Granola vs Fireflies

Granola is a meeting recorder tool that doesn't require those annoying bots to join. In-fact the people you're on the call with don't even have to know you're using it.

Interestingly enough, this isn't any different than just having a note taker on the call, because they don't allow you to playback the audio. What you can do is ask Granola's AI Chatbot questions about the call, or any calls you've had across the company.

You can even ask Granola questions mid-call, which uses full context of the call up to that point, or can even come up with contextual questions to ask to help the conversation flowing. It's really as if you have an active note taking assistant on the call alongside you, helping you keep the conversation flowing, and researching further context details when needed.

We make sure to always have Granola recording our meetings (even in-person team meetings and brainstorming meetings), even if we have one of the best AI note taker bots joining the call as well. It's just a more lightweight solution that can't be kicked from calls and is less invasive.

• Incredibly easy to use
• AI notes save a lot of cleanup after calls
• Records more than just scheduled meetings
• Less invasive than meeting bots that join calls
• Full transcripts are searchable and actually useful
• You can add your own notes and Granola will build around them
• Great for founders and small teams documenting ideas, meetings, and processes

• iOS only right now (Android coming soon)
• Integrations are limited
• No audio or video recording (if you care about that)

This is the first thing that made Granola click for us. When we use meeting bots, there's usually friction involved. They have to join your call and announce itself, and sometimes they accidentally get kicked out. Granola is just always available. You bring it up, you click record, and you can go. It'll just sit quietly in the background and record your transcript. The whole thing just feels way lighter and way less invasive.

We still use meeting bots when we need full recordings, but day to day, Granola's what actually gets used.

When we first started using Granola, it was for scheduled meetings, but then we started using it for in-person meetings and chats.

Just the other day, Alex and I were out on a walk when we started brainstorming. I literally paused to pull out Granola so we could start recording our conversation. Later, I took those notes and dropped them into AI to quickly turn them into a deck for a team presentation.

And that's exactly why we always say, "If it's not in granola, it didn't happen!"

Granola transcribes everything everyone says, live, word for word, and then turns it into organized notes once I hit Generate Notes. And I love that it still gives me the full transcript too. It's really useful for when I need to pull exact quotes or check on what was actually said, or if I need to go back and drop parts of the conversation into a document later.

We also really like that Granola's AI doesn't take too much control away from you. I always pop in notes while a meeting is happening, and Granola builds around them instead of replacing them. So your final notes still feel like your notes, just way more organized.

The AI here is actually useful. The AI assistant in Granola has actually saved me a couple of times. Sometimes during a meeting, I might need to pop out for a couple of seconds, and instead of having to interrupt everyone and play catch-up, I can just pop into Granola's chat and ask, "What did I miss?" and it'll give me a quick recap. That's the kind of thing that is genuinely helpful.

Granola has an MCP that connects with Claude that allows us to build workflows.

Here are some common workflows we use:

• Draft follow-up emails from all my sales calls this week and place them in Superhuman Mail
• Create a slide deck for our team meeting based on this week’s exec team meeting
• Create Linear tickets for all the bugs we talked about on our call today

While we'd love Granola to take action for us on its own, the MCP is a happy middle ground for now. For example, we'd love to finish an engineering call and have Granola recommend tickets or push action items somewhere useful without us having to trigger it in the MCP.

That said, we pair Viktor AI with Granola and get Viktor to take most of the action for us now 😉

• Basic: $0 per month. Best for individuals who want to try Granola and see if it fits into their workflow before committing.
• Business: $14/user/mo. Best for individuals or small teams who want unlimited meetings and collaboration within a shared space.
• Enterprise: $35/user/mo. Best for larger teams that need more admin permissions and privacy control options.

Fireflies was actually one of the first meeting recorder solutions on the market. They managed to build remote tooling that would actually join in existing meetings, like in Google Meet or Zoom, act like a guest, and record the audio.

This was super impressive, back when online video conferencing software was more restrictive, and Google Meet for example didn't even have native video meeting recorder functionality.

We actually used Fireflies almost exclusively for years, super early days back in 2017, and it has come a long way since, moving more into that of a AI meeting assistant.

They've built out a unique feature-set around being able to create snippets of calls, and tag them to a specific playlist, to then reference later or share with your team or others:

It's a really cool idea, it's just in practice, how often will you really be using it? I could see this being more useful for very specific industry verticals or teams, but not most, and not in the way we use a meeting recorder tool in our day-to-day.

All-in-all, they give you a lot of tools to organize your online meetings. But that's where I sorta wish I could just do less. I'm already organizing so many other facets to my life, from file storage in Google Drive, to channels and notes in Slite. I really just want to record meetings, have them log to my CRM, and forget about them unless I need to reference them.

Thing is, if you aren't staying on-top of organizing your calls though, it almost feels like you're just not taking full advantage of what Fireflies has built, which honestly stresses me out. 😅

Fireflies is pretty clean overall—it looks decently nice, it's just that there's a lot vying for your attention even just on the call review page:

Do you view the AI summary? Create Soundbites? Maybe AskFred? Or a Smart Search? Maybe you just want to make a comment? 🤷

It's just a bit overwhelming until you get used to the interface, but overall design-wise, it is clean.

This is an area that we really have to hand it to Fireflies—they have focused on integrations quite deeply out of the gate. For example, they integrate with most of the best CRM tools on the market.

Fireflies’ pricing looks typical at first, but in practice it is fairly restrictive.

• Free tier is extremely limited with only 3 transcription credits, 800 minutes of storage per seat, and audio-only recording.
• To unlock integrations you must upgrade to the $18/user/mo Pro plan, which includes 8,000 minutes of storage but still does not offer video recording. With moderate usage, around 30 calls per month, that storage only lasts roughly 4–5 months before you are pushed to the highest tier if you want to keep historical recordings.

Because video recording is locked behind the top plan, many teams will need the most expensive tier immediately.