Yes, Granola has a free Basic plan at $0 per user with limited meeting history. You get AI notes, AI chat, templates, and shared folders. Older notes lock behind the paywall once you pass the free window, which Granola frames as a rolling span of about 30 days (some reviewers report an older cap near 25 notes).

Granola Pricing 2026: Plans, Cost, and Value

Q: Is Granola cheaper than Otter or Fireflies?

Granola Business at $14 per user per month undercuts both Otter Business at $30 and Fireflies Business at $19 on the team tier. On the free tier, Fathom beats all three with unlimited free recording.

By Nam Nguyen, founder of saas.com.ai. I track AI tools by real traffic and growth data to help you find the right one for the job. Published July 11, 2026 · Last updated July 11, 2026

Key takeaways

Granola runs three plans in 2026: Basic (free), Business at $14/user/month, and Enterprise at $35/user/month, per the official pricing page.
Billing is seat-based, with no per-minute or per-meeting charges, so cost scales with headcount, not with how much you record.
The free Basic plan gives limited meeting history: Granola frames it as a rolling window of recent notes (about 30 days), while some third-party reviewers report an older cap near 25 saved notes.
Granola dropped its old “Individual” and “Pro” tiers in 2026 and collapsed everything into these three.
At 14/user, GranolasitsbetweenFirefliesBusiness(19) and undercuts Otter Business ($30), but Fathom still beats all of them on the free tier.

Granola costs $0 on the free Basic plan, $14 per user per month on Business, and $35 per user per month on Enterprise as of July 2026, according to the Granola pricing page. There is no per-minute meter and no per-meeting fee, which is unusual in this category. The catch most buyers miss: the free plan is a trial in disguise, because its meeting history is capped, and the paid jump is per seat, so a five-person team is looking at $70 a month before anyone talks about Enterprise. This guide breaks down every plan, shows where the free tier actually runs out, and gives a verdict by who you are.

What are the Granola pricing plans in 2026?

Granola has exactly three plans in 2026: Basic (free), Business, and Enterprise. Here is the full breakdown at a glance.

Plan	Price (per user/mo)	Meeting history	Best for	Verdict
Basic	$0	Limited (rolling ~30-day window)	Trying it out, light solo use	Real product, not a demo, but you will hit the wall
Business	$14	Unlimited	Solos and teams who live in meetings	The plan almost everyone actually needs
Enterprise	$35	Unlimited + admin controls	Companies with security and SSO needs	Only if IT is in the room

(Granola bills monthly only. Its billing docs state annual plans are not currently offered, so there is no annual discount on Business or Enterprise as of this writing.)

The pricing philosophy here is worth pausing on. Otter charges by the minute on its free tier. Fireflies charges by the minute too. Granola charges by the seat and lets you record as much as you want. If you sit in six hours of calls a day, that difference is not academic. It is the whole reason power users switch.

What do you actually get on the free Basic plan?

The free Basic plan is a working version of Granola, not a stripped demo, but its meeting history is deliberately limited. You get AI meeting notes, AI chat across your meetings, shared folders, custom templates, multi-language support, and the option to opt out of model training, according to the official pricing page.

What you do not get: advanced AI models, any integrations (Notion, Slack, HubSpot, Zapier, Attio, Affinity), API access, or team billing.

Here is the part the marketing page softens. The Basic plan caps how much history stays accessible. The official page only says “limited meeting history,” and Granola’s own People and Companies view draws from a rolling window of about 30 days, so older meetings become read-locked until you upgrade. Some third-party reviewers instead describe an older hard cap of roughly 25 saved notes, according to alfred_’s 2026 pricing breakdown. Sources disagree on the exact mechanic, likely because Granola adjusted it around its 2026 rebrand, so treat the 25-note figure as a reported estimate, not the vendor’s published number.

Honestly, that ambiguity is the point. You do not feel the limit in week one. You feel it in week four, when a note you need for a client is suddenly behind a paywall. That is not an accident. It is a well-designed funnel.

