Granola vs Fellow: AI Meeting Notes Head-to-Head
Two AI meeting notetakers with very different theories of the meeting. We tested both on capture, note quality, integrations, compliance, and price to see which produces better measured results.
Fellow takes the overall by six points on integrations, recording and playback, compliance coverage, and team workflows. Granola wins on bot-free capture and the note-writing experience, and it's the more defensible pick for solo operators running confidential 1:1 client calls on Mac, Windows, or iOS. For teams that need meeting data to flow into a CRM or project tracker, or that need HIPAA or Salesforce, Fellow is the higher-scoring default.
Granola and Fellow target the same job (turning meetings into structured, searchable notes) but make nearly opposite product bets. Granola captures system audio locally with no visible bot in the call. Fellow offers both a meeting bot and a botless option, and wraps notes in a full team workflow with agendas, action items, and CRM sync.
Pricing sits close enough that cost alone shouldn't decide it. Granola's Business plan is $14/user/month and Fellow's Business plan is $15/user/month on annual billing, with comparable free tiers. We ran both through the same capture, note-quality, integration, and compliance rigs and scored each round on measured results.
| Test category | Winner | Result & method |
|---|---|---|
| Capture model and call dynamic | Granola | Granola captures device audio locally with no visible participant in the meeting, so external attendees see a clean participant list. Fellow offers both bot and botless recording, but its bot path is the more common deployment and triggers a visible notifier; its botless path closes the gap but takes more setup. On trust-dependent calls (client, recruiting, board), Granola's default is less intrusive. How we measured it: Ran 20 mixed meetings (Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, in-person) through each tool back-to-back. Scored on whether a visible recording indicator appeared in the participant list, whether external participants asked about recording, and whether the tool captured both sides of audio without participant onboarding. |
| Note quality and structure | Fellow | Both produced usable notes. Fellow's structured summaries included action items with assignees and due dates that synced to project tools, plus X-Ray links back to the exact transcript line each point came from. Granola produced clean, focused notes and its Recipes templates were intuitive, but action-item extraction was shallower and there's no audio playback to verify a contested line. On the same answer key, Fellow caught more action items per meeting on average. How we measured it: Scored AI-generated notes from the same 20 meetings against a hand-written answer key for three things: capture of decisions, capture of action items with owners, and absence of hallucinated content. Each meeting was independently rated by two reviewers. |
| Transcription accuracy and speaker ID | Fellow | Granola lands at 90–95% transcription accuracy on clean 1:1 audio, but multi-speaker accuracy drops noticeably in calls with three or more participants, and speaker identification breaks down in larger meetings. Fellow's bot path gets a direct meeting feed and held attribution more reliably on the group-call subset. On 1:1s the two were within noise; the gap opened on group calls. How we measured it: Transcribed the same set of 1:1 calls and 4–6 person group calls in each tool and compared the output to a human transcript. Word error rate was scored on clean audio only; speaker attribution was scored separately on the multi-speaker subset. |
| Recording, playback and verification | Fellow | Granola intentionally doesn't store audio or video (transcription happens in real time and the source is discarded), and there's no upload path for files captured elsewhere. Fellow stores full recordings with playback, organizes them into channels, and accepts audio or video uploads on paid tiers. For any workflow that needs to verify a transcript against the source or revisit exact phrasing, this round isn't close. How we measured it: Tested whether each tool produced an audio or video recording that could be played back, scrubbed, and quoted from after the meeting, and whether external audio/video files could be uploaded for processing. |
| Integrations and CRM sync | Fellow | Fellow connects natively to 50+ tools including Salesforce, HubSpot, Asana, Jira, Linear, ClickUp, Notion, Slack, and Google Docs, and exposes an API and MCP Server for connecting meeting data to other AI tools. Granola added HubSpot, Slack, Notion, Attio, Affinity, and Zapier through early 2026, but doesn't offer a native Salesforce integration and lacks an export function; getting transcripts or notes out otherwise requires copy-paste. For teams that need action items to land on a CRM record, Fellow wins decisively. How we measured it: Counted native, first-party integrations on each vendor's documentation as of the test date, and ran an end-to-end test of pushing meeting action items into a CRM and a project tracker without manual copy-paste. |
| Security and compliance | Fellow | Fellow publishes SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and HIPAA coverage. Granola achieved SOC 2 Type 2 in July 2025 and is GDPR-compliant, but doesn't offer HIPAA compliance and won't sign a BAA. Granola also has data sharing for AI training enabled by default on non-Enterprise plans: individuals opt out in settings, while organization-wide opt-out is restricted to the $35/user/month Enterprise tier. For healthcare, legal, or regulated buyers, Fellow's posture is materially stronger. How we measured it: Compared each vendor's published certifications and data-handling policies on their trust/security pages as of the test date, including SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA, and default behavior on training opt-out. |
| Platform coverage | Fellow | Granola ships native apps for macOS, Windows, and iOS; there's no Android app and no web version, and no public release date for Android. Fellow runs on iPad, Android, and iPhone in addition to desktop and web. For organizations on mixed device fleets, Granola excludes Android users by default. How we measured it: Counted supported platforms (macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, web) and tested whether mixed-device teams could adopt the tool without leaving anyone out. |
| Pricing and free tier | Granola | List price is effectively tied: Granola Business is $14/user/month and Fellow Business is $15/user/month billed annually ($23 monthly). Fellow's Team plan at $7/user/month annual undercuts Granola if you don't need unlimited AI notes or CRM sync. The deciding detail is the free tier: Fellow's free plan covers up to 10 users with five AI notes per user, while Granola's Basic plan offers unlimited meetings but caps free users to the last 30 days of history. For a small team that runs few meetings per week, Granola's free path is cheaper to live on longer. How we measured it: Compared each vendor's published Business-tier pricing and free-plan limits as of June 2026, normalized against a 10-person team running ~40 meetings per user per month. |
Granola and Fellow are sold for the same job (turning a meeting into structured, searchable notes), but they make nearly opposite product bets. Granola captures audio locally with no bot in the call. Fellow offers both bot and botless recording and wraps notes in a full team workflow with agendas, action items, and CRM sync. With Business-tier pricing within a dollar of each other, the buying decision reduces to which bet fits the work.
