Otter vs Granola: which one to pay for

Otter and Granola do the same job. Both turn a meeting into notes you did not have to write. They disagree about almost everything else: who is in the call, what is kept afterwards, and what the free plan runs out of.

I make a competing product, so read this as a vendor's comparison. Every figure below comes from Otter's or Granola's own pages, read on 5 October 2026. Prices in this category move, so check before you pay.

The verdict, by kind of reader

Mostly internal calls: Otter. Among colleagues, a notetaker on the guest list is ordinary. Otter's agent can join every Zoom, Teams and Google Meet call on your calendar without you starting anything. It keeps the audio, so a disputed minute can be replayed.

Client, candidate or investor calls: Granola. Nothing joins the call. You start it yourself, and in Granola's words it "won't auto-join or auto-record anything". Otter can also record without a bot, from its desktop app. If you pick Otter for client calls, use that mode.

Solo and paying: Otter. Otter Pro is $8.33 a month billed yearly, about $100 a year. Granola's cheapest paid plan is $14 a month, or $168 a year. Check two Otter limits before you pay: 1,200 minutes a month, and 90 minutes per meeting.

Solo and not paying: it depends on your calls. Otter's free plan transcribes 30 minutes of a conversation and keeps the 25 most recent. Granola's free plan shows 30 days of history. For calls over half an hour, Granola. For a free archive, neither.

A small team: Granola, unless you need activity logs. Granola Business is $14 a seat, with central billing and user management. Otter Business is $19.99 a seat billed yearly, or $30 monthly. Otter's plan adds activity logs and usage analytics, which Granola keeps for Enterprise. Otter Business stops at 25 billed users.

A team that needs single sign-on: Granola. Granola Enterprise is $35 a seat and includes SSO. Otter puts SSO in Enterprise at a custom price, with a 100-user minimum.

Anyone who quotes people: Otter. Granola deletes the audio after transcription. If the transcript gets a word wrong, there is no tape to check it against. Otter keeps the recording and highlights each word as it plays.

The table

	Otter	Granola
Free plan	300 minutes a month, 30 minutes per conversation, 25 most recent conversations, 3 file imports ever	30 days of meeting history
Individual plan	Pro: $8.33 per user per month billed yearly, $16.99 monthly. 1,200 minutes a month, 90 minutes per meeting	Business: $14 per user per month. Unlimited notes and history
Team plan	Business: $19.99 billed yearly, $30 monthly. Unlimited meetings, 4 hours per meeting, up to 25 billed users	Business: $14, the same plan. Central billing and user management
Enterprise	Custom price. SSO needs a 100-user minimum	$35 per user per month. SSO included
Bot in the call	Optional. The agent joins Zoom, Teams and Google Meet. The Mac and Windows desktop app records without one	No. It records the computer's own audio
Audio kept	Yes, with playback and mp3 export	No. Deleted after transcription
Where it lives	Otter's cloud, on AWS	Granola's cloud, on AWS in the US. Transcript and notes only
Platforms	Web, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, Chrome extension	Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, Apple Watch
Languages	English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Chinese	"Multi-language support". The pricing page gives no list

Otter's page also showed introductory discounts for first-time subscribers. I have used the list prices, because a first-time discount applies once. Granola's page lists one rate per plan and shows no yearly discount.

The limit that will catch you

Each free plan runs out of something different, and neither says so in the headline.

Otter runs out of time. The free plan transcribes 30 minutes per conversation, so an hour-long call is half transcribed. Pro raises that to 90 minutes, which still does not fit a two-hour workshop. Business allows four hours.

Pro also has a monthly meter: 1,200 minutes, which is 20 hours. Someone with five hours of calls a day passes that in the first week. Count your own calendar before you choose Pro on price.

Granola runs out of memory. Its pricing page shows no minutes meter on any plan. The free plan shows the last 30 days of meetings. The page does not say whether older notes are deleted or hidden, so ask before you rely on it.

That makes free Granola a notepad and not an archive. The $14 plan is the price of your own history.

The bot is a question about sharing

Otter gives you three ways to capture a call: send the agent, record from the desktop app, or record in Chrome. The agent is the one people object to.

Otter's own pricing table describes it in one row: "Joins Zoom, MS Teams, and Google Meet to automatically write and share notes". Read the last three words again. Automatic sharing suits a team that wants everyone to get the minutes. On a client call, check the sharing settings before the meeting and not after it.

Granola lists "Bot-free, device-audio capture" on every plan. It also has a setting that tells people you are using it. That setting is per user on Basic and Business, and an admin can enforce it on Enterprise.

No bot does not mean nobody needs telling. With either product, the consent is yours to ask for.

What the comparison pages leave out

Search for this comparison and most results are third-party pages with a button under each product. Both vendors pay for referrals.

Granola's affiliate programme pays $20 for every referred user who completes a meeting. Otter's partner page has a section headed "Referral & affiliate partners", who "earn incentives" for customers they refer. I do not know which comparison pages are enrolled, and most do not say.

A page paid for the click has little reason to write "check the 30-minute cap first". It has none to write "buy neither". That does not make those pages wrong. It explains what they leave out.

Vendors do the same with ranked lists, which we took apart in Otter's list of the ten best meeting tools begins with Otter. Apply the test to this page too. yapyap sells a third product, and this site carries no affiliate link to either company.

If you want neither company holding it

Both products keep your meetings on their servers. Otter keeps the audio and the text. Granola keeps the text. If that is what you want to avoid, neither wins.

yapyap records and transcribes on your own computer, joins no call, needs no account, and costs €69 once. You give up what a cloud product is good at: there is no team workspace, no web app and no SSO. The data question is worked through in Otter vs Granola vs yapyap: which one keeps your data safe. The direct comparisons are yapyap vs Otter and yapyap vs Granola.