Oatmeal vs Granola
Disclosure: We built Oatmeal. We're biased. This page explains the genuine differences and tells you honestly where Granola is the better choice.
Oatmeal is launching very soon. The app is built and we're currently waiting on App Store approval. If you want to be notified when it's available, join the waitlist.
Different tools, different philosophies
Granola is a productivity tool. It captures meetings and helps you act on them — summaries, action items, templates, CRM integrations. It's well-funded ($67M raised, $250M valuation as of May 2025), growing 10% week-over-week, and used heavily in VC and founder circles. If you need a meeting assistant that plugs into your team's workflow, Granola is excellent.
Oatmeal is a memory tool. It captures meetings too, but the goal is different: build a searchable, interconnected record of everything discussed across every meeting. Entities, relationships, decisions, context — queryable weeks later.
Granola captures meetings. Oatmeal remembers everything.
That's a philosophical difference, not a quality judgment. The right choice depends on what problem you're solving.
Where Granola is better
Let's get this out of the way first. If any of these matter to you, Granola is probably the better choice today:
- Team collaboration. Granola has shared folders, team workspaces, and collaborative note editing. Oatmeal is single-user. If your team needs a shared meeting knowledge base with permissions and roles, Granola handles that. Oatmeal doesn't.
- Integrations (for now). Granola connects to Slack, Notion, HubSpot, Salesforce, Zapier, and more. Oatmeal doesn't have integrations yet, but they're on the roadmap.
- Mobile. Granola has an iPhone app. Oatmeal runs on macOS only — Apple Silicon Macs specifically.
- Templates. Granola has pre-built templates for different meeting types (customer discovery, 1-on-1s, interviews). Oatmeal doesn't have templates yet.
Where Oatmeal is different
Privacy: 100% local processing
This is the fundamental architectural difference.
Granola captures your transcript locally (no bot in the call), but sends it to cloud AI (OpenAI or Anthropic) for summarization and enhancement. Your meeting content passes through third-party servers. Granola states they don't allow these providers to train on your data, and they're SOC 2 compliant — but the data does leave your machine.
Oatmeal processes everything on-device. Speech-to-text runs via Parakeet TDT 0.6B, a 600M-parameter model that achieves 6.05% word error rate — the best-in-class among open models on the Open ASR Leaderboard. It runs locally through MLX on Apple Silicon and can transcribe an hour of audio in about one second. LLM tasks (summaries, entity extraction, chat) use Qwen3-4B quantized to 4-bit, also running locally via MLX-Swift — no network calls, no cloud. Your audio and transcripts never leave your Mac.
For some people this doesn't matter — they're fine with cloud processing, and Granola's privacy practices are reasonable. For others — lawyers, therapists, executives discussing M&A, anyone under NDA — local-only is a hard requirement. If that's you, Oatmeal is one of very few options that's genuinely local.
Memory layer: cross-meeting intelligence
This is what "memory-native" means. Most meeting tools treat each meeting as an isolated document. Oatmeal connects them.
After each meeting, Oatmeal's entity extraction pipeline identifies people, companies, projects, and topics mentioned. It resolves "John" in Tuesday's standup to the same "John Smith" from last month's kickoff. It tracks relationships — who works with whom, which projects are connected, what decisions were made where.
The result: you can press ⌘K and ask "What has Sarah said about the API migration?" and get an answer synthesized from every meeting where that topic came up, with source citations pointing to specific meetings.
Granola has an AI chat feature that searches across meetings, but it doesn't build a persistent knowledge graph. Oatmeal's entity pages show you every mention of a person, every decision involving a project, every action item assigned to a teammate — across your entire meeting history.
Audio recording with synced playback
Granola captures text transcripts but does not record audio or video. If the transcript gets a word wrong, you can't go back and listen.
Oatmeal records both microphone and system audio (your voice and theirs, separately). The playback bar syncs with the transcript — click any word to jump to that moment in the recording. This matters for meetings where exact wording matters: legal discussions, customer interviews, negotiations.
Works with any audio source
Granola works with meeting platforms — Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Webex. It needs a meeting to capture.
Oatmeal captures any audio playing on your Mac. It also imports existing content: audio files, video files, VTT/SRT subtitle files, YouTube transcripts. If you have a library of recorded interviews, podcast episodes, or lecture recordings, you can import them all and they become part of your searchable memory.
