiations

Visit Hedy AI See full review

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Specs come from each tool's own site and docs (how we test). AIDiveForge is editorially independent.

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