Granola vs Fathom: two very different tools with the same job title

The short answer

Granola wins if you already take notes by hand, work on a Mac or Windows laptop, and want nothing visible to appear in the call. Its desktop app hears your system audio, enhances what you typed, and never saves the audio at any point. Nobody in the meeting sees a participant called "Granola".

Fathom wins if you need the meeting itself kept. Free forever with unlimited recordings and transcripts, CRM sync on paid tiers, clips you can send to a colleague, and a public API from Premium up. For a sales or customer-success team, it is not close.

Neither is a mobile-first tool. Granola's phone app records in-person meetings but is the thinner half of the product. Fathom's iOS app is still listed as coming soon on fathom.ai as of September 2026, with a waitlist, and there is no Android app. If most of your meetings happen away from a laptop, both leave a gap. That gap is what the Noter AI section near the end of this page is about.

On price, Fathom's free plan beats everything. Once you pay, Granola's $14/user/month is cheaper than Fathom's $19/user/month Team tier, but Fathom's free tier does more than most paid tools.

The real difference: an enhanced notepad versus a call record

Most comparisons start with feature lists. Start instead with what each tool believes the output should be, because that decides everything else.

Granola treats your note as the artifact. You open a clean editor before the call and type as you normally would, half sentences, arrows, shorthand. Granola listens in the background. When the meeting ends it merges your fragments with the transcript and hands back a tidy document that still reads like your thinking. The audio is never saved. What survives is the transcript and the note.

Fathom treats the meeting as the artifact. It captures the call, produces a summary, action items and highlights, and keeps a searchable library of everything. You can pull a 40-second clip out of a customer call and paste it into Slack, or push the summary into HubSpot. The note is a by-product of the recording, not the other way round.

This is why people who love one often dislike the other. If you think while writing, Fathom's summary feels like someone else's homework. If you need to prove what a client said in March, Granola's missing audio is a problem you cannot work around.

How each one captures the meeting, and what the room sees

Capture method is the part with social consequences, so it is worth being precise.

Granola is bot-free by design. The desktop app records your microphone plus your computer's system audio. Nothing joins the call. Other participants see a normal meeting. It works the same on Zoom, Google Meet, Teams or a Slack huddle, because it never touches those platforms, only your speakers and mic.

Fathom gives you both options. By default a bot joins the call and appears in the participant list, which is how it can capture video and screen share. Fathom also offers bot-free capture through its Mac app, described on its own comparison pages as a beta at the time of writing. So Fathom can be invisible, with a caveat, and Granola always is.

Why this matters more than it sounds: in some meetings a visible bot changes the conversation. Investor calls, executive one-to-ones, sensitive client work, legal and HR conversations. A named recorder in the participant list makes people careful. If that is your world, Granola's approach is the safer default, and Fathom's Mac beta is a reasonable second.

Being invisible to the participant list is not the same as being allowed to record. Consent law depends on where everyone is sitting, not on whether a bot shows up. If you are unsure, read whether you have to tell people you are recording before you rely on silent capture.

Granola vs Fathom, side by side

Checked against granola.ai and fathom.ai in September 2026.

Platforms: where each one actually runs

Both are desktop products first, but they are not equally far along on phones.

Granola runs on Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android and Apple Watch. The desktop app is the real product: templates, folders and integrations live there. The phone app syncs your notes so you can read them anywhere, and it can record an in-person meeting on its own. What it cannot do is capture a Zoom or Teams call you joined on your phone, because iOS does not let one app record another app's audio. That is an Apple limit, not a Granola failing, and it applies to every iPhone app.

Fathom is a computer tool either way, but its two capture modes do not reach the same machines. Bot capture works from any laptop, Mac or Windows, because the bot joins the meeting itself and nothing has to run on your side. Bot-free capture is different: Fathom's pricing page labels it "beta feature for Mac", and as of September 2026 Fathom does not publish a Windows desktop app anywhere on its site. So a Windows user still gets Fathom, but only the version with a bot in the participant list. Its iOS app is announced with a waitlist and described as coming soon rather than shipped, and there is no Android app. Either way, if you close the lid, the meeting is not captured.

