Where Granola is the better choice
Granola is a polished take on AI meeting notes, and it does that one job very well. It quietly enhances the notes you type yourself, produces clean summaries in its own workspace, and — like MeetingRecorder — no bot joins the call. If your goal is a tidy, shareable set of AI notes synced across devices and your team, and a monthly subscription is fine, Granola is a lovely tool.
If that’s what you’re after, use it.
Where MeetingRecorder wins
The difference comes down to what you’re left holding and where it lives. Granola’s value is the notes, kept in its cloud on a subscription. MeetingRecorder is built around the recording itself:
- You keep the actual audio file. The M4A of the call is saved to a folder on your Mac — not discarded in favour of notes. You can replay it, re-transcribe it, or archive it.
- Everything stays local. Audio, transcript and summary live on your machine; nothing is uploaded unless you choose to transcribe.
- It records any app’s audio, not just meetings — a webinar, an interview, a video.
- It’s free, with a monthly transcription allowance, and there’s no account to create.
You still get a transcript and a short summary with action items — you just also keep the source recording, privately, at no cost.
Bottom line
Pick Granola if you mainly want polished, synced AI notes and don’t need the underlying audio. Pick MeetingRecorder if you want to keep the real recording on your Mac, capture any app, and pay nothing. Download it here — no sign-up.
Weighing other tools? See how we compare as an Otter.ai alternative for Mac.