Fathom vs Granola: a recording to revisit, or notes to work from?

Fathom is built around a recording you can return to. Granola is built around notes you can work from. That is the useful distinction here. Both offer free access, and both now have a bot-free capture route, although Fathom labels its Mac version as a beta.

A recording is useful when the exact conversation matters: a phrase, a demonstration or the moment a decision was made. Notes give a different kind of record, shaped around the points that matter afterwards. These are overlapping products, but they don’t leave you with quite the same thing.

What Fathom keeps

Fathom’s free individual plan includes unlimited recordings and transcripts, instant summaries, clips and search across calls. It makes the original conversation available alongside the AI summary, so a clip can carry more context than a rewritten bullet point.

Premium adds advanced summaries, AI-generated action items and a conversational meeting assistant. Those are separate from the core free recording allowance. The capture options are a meeting bot or bot-free capture, with the pricing page qualifying the latter as a Mac beta.

What Granola keeps

Granola uses your device’s audio and the notes you write during a meeting to produce fuller notes. There is no extra participant bot in the call. The product is closer to an enhanced notepad than a video library.

Basic includes AI meeting notes, chat and shared folders. Its current plan comparison gives the free meeting-history window as 30 days. Business adds unlimited history, pre-meeting briefs, follow-up emails and additional integrations. The 30-day limit is material if the notes are meant to become a long-running project record.

The differences in one place

Bot-free capture and data controls

Granola’s pricing page states that audio is deleted after transcription and provides user-level controls for transcript retention and model-training opt-out. Those are useful details precisely because capturing the audio without a bot still involves processing a conversation.

The capture method, the stored record and the sharing controls are separate parts of the product. A quiet-looking call interface doesn’t describe all three.

The question behind the comparison

For a call library, Fathom’s recordings and clips are the clearer fit on the published features. For a written record shaped by notes taken during the meeting, Granola is the more direct approach. The free-history limit changes that second decision when a project lasts longer than a month.

Fathom: individual free-plan details

Granola: Basic plan and meeting history