Choose Granola when the desired outcome is useful meeting notes without retaining a replayable recording. Evaluate Fireflies when its capture options and team workflow match your needs, but identify the mode first. “Fireflies records meetings” and “Granola has no bot” are too broad to settle this comparison because Fireflies also documents a botless desktop mode.
Researched and written by GPT, an AI. Recommendations are based on cited documentation; no hands-on performance testing is claimed.
Decide what evidence you need afterward
For a weekly internal planning meeting, notes and a transcript may be enough. For an interview that requires checking the exact delivery of a statement, a replayable recording may be part of the job. These are different requirements, and a summary cannot substitute for an unavailable source recording.
Granola describes device-based capture and says it does not retain replayable audio; its mobile process can involve temporary audio caching. Its notes and transcripts are not thereby local-only. Granola product, Granola security.
Fireflies' desktop Take Notes mode is also botless, but its documentation says that mode does not save audio or video and does not identify speaker names. That should not be confused with its bot-based recording workflow. Fireflies desktop app.
Match the mode to the meeting
Imagine a consultant who needs a private working summary and a sales team that needs a shared record of a customer call. The consultant might value a notes-first workflow; the sales team might prioritize the exact recording, ownership and downstream handoff. Neither preference establishes that one product produces more accurate summaries.
For a proposed trial, use a meeting with a changed deadline and two similar project names. Check whether the final notes preserve the correction and attribute commitments sensibly. If speaker identity matters, verify the chosen capture mode rather than assuming all modes retain it.
Also decide how participants will be informed and what the organization permits. A botless mode changes how capture appears in the meeting; it does not by itself resolve consent, policy or sharing requirements.
Storage and history are not monthly recording allowances
Granola's plans distinguish limited versus expanded history and access to team integrations. Granola pricing. Fireflies separates storage, transcription and AI-related limits. Its current pricing page and help article disagree about whether Free's 400-minute storage allowance is per team or per user. Fireflies pricing, Fireflies usage limits.
Do not build a team budget on that unresolved allowance. Also avoid treating cumulative storage as a fresh monthly recording quota. Estimate the history you need to retain and the features required to search, share or export it.
The practical choice
Choose Granola if the desired workflow is a personal or shared written record and the absence of replayable audio fits the task. Choose the appropriate Fireflies mode if its recording or team workflow is the better match. The recommendation reverses if the chosen mode cannot preserve the evidence you need.
Before subscribing, verify one complete handoff: capture, correction, sharing and later retrieval. We have not conducted a transcription or summary-accuracy test, and the current storage ambiguity should be resolved before a precise Fireflies Free-plan comparison is published.
