Fathom vs Granola: Which AI Meeting Note Taker Fits You?

Fathom vs Granola is the comparison most people land on after their first few meetings with an AI note taker, because the two tools agree on the job and disagree on almost everything else. Both turn a call into notes, a summary and a searchable transcript. The difference is how the recording happens, and what the free version gives you.

Fathom sends a recording bot into your meeting as a visible participant, and in exchange its free plan is unlimited: as many recordings and transcriptions as you want, at $0, forever. Granola never sends a bot at all. It captures the call from your own device, and the price of that discretion is a free plan with a 30-day memory and a paid tier at $14 a month.

So the choice underneath this comparison is simple. Do you want a free recorder with a bot in the room, or a quieter notepad you will probably end up paying for? This Fathom vs Granola comparison works through the capture methods, the free plans and the real prices, so you can answer it for your own calls.

	Fathom	Granola
Free plan	$0 forever, unlimited recordings and transcriptions	$0, with AI notes and chat; history limited to 30 days
Paid solo price	Premium $16 per user per month billed annually ($20 monthly)	Business $14 per user per month
Bot in the meeting	Yes, a recording bot joins by default; bot-free capture is in beta, Mac only	Never; captures audio from your own device
History limit	No cap on recordings or transcriptions on the free plan	Last 30 days on free; unlimited on Business
Platforms	Joins calls through its bot; bot-free option is Mac only for now	Apps for Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android

Fathom vs Granola: how each one captures your meetings

The deepest difference between these tools is not price or features. It is about where the recording actually takes place, and every other difference grows out of that.

Fathom works the way most AI note takers work. When a meeting starts, a Fathom bot joins the call as an extra participant, visible in the attendee list. The bot records the conversation, produces the transcription and feeds the summaries. This has real advantages: it does not matter which device you joined from, and the recording survives a dead laptop battery. The cost is social rather than technical. Some people talk differently when a recorder is visibly in the room, and on client calls that stiffness can matter more than any feature.

Fathom does offer a bot-free capture option, worth knowing about before you rule the tool out. It is currently in beta, and limited to Mac. If you live on a Mac, it narrows the gap with Granola considerably. But a beta feature on one platform is not the same promise as a product built around the idea, and Windows users cannot use it yet.

Granola takes the opposite approach on every plan, including the free one. The app sits on your computer or phone and captures the call from your side: your microphone and the sound coming through your speakers or headphones. Nothing joins the meeting, nothing appears in the attendee list, and nobody has to admit a bot. That is also why the platform question barely matters: if call audio reaches your device, Granola can capture it, on Zoom, Google Meet, Teams or anything else.

Fathom: a genuinely free recorder, with a bot attached

Fathom’s headline is its free plan, and it deserves the headline. The $0 plan never expires, and it covers unlimited recordings and transcriptions, along with instant summaries, clips and search. No meeting limit sits in the background waiting to nudge you onto a paid plan, the way most free tiers in this category are designed to do. For internal meetings and standups, that is a complete tool at no cost, and the strongest single fact in this comparison.

The free plan’s boundary sits in the AI layer. Advanced AI summaries are limited on the free tier, so the deeper summaries are rationed rather than standard. The transcriptions and regular summaries keep flowing; the premium intelligence is what you pay to unlock.

That unlock is Premium, the solo tier, at $16 per user per month billed annually, or $20 monthly. Premium also unlocks AI action items and a meeting assistant, and the deeper summaries lose their free plan ceiling. Above it sit two team plans: Team at $15 per user per month billed annually ($19 monthly), with a two user minimum, and Business at $25 billed annually ($34 monthly). The shape is unusual: Team costs less per seat than Premium, because Fathom would rather you bring a colleague than stay solo.

Where Fathom asks for your tolerance is the bot. It sits in the attendee list, and for most internal meetings that is fine, because your own team already knows the tool is there. The question is whether the people you meet with will, and that depends on whose calls fill your calendar.

Granola: meeting notes with no bot, on every plan

Granola’s promise is the mirror image of Fathom’s. Where Fathom gives you unlimited recording and asks you to accept the bot, Granola removes the bot completely and asks you to accept a limit instead. Capture happens on your own device, from your microphone and your system audio, so as far as everyone else knows, no note taker is present at all.

That invisibility is the product. Client calls, sales calls, interviews and sensitive one to ones run more naturally when the attendee list is just people. Granola also starts from your own habits rather than replacing them: you jot rough notes during the call, as you would in a paper notebook, and the AI later expands them from the transcript of what was said. If that workflow sounds right for you, our full Granola review goes through it in depth.

The plans are simpler than Fathom’s. Basic costs nothing and comes with AI meeting notes, AI chat, shared folders and templates you can customize. Its one limit is history: only your last 30 days stay open, and anything older is locked rather than deleted. Business, at $14 per user per month, removes that limit with unlimited notes and history, and adds advanced AI models, integrations with Slack, Notion, HubSpot and others, plus API access. Enterprise, at $35 per user per month, adds SSO, admin controls, organization-wide auto-deletion and priority support.

Granola runs on Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android, so one account covers your desk and your phone. What it cannot do is record a call taken on a device where the app is not running, because the device is the recorder. A fair trade for most people, worth weighing if your meetings are scattered across machines.

Pricing compared

Every figure below comes from Fathom’s pricing page and Granola’s pricing page, checked in October 2026. The two companies structure plans differently, so rows match tiers by job rather than by name.

Plan	Fathom	Granola
Free	$0 forever: unlimited recordings and transcriptions; advanced AI summaries limited	$0: AI notes, chat, shared folders and templates; history limited to 30 days
Solo paid	Premium $16 per user per month billed annually ($20 monthly)	Business $14 per user per month
Team	Team $15 per user per month billed annually ($19 monthly), two user minimum	Business covers teams at the same $14 per user per month
Top tier	Business $25 per user per month billed annually ($34 monthly)	Enterprise plan: $35 per user per month

The yearly math is where the solo comparison gets decided. Fathom Premium on annual billing costs $192 a year; pay monthly and the same plan costs $240, so the annual toggle is worth $48. Granola Business is $14 a month with no annual discount and no billing toggle, which comes to $168 a year either way. For one person, Granola is $24 a year cheaper than Fathom Premium, and Fathom is free.

Which one should you pick?

Pick Fathom if your meetings are mostly internal, your budget is zero, or you record many calls and want them all transcribed and searchable. A standup or a sprint review does not care about a bot in the attendee list, and paying $14 or $16 a month to remove one buys you nothing there. Fathom is also safer if you switch between computers, because the bot records rather than an app on one machine.

Pick Granola if your calendar is full of people outside your company: clients, prospects, candidates, investors. Those are the calls where a visible recorder changes the temperature of the conversation, and where your own notes are worth building the summary around. Treat the $14 Business plan as the realistic cost, because the free plan’s 30-day window makes it a trial in everything but name once you rely on old notes.

For teams, the arithmetic shifts. Fathom Team at $15 per user per month is priced to pull in whole teams, but its two user minimum means a true solo user cannot buy it. Granola charges the same $14 per user on Business for one person or a whole team, integrations included. Granola stays cheaper per seat at every size, while Fathom suits teams who mostly need the free recorder.

Frequently asked questions

Both tools live in our AI meeting tools category, where they sit alongside the other note takers we track.

One more comparison worth a look: our Fathom vs Fireflies breakdown, where the same unlimited free recordings meet a free plan with a 400 minute team storage cap.