Earkeep vs Granola

If you're fine typing shorthand and paying a recurring per-seat fee for a polished, Notion/Slack-connected notepad, Granola is the more mature product today. If you want zero interaction, a complete record of everything said, and to own that record as plain files with no subscription, Earkeep is built for exactly that.

Earkeep never asks you to start anything. It listens in the background all day, and you select the span on the timeline that was the meeting, or connect a calendar (Google, Apple, Outlook, or any ICS URL) so spans are created automatically. Granola works the opposite way: it's an explicit per-meeting tool, not an ambient one, and Reddit users report it catching only part of their calendar.

One user on r/ArtificialInteligence put it directly: "I leave it open throughout my work day and it only produces notes for ~60% of my calls. Great that it doesn't show up in meetings as an AI notetaker, but it's caused me to miss significant notes." Earkeep's always-on model exists precisely to close that 40% gap: there's nothing to remember to start.

Both tools share the founding insight that a robot joining the call is socially unacceptable in the meetings that matter most: client calls, investor pitches, confidential discussions. Granola's own strategy write-up frames it as "the social friction created by meeting bots represented its biggest competitive opportunity."

Earkeep takes the same premise one step further: Granola still needs you to open it and type rough bullets during the meeting so its AI has something to expand; Earkeep needs nothing from you during the meeting at all. Granola's own reviews list "requires typing" and the resulting cognitive load as a recurring complaint.

Earkeep's audio is processed only in memory on your device and never written to disk or sent to any server; there's no account, no cloud, and no API key involved in transcription. Granola's processing is cloud-side: audio and notes are handled on Granola's servers, and reviewers note there's no offline mode.

That distinction matters most for confidential meetings, regulated data, or teams that simply don't want a third party holding the conversation. It also explains a different class of Granola complaints: one three-month reviewer on r/AIToolTesting reported "the number transcription issues are a real problem if you deal with data or finance stuff." Local processing doesn't guarantee perfect transcription, but it does mean the raw audio itself never has to leave the machine to get an answer.

Granola's core loop is human-in-the-loop: you type shorthand bullets during the call, and its AI expands them into structured notes using the meeting's audio as context. That produces a clean, readable write-up, but it is explicitly not a full transcript, and a VC on r/venturecapital complained that "Granola's summary [is] very very short, lacking a lot of details and not allowing me to get deeper into a specific point."

Earkeep takes the opposite approach: it keeps the full verbatim transcript of everything captured, saved locally as plain files you can open, grep, back up, or feed to any tool. Earkeep doesn't yet generate its own AI summaries (that's on the roadmap); today, summarization is something you point your own agent at the transcript to do, via the built-in ACP agents or the MCP server.

Granola's Business plan is $14/user/month, and Enterprise (SSO, API access, priority support) is $35/user/month; the free tier caps out at 25 notes total. Over three years, a single Granola Business seat runs roughly $504; over five years, roughly $840, before any price increase or Enterprise upgrade.

Earkeep is €39 once, for one device, no subscription and no tiers. That price includes every update to Earkeep 1.x; if a paid major upgrade ever ships, the version you already bought keeps working.

Granola is the more mature product for a few real reasons, and it's worth saying so plainly:

• You want AI-authored notes today, not a transcript. Granola's structured, expanded notes are ready to read the moment a meeting ends. Earkeep gives you the raw verbatim transcript; turning that into a summary currently means running an agent against it yourself.
• You're deep in Google Workspace, Notion, HubSpot, or Slack. Granola has native integrations with all four, plus a Slack digest and shareable "Ask Granola" notes that let non-users query a meeting without an account. Earkeep has no equivalent sharing or CRM integration today.
• You need team-wide admin controls. Granola's Enterprise plan adds SSO and org-level management for larger teams. Earkeep enforces one license per device, with no team or org tier.
• You're on Windows or Linux for your primary machine. Earkeep requires macOS 13+. Granola's Windows and Linux support is reportedly less polished but exists; if your team isn't all on macOS, that's worth weighing.

Granola's own positioning targets founders, CEOs, VCs, sales leads, and consultants having external, high-stakes conversations where a bot would be inappropriate, and where a polished shared note matters more than a full transcript.

Earkeep's audience overlaps heavily with product and engineering roles running 8-15 meetings a week who already work with their own AI agents and knowledge bases, and want meeting data that stays on their device and plugs directly into that setup. See Earkeep for product managers for role-specific detail.