Granola vs Zoom AI Companion: Note-Taking Compared

Zoom's built-in AI is enough if your team already pays for Zoom Workplace, and Granola is worth adding if you write notes during calls and want them searchable across every meeting app. At Layer3Labs, we build the workflows that carry meeting notes into client CRMs, so we compare note-takers on where their notes can go after the call. In June 2026, Zoom retired the AI Companion name, and its AI features are now named for what they do inside Zoom Workplace.

Both tools now capture meetings without sending an intrusive bot into your audio channel. Granola uses desktop system audio to combine your typed thoughts with transcript data, while Zoom offers My Notes across Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and in-person discussions.

Granola vs. Zoom AI Companion: Side-by-Side

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Granola vs Zoom AI Companion: Which to Use

Zoom's built-in AI handles meeting summaries at no added expense for paid Zoom Workplace subscribers, making it the practical pick for companies that simply need hands-off call recaps. Granola represents a distinct software category: a collaborative scratchpad that enhances your typed observations with AI analysis, structured templates, and deep search across your conversation archive.

When an organization runs all client check-ins through Zoom and participants rarely open a text editor during calls, Zoom Workplace Pro at $14.16 per user per month on annual billing delivers complete summaries without an extra software license.

Granola earns its $14 monthly seat price when your team treats meetings as working sessions. Its design assumes you type bullet points, capture action items as they happen, and later ask Granola Chat about past meetings, choosing among standard and thinking models on Business. Zoom's free Basic plan caps My Notes at 3 uses a month. If your team does not pay for Zoom and meets mostly in Teams or Google Meet, start with Granola's free Basic plan, which has no meeting cap. Our pick would change if Zoom started charging extra for meeting summaries on paid Zoom Workplace plans, or if Granola began keeping audio recordings, which Granola's feature-requests page says it has no plans to do.

• Choose Zoom AI Companion if your company already pays for Zoom Workplace Pro or Business, prefers automated summaries delivered without human effort, and requires full video cloud recordings.
• Choose Granola if you take real-time notes during meetings, attend calls on Google Meet or Microsoft Teams as often as Zoom, and want to query meeting transcripts using external AI clients through the Model Context Protocol.

What Zoom's AI Includes Since the June 2026 Rename

Zoom retired the standalone AI Companion brand name in June 2026, choosing instead to describe capabilities by their specific utility inside Zoom Workplace. The system generates automatic meeting summaries, extracts action items, organizes smart recording chapters, and drafts responses inside Zoom Team Chat at no added fee on paid accounts.

My Notes is Zoom's AI note-taker for Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and in-person conversations, and it works without a bot joining the call. You start it from the My Notes icon in the Zoom meeting window or app.

Zoom also offers a bot mode for Teams and Google Meet calls. Once scheduled or invited, this assistant joins Teams or Meet sessions as an external attendee, generating post-meeting summaries for eligible Pro, Business, and Enterprise license holders.

ZoomMate, Zoom's agentic product built on Custom AI Companion, launched in June 2026 at $20 per user per month, and its plan includes 2,200 AI credits a month.

Pricing Structure and Plan Limits as of October 2026

Zoom's AI costs nothing extra on a paid Zoom plan. As of October 2026, confirmed on the official Zoom pricing directory, Zoom Workplace Pro costs $14.16 per user per month billed annually ($16.99 on monthly billing) and includes unlimited meeting summaries alongside core video hosting features. Zoom Workplace Business runs $18.33 per user per month billed annually ($21.99 monthly) for up to 300 participants.

Zoom's free plan caps AI use. Zoom Basic restricts AI meeting summaries to 3 hosted meetings per month and caps My Notes at 3 uses monthly, on top of its standard 40-minute call cutoff. Conversely, Granola's billing documentation shows its Basic plan allows unlimited meeting transcriptions without daily caps. The free plan restriction on Granola is historical access: notes older than 30 days are stored securely but cannot be opened in the app until you upgrade to a paid tier.

Granola Business costs $14 per user per month, billed monthly. It provides unlimited historical note access, advanced model selection, pre-meeting briefs, automated follow-up emails, and connections to the HubSpot, Attio and Affinity CRMs, plus Notion and Zapier. For larger organizations, Granola Enterprise costs $35 per user per month, introducing single sign-on for teams with at least 50 users, centralized admin controls, SCIM user provisioning, and an organizational Audit API.