Where does the Granola free tier actually run out?

The free tier runs out the moment you need an old note back, which for a working professional is usually two to four weeks in. Not on day one. That delay is the whole design.

Three specific walls hit real users:

History lockout. Once you pass the note cap, older meetings stop opening inside the app. Your notes are not deleted, but you cannot read them until you pay, per alfred_’s review. If you never exported them, you are stuck.
No integrations. The free plan cannot push notes to Notion, Slack, or HubSpot. So if your workflow is “meeting, then update the CRM,” you are copy-pasting by hand, which is exactly the chore Granola is supposed to kill.
Basic models only. The “advanced AI thinking models” live on Business. On free, summaries are competent but blunt. For a quick internal sync that is fine. For a discovery call you will quote back to a client, the gap shows.

(Personal aside: the smartest free-tier move I have seen is people exporting every note to Markdown weekly, so when the cap hits, nothing is trapped. It takes two minutes and defuses the entire lock-in.)

There is no standalone free trial of Business the way you might expect. The free Basic plan is the trial, and Granola does offer time-limited trials of the paid plans in some cases, where you keep full access until the trial ends and then either subscribe or drop to Basic, according to Granola’s billing docs. Do not count on a generous 14-day Business trial appearing automatically.

Is Granola worth $14 a month?

Granola Business is worth $14 per user per month for anyone who sits in more than five meetings a week and needs to remember what was said. Below that threshold, the free tier or a genuinely unlimited free rival is the smarter call. Here is the verdict by who you are.

For the solo consultant

Buy it. If you bill by the hour and take client calls, $14 a month is rounding error against one recovered detail. Granola’s bot-free capture matters more here than the price: because it grabs audio straight from your machine instead of sending a bot to join, you never show up as “Otter Assistant has joined” in a client’s participant list. For a consultant, looking like you are quietly present instead of secretly recording is worth the whole subscription. That single difference is why I would not put a solo consultant on Fireflies.

For the sales team

Do the seat math first. Five reps on Business is $70 a month, ten is $140. That is cheap for what it replaces, but sales leaders should know Granola’s post-meeting automation is thinner than Fireflies. There are no built-in follow-up emails or task tracking on the same level, per alfred_’s comparison. If your reps need the note to auto-trigger a CRM sequence, price the integration work in, or look hard at Fireflies, which was built around exactly that.

For the executive or founder

Business, not Enterprise, unless your security team demands SSO. The $35 Enterprise tier is priced for the IT department, not for you. It buys SSO, org-wide training opt-out, usage analytics, and admin controls over sharing and API access, per the pricing page. If you are a 200-person company with a compliance officer, that is money well spent. If you are a founder who just wants clean notes from investor calls, you are overpaying by $21 a seat. Start on Business.

How does Granola’s price compare to Otter, Fireflies, and Fathom?

Granola is mid-priced: cheaper than Otter Business, cheaper than Fireflies Business, but beaten on the free tier by Fathom. The table below lines them up on the numbers that decide a purchase.

Tool	Free tier	Entry paid	Team/Business	Billing model
Granola	Limited history (rolling ~30 days)	Business $14/user/mo	$14/user/mo	Per seat, unlimited recording
Otter.ai	300 min/mo	Pro $16.99/mo	Business $30/user/mo	Per minute on free
Fireflies.ai	800 min/mo	Pro $10/user/mo	Business $19/user/mo	Per minute on free
Fathom	Unlimited (AI summaries capped 5/mo)	Paid tiers vary	Team pricing varies	Unlimited free recording

Competitor figures per genesysgrowth’s 2026 comparison and usecarly’s roundup. Otter and Fathom revise their team tiers often; the figures above reflect mid-2026 published rates.)

Two things jump out. First, if “free forever” is your only requirement, Fathom wins outright, since it offers unlimited free recording and transcription and only caps the fancy AI summaries at five per month. Granola cannot match that on free.

