Two hosted notetakers, one obvious axis and one that is not.

Someone comparing Granola and Otter on a Mac is almost always comparing them on one thing without saying so out loud: whether a bot shows up in the call. Granola does not send one. Otter's Meeting Agent does, when you schedule it, and everyone on the call sees it join. That single difference decides more of this comparison than the price does, and the price still matters — Granola Business is $14 a user a month against Otter Pro's $16.99, or $8.33 if you commit to a year up front.

If the bot is the deciding question, this page is short: pick Granola. If minutes matter more than either of those — Otter's Basic tier is metered at 300 transcription minutes a month, and Granola's free tier does not cap minutes the same way but does cap meeting history — read on, because the rest of the comparison is not as one-sided as the bot question makes it look.

Both tiers, in full

Granola's structure, checked against its own pricing page on 6 September 2026: Basic is $0 with limited meeting history, AI chat within and across meetings, shared folders, note templates and an opt-out of model training. Business, at $14 a user a month, removes the history limit and adds advanced integrations — Attio, Notion, Slack, HubSpot, Affinity, Zapier — plus MCP and an API. Enterprise, at $35, adds SSO, admin controls over sharing and API access, and an org-wide training opt-out rather than a per-person one.

Otter's structure runs differently. Basic is free with a 300-minute monthly transcription cap and three lifetime file imports. Pro, at $16.99 monthly or $8.33 annually, raises that to 1,200 minutes, ten imports a month, and meetings up to ninety minutes. Business, at $30 monthly or $19.99 annually, removes the minute cap entirely and allows four-hour meetings. Enterprise adds SSO, SCIM, domain capture, an API, webhooks and HIPAA compliance as an add-on. The two products' free tiers are shaped by different constraints — Otter's by a minute count, Granola's by how far back you can search — which matters more depends on whether you attend a lot of short meetings or a few long ones.

The table

Both checked against their own pricing pages on 6 September 2026.

A year of each at the tier most individuals actually buy: Granola Business is $168, Otter Pro on annual billing is $99.96 but $203.88 if paid monthly instead — the two-thirds discount for committing annually is larger on Otter than most subscriptions in this category offer, and it changes which one is actually cheaper depending on whether you commit for a year up front.

Why this pair specifically

Granola and Otter get compared together more than either is compared to Fireflies or Fathom, and it is worth saying why: both are aimed at individuals and small teams first, both lean on a genuinely good transcript and a genuinely useful summary rather than a long integration list as the headline feature, and both are frequently the first tool somebody tries after deciding Zoom's or Google Meet's own built-in notes are not good enough. The bot question — visible participant against invisible capture — is the fork in the road that decides most of what follows, which is why it gets top billing here rather than being buried in a table.

Where Otter is ahead

It works when you are not there. A scheduled agent covers the meeting you double-book, the one you join nine minutes late, or the one a colleague sits in on your behalf. Granola has no equivalent — it records what your own device hears, which means you have to be running it.

It is on the web as well as native apps. Otter's archive is reachable from a browser on any machine, which matters if you switch between a work laptop and a personal one during the day. Granola's apps cover more device types on paper, but there is no browser-only path into the archive the way Otter has.

Imports are more generous at the entry tier. Otter's Basic plan allows three lifetime file imports and its paid tiers raise that to ten a month and then unlimited. If you are transcribing existing recordings rather than capturing new ones, Otter's import allowance is the more usable one to start on for free.

Meeting length is unlimited sooner. Otter Business removes the length cap on a meeting entirely and allows the account to sit in three concurrent calls, a specific team capability Granola's tier structure does not name an equivalent for.

Where Granola is ahead

No bot, on every tier, on every platform. This is the difference that shows up in the room. A participant labelled as an AI notetaker joining a client call, a candidate interview, or a first sales conversation is a moment everyone notices, and it is one Granola's design avoids entirely by using the computer's own audio instead.

Cheaper at the tier most people actually buy. $14 against $16.99 is not a large gap, but it compounds: a year of Granola Business is $168 against $203.88 for Otter Pro on monthly billing, and Otter's own cheaper annual price still asks for a year's commitment up front to reach it.

Deeper integrations, sooner. Granola's Business tier — its second tier, not its top one — already reaches Attio, Notion, Slack, HubSpot, Affinity, Zapier, an API and MCP. Otter reserves its equivalent breadth for Enterprise, where SSO, SCIM and the API actually live.

Chat across your whole meeting history is on every tier, not gated to a top plan. "What did we agree with this account in June" is a question Granola's free users can ask, not just its paying ones.

A free tier that is not measured in minutes. Granola's free tier is capped by how much meeting history it retains, not by a monthly transcription allowance — for someone who attends a handful of long meetings a week rather than dozens of short ones, that shape can outlast Otter Basic's 300-minute ceiling considerably.

What neither of them answers

Both are cloud products by construction — that is how the cross-device access, the shared folders and the integrations work at all. Granola's own pricing page lists "opt out of model training any time" on every tier, which tells you what the default is and that there is something to opt out of. Otter's privacy policy lists training its proprietary AI technology on de-identified audio recordings and transcriptions among its stated uses. Reading either policy in full, rather than through a comparison table, is worth doing before a client conversation or anything under an NDA goes through either service.