The practical result: a Mac user who is at a desk all day will barely notice the difference. A consultant who spends three days a week in client offices will notice immediately. For that pattern, look at options built for recording in-person meetings rather than trying to force either of these into it.

Free tiers, and what a seat really costs

This is the clearest win on the page, and it belongs to Fathom.

Fathom Free gives you unlimited recordings, unlimited transcriptions and AI call summaries, plus search across your calls, clips and playlists, and your choice of bot or bot-free capture on Mac. No meeting cap, no minute cap. Most people who try Fathom never pay. What the free tier holds back is the advanced summary formats, AI-generated action items, the conversational assistant that answers questions across calls, and the custom bot name.

Granola Basic is free with a limited meeting history, and includes AI notes, AI chat, shared folders, custom templates, multi-language support and the option to opt out of model training. The limit that bites is history: once you are past it, older notes stop being useful as a reference, which is most of the reason to keep meeting notes at all.

If your only question is "can I do this without paying", Fathom is the answer, and it is not a close call.

A five-person team pays $70 a month for Granola Business and $95 for Fathom Team. Granola is cheaper, but Fathom Team buys things Granola does not sell at that price: shared search across every call in the team, keyword alerts, comments, and a kept recording anyone can go back to.

For one person, Fathom Free is the value winner and it is not close. Paying $20 for Fathom Premium only makes sense if you need AI action items and the cross-call assistant. Granola's $14 Business tier is priced as a team product, and at the time of writing Granola's pricing page does not publish a solo paid tier between Basic and Business.

Per-seat pricing is not automatically bad. You are paying for shared admin, shared billing and shared search. If your team genuinely reviews each other's calls, that is real value. If five people just want their own meetings written up and nobody ever opens anyone else's notes, you are buying infrastructure you will not touch. That trade-off is worked through in more detail on meeting notes apps without per-seat pricing.

Both charge per user once you pay, so cost scales with headcount. Monthly rates below, with the annual equivalent in brackets where the company publishes one. Noter AI is included for scale, and its section is further down.

What you get out after the meeting

Same meeting, two very different deliverables.

• Granola gives you one clean document: your typed notes rewritten with the transcript's context, in whatever template you set. The transcript is kept. The audio is not. You can ask AI chat questions about your notes, organise them in folders, and push them to Notion, Slack or a CRM on the Business tier.
• Fathom gives you a summary, highlights and, on paid tiers, AI action items. It keeps the audio and video, so you can scrub back to any moment, cut a clip, and drop that clip into a message. Paid tiers add CRM field sync, Deal View, coaching metrics and AI scorecards, which is a sales-management product rather than a notes product.
• Speaker labels. Fathom documents speaker diarization and respects the mute button. Granola attributes speakers too, but at the time of writing it does not publish how it handles larger groups, and reviewers report attribution getting shakier past three or four voices. If knowing exactly who said what in a meeting is load-bearing for you, test both on a real five-person call before committing.
• Going back to the audio. Granola cannot. This is the single biggest thing to check before you choose it. If your work ever involves quoting someone accurately, checking a number you misheard, or proving what was agreed, deleted audio is a hard stop.

Languages, and what happens when a meeting mixes two

Granola's own documentation is unusually clear here, with one catch: it never quotes a headline number, it just lists the languages. So the honest way to state this is to count what the list actually holds.

Granola's docs list 31 languages on desktop and 17 on mobile. The desktop app has a multi-language setting that transcribes those languages even when more than one is spoken in the same meeting. The mobile app does not: it analyses the transcript, picks a single dominant language, and Granola's docs advise sticking to one language per meeting on the phone.

Fathom transcribes in 38 languages. When a call is detected in Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian or Dutch, it will translate the summary into that language. At the time of writing, Fathom does not document how it handles a conversation that switches between two languages mid-sentence.

So for a bilingual team the answer is narrower than the language counts suggest. Granola on a Mac handles a mixed meeting. Granola on a phone does not. Fathom does not document it either way. If your meetings genuinely run in two languages at once, that constraint deserves its own research, and there is a fuller ranking on transcribing multilingual meetings.