Zoom also sells My Notes as an isolated service starting at $8.33 per user per month for customers who host meetings on rival video providers but want Zoom's summaries. However, adding Granola Business to an existing Zoom Workplace Pro seat brings your total cost to roughly $28 per user per month, which is justified only if your operators extract ongoing value from Granola's cross-meeting chat and flexible templates. Zoom's own My Notes comparison table lists Granola at $14 or $35 per user per month, the same figures on Granola's pricing page.

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Meeting Capture Architecture and Platform Reach

Both Granola and Zoom provide bot-free audio capture, eliminating the awkwardness of an automated attendee sitting in client sales calls. Granola operates as a native application on macOS 14+ and Windows, transcribing the combined system audio stream and your microphone directly from your machine. Because it listens to computer hardware audio rather than integrating into video software backends, it transcribes calls across Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack Huddles, and local VoIP dialers without configuration.

The Granola mobile guidelines confirm that free mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Apple Watch transcribe in-person meetings. Furthermore, Granola for iOS supports outbound cellular telephone calls, generating transcripts for direct dial-outs. It cannot, however, transcribe virtual meetings running on a smartphone.

Zoom's My Notes also works without a bot, allowing users to transcribe conversations on Zoom, third-party software, and in-person discussions via mobile hardware or the web portal. Zoom also keeps a participant bot that you can invite into Teams and Google Meet calls on Pro and higher plans.

Audio Storage and Transcript Retention Policies

Zoom can keep full cloud recordings, and Granola keeps no audio at all. According to the Granola transcription policy, Granola never saves audio or video recordings of meetings. It caches audio only during the conversation to run speech-to-text through third-party transcription providers named on Granola's security page, then deletes the cached audio once the transcript is done.

This architectural choice means Granola users cannot replay meeting audio or re-watch screen presentations. The application preserves only the generated written transcript and your personal typed notes, stored in Amazon Web Services data centers in the United States. Individual users can set transcript auto-deletion windows ranging from 1 day to 1 year, while Enterprise administrators can mandate global retention schedules.

Zoom operates on an opposing model when recording features are turned on. Its Smart Recording capability requires saving full cloud video and audio recordings alongside text transcripts. This lets team members review video highlights and screen recordings after the call.

Data Privacy Standards and Model Training Defaults

Zoom states in its AI feature documentation that it does not use customer audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments, or other communications content to train Zoom's or third-party AI models.

Granola uses a tiered approach to model training. On Free Basic and Business plans, customer conversational data may be used in an anonymized format to train Granola's own models, though individual users can disable this setting at any time in their account preferences. On the Enterprise tier, customer model training is disabled by default across the entire workspace. Granola says it does not allow third parties such as OpenAI and Anthropic to train AI models on your data.

Regulatory compliance profiles also diverge. As outlined in the Granola HIPAA specifications, Granola supports HIPAA compliance and signs Business Associate Agreements exclusively for Enterprise customers paying $35 per seat monthly, and that agreement covers desktop software only. Zoom's AI note-taking page does not state SOC 2 or HIPAA terms for My Notes, so treat My Notes as uncovered for patient calls unless Zoom signs a BAA with you.

Workflow Automation and Ecosystem Connections

Zoom keeps its AI inside Zoom Workplace, where meeting summaries, smart compose, and call summaries are built in. ZoomMate is Zoom's paid agentic product on top of that.

Granola approaches integrations through an open knowledge ecosystem. On Business and Enterprise tiers, Granola syncs notes directly with Notion, HubSpot, Slack, Affinity, Attio, and Zapier for routing to other tools. For engineering and product teams, Granola provides direct REST API endpoints to extract structured summaries and raw text transcripts automatically.

The standout technical integration for Granola is its Model Context Protocol server. According to the Granola MCP technical manual, workspace members can connect meeting transcripts directly to external tools such as Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and Microsoft Copilot. This setup allows developers and researchers to reference live meeting decisions directly inside their coding environments and custom AI prompts.

The Verdict

Zoom's built-in AI is the practical choice for businesses that run on Zoom Workplace and want automated call recaps without administrative overhead or additional software line items. Zoom's AI costs nothing extra on paid plans. My Notes captures third-party calls without a bot, and Zoom does not train AI models on customer communications.

Granola is the superior tool for founders, product managers, sales reps, and knowledge workers who actively write notes and treat client conversations as raw thinking material. Its combination of structured user notes, cross-meeting chat, automated CRM sync, and Model Context Protocol connectivity gives you more ways to reuse past meetings than Zoom's summaries.

If your organization is currently on Zoom Workplace Pro or Business, start by using the native My Notes feature across your standard weekly meetings. Only adopt Granola if your operators demonstrate a recurring need to co-write with the transcript, run custom prompt recipes, or pipe meeting context directly into external tools like Claude and Notion.