Neither is the only cloud notetaker worth knowing about, either — Granola and Otter are simply the two people search for together most often. Fireflies sells a similar shared archive at a lower entry price with a bot back in the call, and Fathom has shipped a bot-free mode of its own with a considerably more generous free tier than either product on this page. Full round-ups of alternatives to each are at best Granola alternatives and best Otter alternatives if this specific pair is not the end of your search.

This is the point where a third option is worth naming rather than pretending it does not exist. Coii AudioNotes is a separate product, not a plan on either of these — a $19-once Mac app built around the specific case where the recording should never leave the machine at all, no opt-out setting required because there is nothing to opt out of.

It has none of what makes Granola and Otter genuinely useful to a team — no cross-device archive, no CRM integrations, no scheduled agent that attends a meeting on its own — because it is one person's app for one person's Mac, three of them at most on a single licence. What it answers is narrower and, for some meetings, more important than either of the two products above: where the bytes go afterwards.

Neither Granola nor Otter can show that same figure honestly, because in both cases the equivalent step happens on a server the two of them operate rather than on the machine in front of you — which is not a criticism of either, since it is exactly how the cross-device access and the shared archive both companies sell are built to work at all.

What switching actually costs

Moving between Granola and Otter is mostly a habit change rather than a technical one — both open from your calendar and expect to know what the meeting is, so the workflow feels similar either way. What does not move is the archive: neither has an importer for the other's format, so anything you want to keep should be exported while the subscription that holds it is still active, not after.

Moving from either to Coii AudioNotes is a bigger change in kind, smaller in effort. There is no calendar integration to reconfigure because there is none to begin with — you open the app and press record. The habit that breaks is the one where the meeting starts itself; the one that forms is remembering to start it, which is a real friction for the first week and the most common reason somebody drifts back to whichever cloud tool they left.

A concrete way to decide between all three: pull up your calendar for the last two weeks and sort the meetings into three piles — ones you would have missed without a scheduled agent, ones where an integration mattered because a note needed to land in a CRM or a shared channel automatically, and ones where you were simply present and wanted a written record afterwards. Otter wins the first pile outright. Granola wins the second more often than not, at a lower price. Coii AudioNotes only competes for the third pile, and it competes hardest when what is being recorded is the kind of conversation neither cloud product's policy fully puts you at ease about.

Who should pick which

Pick Otter if meetings need to be captured whether or not you are in them; if you read notes from a browser as often as from a Mac; if a folder of existing recordings needs importing; or if your team is heading toward SSO, SCIM and an enterprise console.

Pick Granola if the bot is the thing you are trying to avoid; if the integrations you need — Attio, Notion, Slack, HubSpot, Affinity, Zapier — matter more than a scheduled agent; if the price at the tier you will actually buy matters; or if chatting across a year of meetings is something you would use weekly rather than once.

Pick Coii AudioNotes if neither answer to "where does the recording go" is good enough, and you are willing to give up cross-device access, team features and every integration listed above to get a flat no as the answer instead.

Speaker separation on both, honestly

Both Granola and Otter identify speakers, and both do it well in the case their own demos show: two people, taking turns, each on a reasonable microphone. That is also, in fairness, most one-on-one calls. Neither company's own site makes a specific claim about the harder case — three or more voices sharing one channel, two people talking over each other, somebody dialling in from a car — and no product in this category, on this site or off it, has published evidence of solving that reliably. A comparison that implied either tool had solved it would be selling something neither company actually claims.

What differs between the two is not accuracy so much as where the separation happens. Granola and Otter both process audio on their own servers, so the underlying model can be upgraded for every user at once without anyone reinstalling anything. Coii AudioNotes uses voice prints computed on the Mac itself — a smaller model, in exchange for the recording never leaving the room it was captured in.

On an older Mac

This does not distinguish Granola from Otter at all, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than inventing a difference. Both do the transcription and the summarising on their own infrastructure, so a 2019 Intel MacBook and a brand-new Apple Silicon one produce close to the same experience on either product — the network connection is the bottleneck, not the laptop. That is one of the few rows on this page where the two are simply tied, and it is also the row where a local app like Coii AudioNotes behaves differently: on Apple Silicon its own transcription keeps pace with a live conversation, and on an older Intel Mac it still finishes, more slowly, because the work is happening on the machine rather than a server that does not care which laptop asked it.

What neither company will tell you outright

Both Granola and Otter are, understandably, better at describing what they do than at describing what they do not. Neither home page volunteers that its free tier is designed to convert into a paid one once real usage begins — Otter's 300 minutes covers roughly five hours a month, a normal week or two of meetings for a lot of people, and Granola's meeting-history limit means the archive itself, not just new recordings, is what disappears first. Reading the free-tier fine print before committing a team's habits to either one avoids the more common version of this page's second search: "why did my Granola history disappear" or "why did Otter stop transcribing this month."

Both Granola and Otter have their own full comparison pages on this site if you want the detail on either one specifically, and the library has the rest of the comparisons. Or download Coii AudioNotes — thirty days, every feature, no card and no account, and the price only comes up after that, once the thirty days are actually used on real meetings rather than a single test call.