Granola does more. This one keeps the audio.

If you take notes on more than a Mac, buy Granola. It runs on macOS, Windows, iOS, Android and Apple Watch, it has shared folders and note templates, it chats across your whole meeting history, it connects to Attio, Notion, Slack, HubSpot, Affinity and Zapier, and it has an API and MCP integration. At $14 per user per month it is not expensive for what it is, and there is a free tier to try it on.

Buy Coii AudioNotes if the recording not leaving your Mac is the thing that decides it: $19 once, macOS only, and every stage — the capture, the transcript, the speaker separation and the minutes — happening on the machine, including with the network off. That is the whole argument. For a lot of people it is not enough of one, and this page is written so you can work out which group you are in before paying either of us.

One thing that is not a difference

Neither app uses a meeting bot. Granola's home page leads with it — "Without a meeting bot", "uses your computer audio, so doesn't invite a bot" — and Coii AudioNotes works the same way, recording what the Mac can already hear.

This matters because "no bot" is the loudest claim in this category and it is often made as though it were rare. Among the newer notetakers it is the norm. If you have watched a participant called someone's Notetaker join a client call and seen the room go quiet, that was Otter, Fireflies, Zoom's own assistant or one of the several tools that do work that way — and it is a real reason to leave those, just not a reason to pick between these two.

The table

Rows we lose are marked as losses, because you will find out anyway.

Where Granola wins

It is the more capable product, and it is not close.

Five platforms against one. If your notes have to exist on a phone, or you dictate a thought into an Apple Watch after a corridor conversation, this comparison is already over. Coii AudioNotes builds for nothing but macOS 13 and later, and a platform that has not shipped is not a platform.

It remembers across meetings. Granola's chat works within and across your meeting history, so "what did we agree with that customer in June" is a question you can ask. Coii AudioNotes answers questions about a meeting — the transcript and your notes for that session. There is no cross-archive memory and no plan you should count on.

It connects to the tools the work actually lives in. Attio, Notion, Slack, HubSpot, Affinity, Zapier, an API and MCP. If the value of a note is that it lands in a CRM without anybody retyping it, that is a workflow Granola has and we do not have at all.

It is a team product. Shared folders, centralised billing, user management, note templates everyone uses. Coii AudioNotes is one person on up to three of their own Macs. There is nothing to share and nobody to administer.

There is a free tier. You can use Granola at $0 with limited meeting history and decide slowly. Ours is thirty days with everything unlocked, and then it asks.

Where Coii AudioNotes wins

The recording never leaves the machine.

Not the audio, not the transcript, not the summary. There is no server of ours for it to go to. Granola is a cloud product by construction — that is how the sharing, the cross-meeting chat and the integrations work at all — and its own pricing page lists "opt out of model training at any time" as a feature, which tells you what the default is and that there is something there to opt out of.

That difference is not a setting either of us can toggle to match the other. It is the shape of the two products.

For most meetings it does not matter. For some it decides everything: a conversation under NDA, a client's unreleased financials, a candidate talking about why they are leaving, a founder's cap table. The rule most people eventually land on is that if you would not paste the transcript into a chat window, you should know where it is going.

It still works when the connection does not.

The important half of this is the summary. Plenty of tools record offline and owe you notes when you reconnect. Here the language model is bundled with the app, so the minutes are written on the Mac, in the room, with the aeroplane's Wi-Fi off. What you get on landing is the finished thing rather than a queue.

Two tracks, not one mix.

Your microphone and the system audio are captured separately — the room and the call, kept apart rather than summed into one file. It is why the speaker separation has something clean to work with, and why a transcript can tell your own thinking-out-loud from what the other side actually committed to.

$19 once against $168 a year.

Both are honest prices for what they are — Granola is selling a service with running costs, and a subscription is the correct shape for that. It is simply a different trade. One year of Granola Business is nearly nine times the price of this app, and the app has no second year.

What it actually looks like

The transcript is speaker-labelled and timestamped into the recording, so a line you half-remember is a click away from the audio that proves it.

Everything on the page above is a drawing rather than a screenshot, for the reason that ought to be obvious in a product like this one: a real screenshot would be a real meeting, and those belong to the people who were in them.

Three people, and the ones who talk over each other

Speaker separation is the feature most likely to disappoint whichever tool you pick, so it is worth being specific rather than putting a tick in a row.

Both apps do it. Two people on a call, taking turns, one of them on a decent microphone: both will get it essentially right, and the transcript reads like a script. That is the demo case and it is also, to be fair, most calls.

Where it gets harder is the same everywhere. Three or more voices on one channel, two people finishing each other's sentences, somebody dialling in from a car, a room where four people share one laptop microphone at the end of a table. No product in this category solves that reliably, and any comparison that implies one of them has is selling something.

What the two-track capture buys here is narrower than it sounds and more useful than it looks: your own microphone is a separate file from everything the call carried, so the app never has to work out whether the person talking was you. That is one voice removed from the guessing, permanently, and in a two-person call it is half the problem. It does not help with the four people at the far end sharing a microphone.

The practical advice, whichever you buy: names get attached to voices more reliably when somebody says a name early. "Thanks for joining, Priya" in the first minute is worth more than any setting either app offers.

