MacAI Meeting Notes

All three of Granola, Fathom, and Fellow are built specifically to sit in a live meeting, but they disagree on how to capture it and what “free” actually buys you. Granola, from Granola Inc. — used internally at Linear, Vercel, and Figma, per its own site — never joins as a bot at all, instead transcribing your computer’s own audio in the background; its free Basic plan is unlimited on new notes, though anything older than 30 days needs the $14/mo-per-user Business plan to reopen. Fathom, used at over 300,000 companies per its own site, has traditionally joined meetings as a visible bot but is now rolling out a bot-free capture mode, still in beta on Mac — its free individual plan has no time limit or history cliff at all before Team pricing starts at $19/mo per user (2-user minimum). Fellow, from Fellow Insights Inc., competes on a different axis entirely: zero-day retention, MNPI redaction, and a SEC/FINRA-exam-ready audit trail aimed at regulated finance and healthcare teams rather than raw note quality — its free plan is real but thin, just 5 AI notes and 5 AI recordings for the life of the account, not per month.

Noted, from Digital Workroom Ltd — over 3 million downloads, per its own site — isn’t built specifically for meetings at all. It started as a timestamped notes-and-recording app for students and journalists, with AI Transcribe layered on afterward, and it shows: the real strength here is cross-device recording — iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac synced over iCloud, with hands-free recording start from the Watch — rather than meeting-specific features like calendar briefs or CRM sync. It’s free to download, with a Noted+ subscription unlocking AI Transcribe; the exact subscription price isn’t published outside the App Store listing itself.

Aiko, from Sindre Sorhus, a well-known indie developer behind dozens of Mac and open-source tools, is the outlier worth knowing about: it doesn’t capture live meetings at all, bot or otherwise — it transcribes audio you already have, whether that’s a dropped-in file or a Voice Memos recording. What it trades that for is a privacy pitch none of the other four can match, since transcription runs OpenAI’s Whisper model entirely on-device across 100 languages, for a $24 one-time purchase (14-day free trial via TestFlight) instead of a subscription.