Second, Granola and Otter are not really competing on price, they are competing on how they record. Otter and Fireflies send a bot into the call. Granola does not. That is the entire pitch: you keep your meeting looking like a meeting. Price is almost a sideshow next to that decision, which is why I would not choose between them on the dollar figure alone.

Straight talk: if you want the deeper feature-by-feature teardown rather than just the numbers, read the full Granola review or the best AI note-takers roundup.

See Granola’s live plans before you commit a single seat.

Check current Granola pricing →

What is the hidden cost of switching to Granola?

The real cost of moving to Granola is not the $14, it is the friction of a desktop-only, bot-free model that some workflows are not built for. Three hidden costs are worth naming before you migrate a team.

The desktop dependency is first. Granola captures audio locally, which is the reason it is bot-free, but it also means the app has to be running on your machine during the call. There is no server-side bot quietly recording a meeting you forgot to open. Miss the launch, miss the note. Teams used to Otter’s “the bot always shows up” reliability find this a genuine adjustment.

Export lock-in is second. Your accumulated notes live in Granola. If you later leave for Fireflies or Fathom, there is no one-click migration of a year of meeting history. Get in the habit of exporting early, as I flagged above, or you inherit the same trap that makes leaving any note tool painful.

Training data is third. On Basic and Business, the opt-out of model training is available but individual. Only Enterprise gives you org-wide, team-level opt-out, per the pricing page. For a regulated industry, that difference alone can force you up to the $35 tier, which changes the math entirely.

Not sure Granola fits your stack? Compare it head to head.

See the best AI note-takers ranked →

Frequently asked questions

Is Granola free?

Yes, Granola has a free Basic plan at $0 per user, but with limited meeting history. You get AI notes, AI chat, templates, and shared folders, according to the pricing page. Older notes lock behind the paywall once you pass the free window, which Granola frames as a rolling span of about 30 days (some reviewers report an older cap near 25 notes).

How much does Granola cost per user?

Granola costs $14 per user per month on Business and $35 per user per month on Enterprise, as of July 2026, per the Granola pricing page. Billing is per seat, so a five-person team on Business pays $70 a month.

Does Granola charge per meeting or per minute?

No. Granola uses seat-based billing with no per-minute or per-meeting charges, which is unusual for the category. You can record unlimited meetings on paid plans, so cost depends on headcount, not usage volume.

Does Granola offer a free trial of the paid plans?

There is no standalone free trial you can count on. The free Basic plan acts as the trial, and Granola offers time-limited paid trials in some cases where full access ends on the trial date, then drops you to Basic, per Granola’s billing docs.

Is Granola cheaper than Otter or Fireflies?

Granola Business (14/user/mo)undercutsbothOtterBusiness(30/user/mo) and Fireflies Business ($19/user/mo) on the team tier, per 2026 comparisons. On the free tier, though, Fathom beats all three with unlimited free recording.

The bottom line

Granola’s pricing is honest in one direction and quietly clever in the other. The $14 Business plan is a fair, flat, per-seat number with no metering games, and for anyone who lives in meetings it pays for itself the first time you recover a detail you would have lost. I would put almost every solo consultant and small team straight on Business and skip the dance with the free tier entirely.

The clever part is the free plan’s history cap, which is designed to feel generous for a month and then squeeze exactly when your notes have become valuable. That is not a reason to avoid Granola. It is a reason to export early and decide on purpose. Choose Enterprise only when a security team is asking for SSO. Choose Fathom instead if a truly free tier is your hard requirement. Everyone else: the $14 seat is the right answer, and the sooner you stop pretending the free plan will carry you, the less it costs you in lost notes.

About the author. Nam Nguyen is the founder of saas.com.ai, where he curates and tracks AI tools by real traffic and growth data to help readers find the right tool for any task. He tests meeting and productivity tools hands-on before recommending them.