Which one to buy, by buyer

• A Mac user who takes their own notes → Granola. This is the buyer it was built for. You type during the call, it cleans up what you wrote, no bot appears, and you keep your own voice in the document. Fathom will keep handing you a summary you did not write.
• A sales team that needs full recordings → Fathom. Kept audio and video, clips, CRM field sync, coaching metrics and scorecards. Granola does not sell most of this at any tier, and with no saved audio it is ruled out of call review entirely.
• Someone who cannot have a bot appear in client calls → Granola as first choice, because bot-free is the default and not a beta. Fathom's bot-free mode is a real option too, but only on a Mac and only in beta, so check its status yourself before you promise a client that nothing will join.
• A solo user who does not want to pay → Fathom Free. Unlimited recordings and transcripts beat a free tier with a history limit.
• A five-person team on a budget → Granola Business at $70/month against Fathom Team at $95. Choose Fathom anyway if you will actually use shared search and keyword alerts.
• Anyone who needs to prove what was said → Fathom. Granola never saves the audio, so there is nothing to go back to.
• Someone whose meetings happen in a room, not on a laptop → neither, really. Granola's phone app records in person but is the lighter half of the product, and Fathom's iOS app has not shipped. See the next section.
• A Windows team → Granola, if staying invisible matters to you at all. Granola's bot-free capture runs on Windows. Fathom's does not: its bot-free mode is published as a Mac beta, and there is no Windows desktop app listed on fathom.ai as of September 2026. A Windows team choosing Fathom is choosing the bot. If a visible recorder in the participant list is fine with you, this stops mattering and the audio question decides it instead.

Where Noter AI fits, and where it does not

Noter AI is our app, so read this section with that in mind. It is here because it sits in a gap both tools leave open, not because it beats them at their own jobs.

It starts on the phone, not the laptop. Noter AI is built for iPhone, iPad and Android. You record an in-person meeting with one tap, a Control Center widget, or a Siri Shortcut, and recording keeps running with the screen locked. For online calls a bot joins Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Webex through a link or your synced Google or Outlook calendar. You can also import an audio file you already have, from Files, iCloud Drive, or shared in from Voice Memos or a WhatsApp voice note. Granola's phone app records in person too, but its templates, folders and integrations stay on desktop, and Fathom's phone app has not shipped.

It does not make you pick a language, and it copes when two are spoken. Transcription covers 60+ languages with automatic detection always on. The language is tagged word by word rather than locked per recording, so a sentence that moves from Arabic to English, or Hindi to English, arrives with each half in its own script. Tools that commit to one language at record time transcribe the second one phonetically, which reads as nonsense. Granola matches this on desktop only, and its own docs say the phone app picks one language. Finished notes can then be translated into 18 languages, and it is the summary and action items that get translated, not just the raw transcript.

It keeps the audio, and the transcript is editable. Every segment is timestamped, speakers are labelled, and tapping a line plays that exact moment. Fix a misheard name or a product term in the transcript and re-run the summary so the correction carries through. Six output styles reshape the same recording into minutes of meeting, key bullet points, an email, a to-do list, a formal report, or a custom instruction where you describe exactly how you want it written. AI chat answers questions about one note or across every note you have. Export as PDF, Word or plain text.

The price is flat. $9.99 a month or $49.99 a year, which is about $4.17 a month. No per-seat multiplier and no AI credits. Five people each holding their own subscription costs roughly $50 a month, or about $21 on annual plans, against $70 for Granola Business and $95 for Fathom Team.

The honest limits. There is no Mac, Windows or web app, so if you want Granola's desktop editor this is not a replacement for it. There is no permanent free tier, though there is a free trial you can run on a real meeting. There are no CRM or Slack integrations, so Fathom's HubSpot and Salesforce sync has no equivalent here. Transcription happens in the cloud, not on the device. And for virtual calls a bot does join, so if silent capture is the whole reason you are reading this page, Granola on desktop is still the better fit.

If that trade sounds right, it is on the App Store and Google Play. If it does not, the two tools above are both good at what they were built for, and this page has tried to say which is which.