Granola vs Fireflies.ai
Both are AI meeting notetakers, but they solve different jobs: someone deciding between them is really choosing whether meeting notes are a personal artifact for the person who was in the room, or a team-wide dataset to be searched, analyzed, and pushed into a CRM.
The difference that matters
Granola never puts a bot in the call, it listens locally and merges its transcript with the rough notes you already typed, staying free forever on Basic and charging $14/user/month (Business) only when you want unlimited history and integrations. Fireflies sends a bot into Zoom, Meet, or Teams to build a searchable archive across your whole team, with talk-time analytics, automatic CRM pushes, and Soundbites clips, but its actual analytics layer, topic tracking, conversation intelligence, and CRM sync, is gated to its $19/seat/month Business plan, not its cheaper $10/seat/month (annual) Pro tier.
Side by side
| Granola | Fireflies.ai | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Basic, $0/user/month: AI meeting notes, AI chat, shared folders, templates, multi-language support; meeting-history access is described as 'limited' with no numeric cap published | 800 min recording storage per seat, 20 AI credits/month for advanced features, unlimited basic transcription and structured summaries, but no transcript downloads, no topic tracking, and no conversation intelligence |
| Entry paid plan | Business, $14/user/month, billed monthly (no annual option shown): unlocks unlimited meeting notes and history, advanced AI models, integrations (Notion, Slack, HubSpot, Zapier, Attio, Affinity), MCP and API access | Pro, $10/seat/month billed annually ($18/seat/month billed monthly), unlocks 8,000 min storage/seat and transcript downloads; topic tracking, conversation intelligence and direct CRM sync are gated to Business ($19/seat/month), not Pro |
| Bills in | Flat per-seat monthly subscription; no usage-metered AI credits | per seat/user, with AI feature usage metered separately via monthly AI credits |
Choose Granola if
You're an individual or small team that wants a clean, private note enhanced by AI, not a bot sitting in every call and not a shared archive you have to manage.
Choose Fireflies.ai if
Meetings are a team-wide data source you want to mine for patterns, sentiment, and pipeline signal, and you're prepared to pay for Business tier to unlock the CRM sync and conversation intelligence that make Fireflies worth choosing over Granola in the first place.
Our verdict
Pick Granola if you want your own notes finished, not filed. Pick Fireflies if the point is a searchable, team-wide record of every call, and budget for its Business tier since Pro alone doesn't get you the features that justify the switch.
What to watch out for
Fireflies' free tier appears to have shrunk or been restructured, an earlier verified check recorded 800 min of storage per seat, but a fresh fetch of fireflies.ai/pricing returned '400 mins of storage/team', a team-wide pool rather than a per-seat allowance. Confirm both current figures before relying on them.
Compare against the rest
Both of these sit in the full Productivity directory, which covers 6 tools.
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