Granola alternatives, 2026.Q3: every real option, ranked
The short answer
Edition v2026.Q3 · pricing and status verified 2026-08-06.
Fathom is the strongest Granola alternative for most — zero-budget teams that want unlimited capture — the most generous free tier in the category, with paid tiers only for team views, CRM sync, and compliance. Then: Fireflies · Otter · Read AI. Below, all 20 real options in the meeting capture category, with pricing and honest watch-outs — plus the 6 "alternatives" other lists still recommend that are dead, renamed, or sunsetting.
Why people look past Granola at all: It won't attend meetings for you — no bot means no capture of calls you skip. No video recording, and the free tier's limited history is a deliberate squeeze. User and revenue numbers are undisclosed; the $1.5B price is a bet on trajectory, not reported ARR.
The top Granola alternatives, ranked
2FathomFathom Video
Free (unlimited recording + transcription) · Premium $15 · Team $19 · Team Pro $29/user/moBest for Zero-budget teams that want unlimited capture — the most generous free tier in the category, with paid tiers only for team views, CRM sync, and compliance.
Watch The company discloses almost nothing — no user counts, revenue, or funding since a $4.7M round in 2022 — so its scale is taken on faith. Advanced summary templates, team search, and unlimited CRM sync all sit behind the $19–29 tiers, and the bot-less mode is barely four months old.
3FirefliesFireflies.ai
Free · Pro $10 · Business $19 · Enterprise $39/seat/mo (annual; $18/$29 monthly)Best for Teams that want every call auto-filed — transcripts into CRM, action items into task tools, analytics across the whole org, with the deepest integration catalog in the category.
Watch Vendor-claim-heavy — the 1M-companies and Fortune-500 numbers are its own marketing, and the widely reported $1B secondary-sale valuation (Sept 2025) has no primary source we could re-verify. 2026 pricing metered 'AI credits' (20–50/mo by tier) onto advanced AI features, and the bot-based capture model is exactly what Granola-style tools are eroding.
4OtterOtter.ai
Free 300 min/mo · Pro $8.33 · Business $19.99/user/mo (annual; $16.99/$30 monthly) · Enterprise customBest for Raw transcription volume — live captions, interviews, lectures, and 4-hour meetings — from the oldest and largest pure-play in the category.
Watch A 2025 California class action alleges it recorded conversations without all-party consent for AI training, and UMass banned it under Massachusetts consent law — the category's consent risk made concrete. Growth (~23% YoY) is a fraction of Granola's trajectory, and its LLM-era summarization has lost the quality narrative to younger rivals.
5Read AIRead AI
Free 5 meetings/mo · Pro $15 · Enterprise $22.50 · Enterprise+ $29.75/user/mo (annual; +33% monthly)Best for Teams that want meeting intelligence to leave the meeting — summaries and coaching that follow you into email, Slack, and Teams, plus an email 'digital twin' that schedules for you.
Watch The stingiest free tier of the five (5 meetings/month). Its engagement-scoring roots — measuring who talks too much — still read as surveillance to some teams, and spreading across meetings, email, and messaging risks doing none of them best-in-class.
