Granola Alternatives, Now That It's on Your Apple Watch

For a lot of people, yes. It landed on 28 July 2026 and it costs $0. It starts from a watch face complication and flashes green with a sound, so you know it caught the first sentence. If your whole problem was "I can't open a laptop in that room," go install it and stop reading.

On the watch itself we are close to identical. One tap from a complication to start, one tap to stop. Neither runs by itself. The result shows up on your phone. Their line about the best wearable being the one you already own is right, and it applies to both of us.

So the wrist isn't the split. Neither is the room you're standing in, because they cover in person now too: walking meetings, conferences, coffee. What differs is what you want out of the pile. A stack of good separate records? Or something reading across the stack and bringing you what it found there?

With Granola the note lands when the meeting ends. For a calendar full of thirty-minute calls that isn't a compromise, it's the correct design.

Now you're ninety minutes into a Tuesday afternoon that was supposed to be thirty. You want to know whether the part that mattered got captured. The only way to find out is to end the thing.

Pastok processes while the session runs. The transcript lands first and the summary builds behind it, a few minutes back from where you are. It isn't live and we won't call it live. But you can glance at your phone mid-conversation instead of ending a conversation to check on it.

Two more follow from that. To-dos surface on their own, with a reminder attached to the situation. You don't have to remember to go and look. And a Skill is a standing instruction you write once. It fires when Pastok detects a kind of situation: this sort of conversation, that sort of output, every time.

Granola remembers well. Its chat reads across meetings. Before an external call it writes you a brief covering who's coming and what you discussed last time. That one gets pushed at you rather than waiting to be asked.

Look at the shape of it, though. The brief is about the meeting and the person on the other side, and a calendar entry is what sets it off. The part that reads across your whole history is the chat, and the chat waits for you to think of the question first.

Ours is of you. Pastok holds a picture of what you keep returning to. That picture shapes what gets generated each day, not only what comes back when you ask. It already knows what you care about, so what arrives leads with that. A Skill can push it further. It reads across months on a schedule you set, handing you a pattern you hadn't thought to go looking for.

Granola's free plan lists "opt out of model training any time" as a feature. Opting out is available, which means training runs until you go and switch it off. Doing that for a whole team rather than one account sits on the $35 tier.

We don't use your recordings or transcripts to train AI models. Not by default, not behind a setting, not at all.

That's one difference in defaults and it isn't a legal position. Both products record humans and both sit under the same consent laws wherever you are. Defaults just happen to be what most people live with.

Three complaints push people out of Granola. We don't fix any of them. Keeping everything on your own machine, putting names on the speakers, covering every platform. On price we're worse too. If you're behind one of these, nothing above changes it.

"I'm not happy with my transcripts going out of my machine." That's the loudest one, and we're the same answer they are. Audio goes to servers in the US, and everything gets built from the transcript there. Encrypted in transit and at rest, raw audio deleted after processing, within seven days by default. A decent cloud posture is still a cloud posture. The people who actually solve this run Whisper locally with a local model behind it. Meetily is open source if you want somewhere to start.

Summaries that erase who said what. We separate speakers. But the labels come out as anonymous IDs, not names. And we won't promise the attribution is always right.

You're not on an iPhone. Granola runs on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android. We're iPhone and Apple Watch, no desktop app. That also means we can't take audio from a call happening on your computer. On coverage we're worse, not better.

Price, too. They're $0 with limited history, or $14 per user per month for unlimited notes. We start at $19.90 a month, $14.90 if you pay yearly, and that buys 50 hours of processing rather than unlimited. There's a 14-day trial and it doesn't ask for a card.

What's left is narrow and real. Your meeting notes are fine, and ours would be too. What's missing is anything that reads across them unasked.