Hybrid search
Oatmeal uses both full-text search (SQLite FTS5) and semantic vector search (local embeddings with vDSP-accelerated cosine similarity). Search for "budget concerns" and you'll find meetings that discussed "cost worries" or "spending limits" even if those exact words weren't used.
System-wide dictation
Beyond meetings, Oatmeal includes OatFlow — a system-wide voice dictation tool. Press Fn+Fn anywhere on your Mac to dictate, with optional LLM refinement that cleans up filler words and formats your text. This has nothing to do with meetings; it's a general-purpose dictation tool that ships with the app.
Cost
Granola's free tier gives you 25 meetings — total, not per month. After that, the Business plan is $14/user/month ($168/year). Enterprise is $35/user/month ($420/year). A solo user on Business pays more in 6 months than Oatmeal costs once.
Oatmeal is $79 once. No subscription, no per-seat pricing, no usage limits. All processing runs on your hardware, so there's no ongoing cloud cost to pass through. Over 3 years, that's $79 vs $504–$1,260 for Granola.
Side-by-side comparison
| Oatmeal | Granola | |
|---|---|---|
| Processing | 100% local (MLX on Apple Silicon) | Local capture, cloud AI enhancement |
| Audio recording | Full audio with synced playback | No audio recording |
| Cross-meeting memory | Entity extraction, knowledge graph, ⌘K queries | AI search across meetings |
| Search | Hybrid (full-text + semantic vectors) | AI-powered search |
| Import | Audio, video, VTT/SRT/TXT, YouTube | Meeting-platform only |
| Dictation | System-wide (OatFlow) | Not available |
| Open source | Yes | No |
| Team collaboration | Single-user only | Shared folders, team workspaces |
| Integrations | Coming soon (Slack, Notion planned) | Slack, Notion, HubSpot, Zapier, CRM |
| Mobile | macOS only (Apple Silicon) | Mac, Windows, iPhone |
| Templates | Not yet | Built-in meeting templates |
| Price | $79 once | Free (25 meetings), then $14–35/mo |
Who should use Granola
Granola is the right tool if you:
- Work on a team that needs shared meeting notes
- Need integrations with Slack, Notion, or your CRM
- Want meeting templates for structured output
- Need cross-platform (Windows, iPhone)
- Are comfortable with cloud AI processing your transcripts
Who should use Oatmeal
Oatmeal is the right tool if you:
- Need absolute privacy — meeting data must never leave your machine
- Want to build a long-term memory of everything discussed across all meetings
- Need audio recording with the ability to go back and listen to specific moments
- Import content beyond live meetings — recordings, podcasts, interviews, lectures
- Prefer paying once instead of a monthly subscription
- Want to inspect, modify, or extend the tool (open source)
- Use a Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or later)
Availability
Granola is available now on Mac, Windows, and iPhone. You can download it from granola.ai.
Oatmeal is launching very soon — the app is complete and currently pending App Store review. It requires a Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or later) running macOS 14.2+. Sign up at oatmealapp.com to get notified when it's live.
Continuously improving
I use Oatmeal every day. It's my own meeting tool, and I hold it to my own standard. That means it will keep getting better — not on a corporate roadmap timeline, but because I personally depend on it.
Oatmeal is built to always use the best available local models. When a better speech-to-text model drops — and they keep getting better — Oatmeal upgrades to it. The current STT model, Parakeet TDT 0.6B, was the best open model on the ASR leaderboard when we adopted it. When something beats it, we'll switch. Same for the LLM — Qwen3-4B is excellent today, but local models are improving rapidly. Oatmeal will always run the state-of-the-art for on-device AI.
You buy Oatmeal once. The models get better. The app gets better. No extra charge.
What's on the roadmap
- Speaker identification — Telling apart different speakers beyond "you" vs "them." In progress.
- Meeting templates — Structured output for different meeting types.
- Export — Markdown, PDF, and more export options.
- Integrations — Slack, Notion, and other integrations are on the roadmap.
- Team features — No current plans. Oatmeal is single-user by design. Multi-user would require cloud infrastructure, which conflicts with the local-first architecture.
We'd rather be honest about what we don't do than pretend we're something we're not. Oatmeal is a focused tool for people who care about privacy and long-term memory. If that's not your priority, there are good alternatives — including Granola.
This page was last updated in February 2026. Granola's features and pricing may have changed since then. If you spot an inaccuracy, let us know.