Every other live option in meeting capture
| Tool | Maker | What it is | Entry |
|---|---|---|---|
| tl;dv | tl;dv GmbH | Free-forever unlimited recordings, 2M+ users, 30+ languages; positions as the no-cost Gong alternative for global teams | free · paid tiers |
| Krisp | Krisp | Noise-cancellation leader turned bot-free notetaker — transcription in 16 languages, accent conversion, call-center AI | free tier · paid |
| Circleback | Circleback (YC) | The quality darling — bot + in-person capture, 100+ languages, automations; customers incl. TikTok, Samsung, Deloitte | free tier · paid |
| Grain | Grain Intelligence | Growing-teams notetaker with bot-less audio capture, MCP server, and a claimed 97% 12-month retention | free · $15/user/mo |
| Avoma | Avoma | Modular meeting assistant ($19) + conversation-intelligence add-on ($29) — straddles capture and revenue intelligence | $19/user/mo |
| Fellow | Fellow (now fellow.ai) | Meeting-management pioneer repositioned as the privacy-first notetaker for regulated industries — bot-less option, recording policies, redaction | free · paid tiers |
| Jamie | Jamie (Germany) | Fully bot-less and works offline/in-person; EU-hosted, ISO 27001, no training on customer data — the GDPR-strict pick | free tier · paid |
| MeetGeek | MeetGeek | 50k+ teams; bot, desktop, mobile and 'Wave' in-person hardware capture plus meeting agents; Pro from $9.99/mo | free · $9.99+/mo |
| Sembly | Sembly AI | Meetings into client-ready deliverables for professional services; 10k+ teams, 48 languages | free tier · paid |
| Notta | Notta Inc. (Japan) | APAC-strong transcription suite, claimed 10M+ users, 58 languages; from $8.17/mo | free · $8.17+/mo |
| Supernormal | Supernormal | Pivoted from generic notetaker to 'AI agents for agencies' — meetings into decks, briefs, proposals; claims 700k+ orgs | free tier · paid |
| Spinach | Spinach AI (YC; Zoom & Atlassian-backed) | Agile-ceremony agent — summaries plus ticket creation in Jira/Asana across 100 languages | free tier · paid |
| ZoomMate | Zoom | The native threat, repriced: free-with-paid-plans AI Companion rebranded ZoomMate in 2026 and moved to AI credits — Basic tier caps at 3 summaries/mo | credits; basic free |
| Gemini in Google Meet | 'Take notes for me' — auto notes to Docs with decisions and action items, bundled into eligible Workspace/Gemini plans; the strongest bundling threat | bundled w/ Workspace | |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot | Microsoft | Teams meeting recap and notes inside the Copilot bundle — Copilot Business now $18/user/mo (annual), down from the $30 era | $18/user/mo (annual) |
| Notion AI Meeting Notes | Notion | Bot-less system-audio capture inside the wiki (Business/Enterprise plans, 10 h/day cap) — notes land where work lives; see Kw | bundled w/ Business plan |
The "Granola alternatives" to avoid — no longer what they were
Listicles still recommend these. As of 2026-08-06, they are not what the listicles think.
| Tool | Status | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Limitless / Rewind | acquired | Acquired by Meta; Pendant sales ended Dec 5, 2025, Rewind capture disabled Dec 19, 2025, existing users free through 2026 — personal always-on capture folds into Big Tech wearables |
| Bee | acquired | $50 always-listening wearable acquihired by Amazon (Jul 2025) — ambient capture moved adjacent to element Mm |
| Airgram | dead | Once a well-reviewed notetaker; wound down and domain unreachable by Aug 2026 |
| timeOS | renamed | timeos.ai now redirects to timeless.day (observed Aug 2026) — rebrand/pivot; original product no longer marketed |
| Rewatch | acquired | Meeting-video hub acquired by Atlassian (2023) and folded into the Loom/Atlassian stack |
| Chorus.ai | acquired | Sales conversation intelligence, acquired by ZoomInfo for $575M (2021) — the category's first big exit; sales CI now lives in GTM tooling, not here |
How to choose
- If you're a founder in back-to-back calls and refuse to send a bot into meetings
- Granola — Business at $14 buys unlimited history plus API/MCP so agents can query your meetings. Accept that it can't attend calls you skip.
- If budget is zero, or you're trialing capture across a whole team
- Fathom free — the only unlimited no-cost tier (recording, storage, transcription). Pay only when you need team views, CRM sync, or compliance.
- If you want every call auto-filed into CRM, tasks, and org-wide analytics
- Fireflies Business at $19/seat — the deepest integration catalog; watch the AI-credit meter on advanced features.
- If your job is volume transcription — interviews, lectures, 4-hour calls, live captions
- Otter Business ($19.99, unlimited meetings) — but check your state's consent law first; Otter's 2025 class action is the category's cautionary tale.
- If your org lives in Google Workspace or Zoom and needs summaries, not memory
- Try the native layer first — Gemini 'take notes for me' is bundled into eligible Workspace plans; Zoom's is now credit-metered ZoomMate. Graduate to a dedicated tool when you need cross-meeting search.
This analysis is drawn from the Meeting Capture element dossier — the ranked top 5, the comparison matrix, and the complete field of 22 more tools live there, with every source. Data: mt.json (CC BY 4.0).
Every claim above is dated and sourced from the elems dossiers — 1,421 tools tracked across 58 categories, verified 2026-08-06, including the 276 we found dead, renamed, acquired, or sunsetting. Rankings are editorial, never paid — the charter.
Build your stack in 5 questions →