Reading the result
Fellow took six of eight rounds on integrations, recording and playback, compliance, transcription accuracy on group calls, and platform coverage. Granola won two: capture model (the round it was designed to win) and the free tier. The six-point overall margin is real but narrow enough that the per-round picture matters more than the headline.
How to map the rounds to a buying decision
If your meetings are mostly 1:1 client calls, recruiting screens, or other trust-dependent conversations on Mac, Windows, or iOS, Granola is the higher-scoring pick. Granola doesn’t join your call. There’s no bot. No recording notification. No “Granola AI is now participating” banner. It runs locally on your machine and captures the audio from your system output. To everyone else on the call, nothing is different. That’s the round Granola was built to win, and it does.
If your team runs structured recurring meetings (1:1s, sprint reviews, customer calls that need to land in a CRM) Fellow’s integration depth is the deciding factor. Fellow connects natively to over 50 tools: including Salesforce, HubSpot, Asana, Jira, Linear, ClickUp, Google Docs, Notion, Slack, and more. Action items don’t just sit as text in a note; they sync directly to project management tools, CRMs, or AI automation tools with due dates and assignees. Fellow also offers an API and MCP Server for connecting meeting intelligence to AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor.
If you’re in a regulated industry, compliance decides it. Fellow is a full-featured AI meeting assistant built for teams and organizations, with bot or botless recording, 50+ integrations, and enterprise-grade security (SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA). Granola is SOC 2 Type 2 and GDPR-compliant but does not offer HIPAA compliance and will not sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA). Healthcare, legal, and benefits teams have a clearer path with Fellow.
On the verification gap
The recording round is the one that surprised us most in testing. Granola’s design choice to discard source audio is defensible on privacy grounds but creates a downstream problem: Granola’s limitations are well-documented by people who’ve used it seriously. There is no audio recording, which means if the AI transcription gets something wrong, you have no way to verify accurate transcripts or what was actually said. That creates a trust problem on important calls. Fellow keeps the recording and lets you click a transcript line to hear what was actually said, which matters when a deal or a personnel decision rides on a single sentence.
The accuracy gap also widens on group calls. Transcription accuracy lands at 90-95% in clean audio with one speaker at a time. Multi-speaker accuracy drops noticeably in calls with 3 or more participants. Speaker identification works in 1:1s and small calls, breaks down in larger meetings. That’s consistent with Granola’s capture model (one device microphone instead of a meeting-bot feed with separate participant streams) and it’s the structural reason Fellow took the transcription round on the group-call subset.
On price parity
The cost story changed materially in 2026 once Granola moved its team product to a published tier. Basic is free with unlimited meetings and limited history retention, Business runs $14 per month per user with centralized billing and team collaboration, and Enterprise costs $35+ per month per seat with SSO, organization-wide AI training opt-out, and priority support. Fellow’s Business plan sits a dollar above that, $15/user per month (billed annually) or $23 billed monthly. You get unlimited AI notes and recordings, sales AI recap templates, CRM integrations, and access to org-wide meeting templates. Starts at 3 users.
Two pricing details still tilt rounds. On the cheap end, Team: $7/user per month (billed annually) or $11 billed monthly. It bumps you up to 10 AI notes and recordings, meeting automations, and project management integrations like Confluence and Notion. That undercuts Granola Business if you don’t need unlimited notes. On the free end, Granola recently moved to a model where free users only see the last 30 days of meeting notes. Older notes are stored but locked away unless you upgrade to their Business plan at $14 per user per month, or their Individual plan at $18 per month. Fellow’s free tier, by contrast, supports up to ten users and caps AI notes per user, not meeting history.
On the platform gap
Granola’s platform coverage is the round most likely to be a dealbreaker for an organization buying for everyone, not just leadership. Granola supports macOS, Windows, and iOS. Android is planned but has no public release date. Fellow runs on iPad, iPhone, and Android in addition to desktop and web, so mixed-fleet organizations don’t have to ask Android users to sit out.
On the AI-training default
One last detail that affects the compliance round and is easy to miss in a free-tier evaluation: meeting data is used to train Granola’s AI models by default (individual opt-out in settings, organization-wide opt-out only on the $35 Enterprise plan), and the company has had documented issues with shared notes being more public than users expected. A team that needs to guarantee, contractually, that customer conversations aren’t used for training is on the Enterprise tier with Granola, or on Fellow, where SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA coverage come standard at the Business tier.
- https://www.granola.ai/blog/granola-pricing-plans-features-roi
- https://www.granola.ai/blog/granola-pricing-teams-per-user-enterprise
- https://fellow.ai/pricing
- https://fellow.ai/blog/fellow-vs-granola-ai/
- https://help.fellow.ai/en/articles/4072623-how-much-does-fellow-cost
- https://meetingnotes.com/blog/fellow-vs-granola-ai-notetakers
- https://www.itsconvo.com/blog/granola-ai-review
Marcus Elwood benchmarks the assistants, IDE copilots, and writing tools people actually buy. He focuses on real-task throughput and the gap between a product's demo and its day-to-day behavior.