The two questions people actually ask

"Is it safe to record this call?" is a question about consent, not about software, and neither app answers it for you. Recording rules differ by country and by state, and the difference between one-party and all-party consent is not something a comparison page should be resolving on your behalf. What the two tools change is a narrower question — who else ends up holding the audio — and on that they differ completely. Ask your own counsel about the first. The second is what this page is for.

"What happens to a year of meetings if I stop?" With a subscription, the archive and the access to it are the same thing: the notes live in the service, and the day the card fails is the day you find out how good the export is. This is not a criticism unique to Granola — it is true of every SaaS, and their export exists — but it is a structural difference worth naming. Here the recordings and the minutes are files in a folder you chose, and the licence being expired would not make them unreadable, because nothing reads them but the filesystem.

The trial, and what happens after

Granola has a free tier: $0 forever, with limited meeting history. You can run it indefinitely and upgrade when the history limit starts biting. That is a genuinely lower-friction way in than ours.

Coii AudioNotes has thirty days with every feature unlocked, no card and no account, and then it asks for $19. There is no reduced free mode afterwards. Which of those you prefer depends on whether you would rather try a limited version for a long time or the whole thing for a month.

Both are sold through Lemon Squeezy as merchant of record, so both charges appear under that name and both handle VAT and sales tax at checkout. Ours covers three of your own Macs on one licence.

On an older Mac

This is the part a comparison table hides. Granola does the heavy work on their servers, so a 2019 Intel MacBook and a current Apple Silicon machine give you much the same experience — the network is the bottleneck, not the laptop.

Coii AudioNotes does the transcription and the summary on your machine, which means the machine matters. On Apple Silicon the transcript keeps pace with the conversation. On an older Intel Mac it still works and the summary takes longer after the call ends. If your Mac is from before Apple Silicon, use the thirty days on a real meeting rather than a two-minute test — that is exactly the case where trying it beats reading about it.

The honest summary: local processing is a trade, not a free win. You get the audio never leaving and the offline capability, and you pay for it in your own CPU time and battery.

What neither of them does

Worth knowing before an evening of trials. Neither app is a transcription service you can hand a hundred old recordings to and get bulk results from — both are built around meetings as they happen. Neither is a video recorder: these are audio and notes, not a library of call recordings with faces. Neither does live captioning for an audience in the room, and neither does real-time translation.

And neither is a compliance product. Granola publishes enterprise security controls and Coii AudioNotes uploads nothing at all, and both of those are facts about the software rather than certifications covering your particular obligations. If you work somewhere with rules about recorded conversations, the answer comes from the person who owns those rules.

What switching costs

Coming from Granola takes an evening, and most of it is not technical.

Your existing notes stay in Granola. There is no importer, and it would be dishonest to imply one is coming — what you can do is export what matters from their app while your subscription is live, which is worth doing before you cancel anything regardless of where you land.

The habit is the real cost. Granola opens with your calendar and expects to know what the meeting is; this app expects you to start it. That is a small friction several times a day for the first week, and it is the single most common reason somebody goes back.

What you gain on day one is that the archive is a folder. Recordings, transcripts and minutes are files on your disk that any backup already covers, and that nobody's pricing change can put behind a tier.

The notes are only half of it

Both products produce minutes. What you do with them afterwards is where the two philosophies stop being abstract.

Granola's answer is that the note goes where the work is: into a Notion database, onto a Slack channel, against a record in Attio or HubSpot, or out through an API to somewhere nobody has thought of yet. For a team whose process already lives in those tools, that is not a convenience — it is most of the value, and it is why a per-seat subscription makes sense for them.

This app's answer is that the note is a file, and files already go everywhere. There is no integration to configure and none to break when a vendor changes an API. Whatever you use to move files — a synced folder, a repository, an Obsidian vault pointed at the same directory — already moves these. That is a weaker answer if your team standardises on a CRM and a stronger one if your notes outlive the tools you happened to be using when you took them.

Neither is the right answer generally. They are answers to different questions, and the question is whether the note's destination is a system somebody else administers or a folder you do.

Which one to buy

Buy Granola if you work across more than a Mac; if notes have to reach a CRM, a Notion database or a Slack channel automatically; if a team shares templates and folders; if asking questions across a year of meetings is something you would actually do; or if you want to start at $0 and decide later.

Buy Coii AudioNotes if you are on a Mac and only a Mac; if the recordings are the kind that should not be uploaded — client work, clinical or legal conversations, anything under NDA; if you need the notes written while offline rather than queued; if two clean tracks matter more than five platforms; and if $19 once suits you better than $14 a month for a set of features you would not use.

There is a third answer worth saying: for one meeting a week, the Voice Memos app and five minutes of typing is free and sufficient. These tools start earning their price somewhere around the fourth or fifth call a day, or the first time you cannot remember what was agreed and it mattered.

If you want to keep reading, the library has the other comparisons and the migration guides. The home page is the short version of what this app is, what it sends is the complete list of connections it can make, and the FAQ covers what stops when the trial ends. Or just download it — thirty days, every feature, no card and no account, and the price only comes up after that.