Recordist and Granola

The bot

Neither product joins the call. Granola uses your machine's audio, as Recordist does, so nobody sees a participant and the meeting platform is not involved. Granola's pricing page lists a per-user setting, "Let people know you're using Granola", on its Basic and Business plans, which an administrator can enforce on Enterprise, and an organisation-wide notification as a pilot. Recordist has no setting that tells people for you. It copies a short notice for you to read out or paste into the chat and keeps a mark of when you said you gave it, but telling people stays your job.

They differ at the moment of recording. Granola is built around a note you open for the meeting. Recordist is built around a card that appears when a meeting is detected and records only when you click Record, unless you have added that app to the automatic-recording list. If you ignore Recordist's card, it goes away on its own.

Where the audio goes

Granola's security page says it uses transcription providers, naming Deepgram and Assembly, and transcribes in real time on macOS and Windows; it does not store meeting audio. Notes are stored in its US-hosted Amazon Web Services cloud, and AI providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic write the summaries.

Recordist transcribes with Whisper on your machine and keeps the result in a local database. Notes come from the built-in engine there too, by default. Nothing syncs anywhere unless you set up an export folder yourself, and the Privacy Ledger lists the app's network requests so you can check.

Price and limits

Granola's Basic plan is free, with limited meeting history: 30 days. Business, at $14 per user per month, removes that limit, and Enterprise is $35.

Recordist is free, with no time limit, for recording, transcription, search and export, and search covers every meeting you have kept. Every install includes 7 days of Pro, then 3 AI notes a month. Pro is $9 a month or $90 a year for anyone who subscribes by 8 January 2027, and that price stays for as long as the subscription stays active; from 9 January 2027 new subscribers pay $15 a month or $144 a year. A team of 3 to 49 people buys Pro in one checkout, with a personal key for each person; larger organisations write to hello@recordist.app.

Agent access and offline use

Granola has an MCP connector. On the free plan it reaches your personal notes from the last 30 days, and on Business it reaches personal and shared workspace notes. It reads the notes held in Granola's cloud.

Recordist's MCP server and A2A agent run on your own machine against your local database, on every plan. Recording, transcription, search and local notes work with the Wi-Fi off once the models are downloaded.

When Granola is the better choice

If you like writing notes during the meeting and having them filled in afterwards, Granola is built around exactly that, and Recordist does not try to be a notepad. If you want your notes on your phone or your wrist as well as your machine, Granola has apps for iPhone, Android and Apple Watch; its updates page dates the Android app to 1 July 2026 and the Apple Watch app to 28 July 2026. It also has pre-meeting briefs and follow-up emails on its paid plans, chat across your meetings with inline citations, and support for 32 languages as of 2 September 2026. And if cloud transcription is fine for your meetings, Granola is a well-made choice.

When Recordist may suit you better

If the transcript itself must stay with you, if you want every past meeting searchable on a free plan, or if you want your agents reading local data rather than a cloud copy, Recordist is the bot-free choice built for that.