Price terms as published
Each line is the vendor’s own wording, split from the price capture checked on 2026-09-18. Nothing here is rounded, converted or re-worded — the full sentences stay in the review below. Lines that carry only a price continue the plan named on the line above, in the vendor’s own order.
| # | Plan / term | Checked |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Oats: free, open source, local or free cloud backend | 2026-09-18 |
| 2 | Granola: Basic $0 (limited history), Business $14/user/mo, Enterprise $35/user/mo, monthly only | 2026-09-18 |
One-liner: These are the two best-known bot-free meeting-note products — neither drops a visible recorder into your Zoom or Meet call — but they take opposite routes. Oats is a free, open-source app that listens to your computer’s audio and writes the whole summary itself, optionally 100% offline. Granola is a cloud app that starts from the notes you type during the meeting and uses AI plus the transcript to turn them into a polished document. Pricing and features below were checked against ariso.ai, the ariso-ai/oats GitHub repository, and granola.ai/pricing on 2026-09-18.
Side-by-side
| Dimension | Oats | Granola |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free — both the on-device Local backend and the Ariso cloud backend; “no seats, no trial timer” | Basic $0 with limited meeting history; Business $14/user/mo for unlimited notes/history; Enterprise $35/user/mo |
| Source / ownership | MIT licensed, every line public on GitHub; self-host/fork allowed | Proprietary, closed source |
| Where audio is processed | Local backend: 100% on-device (Apple Neural Engine on macOS, native CPU sidecar on Windows beta); cloud backend available | Cloud service (you can opt out of model training any time) |
| Bot in the call | No — captures your own system audio | No — captures from your device; the bot-free experience is its core pitch too |
| Do you have to type? | No — it writes digest, full summary, and per-person action items from the audio alone | Yes, by design — you take rough notes and Granola enhances them against the transcript |
| Output | Quick digest, summary, per-person action items, 1–5 quality score, searchable library; Local mode saves Markdown + Obsidian Tasks in your vault | Enhanced notes with transcript, AI chat within/across meetings, templates, shared folders |
| Integrations | Obsidian vault (Local mode), Microsoft/Google sign-in for cloud; broad app ecosystem not yet built out | Business adds Attio, Notion, Slack, HubSpot, Affinity, Zapier, MCP, and API access |
| Platforms | macOS + Windows (beta) | See granola.ai for current platform support |
| Maturity | Pre-1.0, shipping weekly (v0.23); Windows in beta | Established, venture-backed product used by named teams (e.g. the Brex case study on its site) |
| Annual discount | N/A (free) | None published — paid tiers are per seat, monthly only |
The real difference: who does the writing
This is not a spec-sheet choice; it is a workflow choice.
Granola’s thesis is that your typing makes the notes better. You jot bare observations while you talk, and its AI weaves those notes together with the transcript into a structured summary after the call. The benefit is notes that track what you cared about; the cost is that if you don’t type, Granola does very little for you. It is an enhancement layer on an active note-taker.
Oats’ thesis is that you shouldn’t have to type at all. Hit record, take the meeting, and come back to a digest, a full summary, and an action-item list with owners. That is closer to the “auto-notetaker” promise of Otter or Fireflies, but with no bot and, in Local mode, no audio leaving the machine. The trade is that a fully automatic summary has no signal about which moments mattered to you — it summarizes the whole conversation on its own judgment.
Privacy and ownership: not even close on paper
- Oats Local mode is the strongest privacy stance in the category: recording, transcription, and the LLM all run on your hardware, there is no login, and you can read the source. Notes are plain Markdown in a folder you choose, so there is no lock-in and no way to be priced out of your own history later.
- Granola is a cloud product. It is credible on privacy controls — model-training opt-out on every tier, org-wide opt-out and SSO on Enterprise — but the audio and processing are on its servers by the nature of the product, and the data lives in Granola, not in a local folder you own.
If your reason for bot-free notes is “this conversation cannot touch a third-party server,” only Oats Local actually satisfies that. If you are fine with cloud processing and simply dislike the visible bot, both qualify.
Price and the history wall
- Oats asks for nothing, and the free Ariso cloud tier currently includes real-time transcription with a stated no-training policy; richer cloud features (coaching, assessments, multi-language) exist but have no published long-term price.
- Granola’s free tier is explicitly a taste: the official pricing page says “limited meeting history” without printing a number (third-party sites variously claim 25 notes or a 30-day window — those figures are not on the official page, so don’t budget from them). Unlimited notes and history, advanced models, and the integrations that make notes flow into other tools sit behind $14 per seat per month, and there is no annual discount.
For an individual who just wants every meeting captured forever, Oats’ flat free is structurally cheaper. For a team that needs notes to land in Notion, Slack, HubSpot, or a CRM automatically, Granola Business is the product with those connectors on day one.
Where to stay honest
- Oats is early software. Sub-v1.0 weekly releases and a beta Windows build mean rough edges and moving features; its strongest items (speaker tagging, multi-language) are cloud-backend-only at launch, so local-private and cloud-polished are not yet at parity.
- “Free cloud” on Oats is today’s price, not a contract. Ariso has not published what enhanced cloud features will cost later.
- Granola’s free limit is deliberately vague on the official page. We report only what granola.ai prints; the exact cap changes and aggregator sites are unreliable.
- Granola requires active typing. If you want fully hands-off notes, that is a mismatch regardless of polish.
- Neither was hands-on tested by us for this comparison — pricing and features are from the official pages and the Oats repository, so there is no score.
Who should pick which
Pick Oats if:
- The meeting is sensitive and audio must stay on-device (legal, interviews, regulated calls)
- You want zero cost with no meeting-count or history ceiling
- You live in Markdown/Obsidian and want notes and tasks as plain files
- You like auditing or modifying the tools you rely on (MIT license)
Pick Granola if:
- You already take notes during calls and want them turned into polished output
- You need notes to flow into Notion, Slack, HubSpot, Zapier, or via MCP/API
- You want a mature, supported product over maximum privacy or minimum price
- Cloud processing is acceptable and you simply want to avoid the visible bot
For the wider field — including the bot-joining, free-minutes camp — see our Granola vs Otter comparison and the standalone Oats overview.