Granola vs Otter.ai, and where Wavenote fits

This is the fork most people in meeting notes are actually standing at: the newcomer that sits on your Mac and lets nothing into the call, or the incumbent that will send a bot to a meeting you are not in and leave the whole company a searchable archive. Both write the notes for you. They disagree about who else is in the room.

The honest read on Granola

Granola is the better experience of the 2 and it is free to start. It hears the call from your own machine, so nobody sees a participant called Notetaker, and the notes it writes are built around what you typed during the meeting rather than replacing it. It runs on Windows, iPhone, Android and a watch, shares folders with colleagues, connects to Notion, Slack, HubSpot and Zapier, and its chat across your notes is in the free tier. What you pay for it is a transcription step you do not see: its own security page names Deepgram and Assembly as the processors that turn your meeting into text, and OpenAI and Anthropic as the models that read it. It holds SOC 2 Type 2 and says plainly that it is not HIPAA compliant and cannot sign a BAA.

The honest read on Otter.ai

Otter is the one to pick when the record has to exist whether or not you attend. Its bot joins from your calendar, names each speaker, and leaves an archive the whole team can search, on the web and on every platform anybody works from. It will also record without the bot from its desktop app, and it turns a meeting into a blog or social post, which nothing else here does. The costs are all on the same side of the ledger: every second goes to Otter's servers, the free plan stops at 300 minutes a month, and Otter is a named defendant in a consolidated federal class action in the Northern District of California over calls recorded without every attendee's consent.

What actually decides it

Ask who the notes are for. If they are yours, and a bot appearing in a client call would be awkward, Granola takes that problem away entirely and costs nothing to try. If several people need the same record of the same call, including calls you did not attend, that is a calendar bot and a shared archive, and Granola does not have either.

Side by side

Where Wavenote fits

Wavenote is the third answer to the question these 2 are arguing about, and it moves the line further back. Nothing joins the call, as with Granola, and the recording also never leaves the Mac: the words become text on the machine that heard them, so there is no processor to name. The notes are files in a folder you picked, on the Mac or in iCloud Drive, which you can open in Finder and keep after you stop paying anybody. The same $4.90 is a dictation key for every other app on the Mac, which is what Wavenote was built for. What it does not have is a bot for the meetings you miss, a name against each voice, a team archive, or anything at all to hand an IT department.

Which one to pick

Granola

The notes are yours, you are in the meetings, and you want the best writeup of them without a stranger in the participant list.

Otter

A team needs one searchable record of every call, including the ones nobody attends, and somebody has to be able to search back through a year of them.

Wavenote

The recording itself is not allowed off your Mac, and you also spend the day dictating into other apps.

• Granola compared with Wavenote →
• Otter.ai compared with Wavenote →