Earshot vs Granola

The short answer

Pick Granola if you're on a Mac (or across several platforms), you love its typed-notes-plus-transcript workflow, and you're comfortable with your transcripts living in Granola's cloud. Pick Earshot if you're on Windows and you want your meetings to stay on your machine — or you want the code itself to be auditable, the AI to be swappable, and the bill to be smaller (or zero, self-hosted).

At a glance

	Earshot	Granola
Bot joins the call	Never	Never
Where recordings live	Your PC only	Audio deleted after transcription
Where transcripts & notes live	Your PC only	Granola's US-hosted cloud (AWS)
Open source	Yes — MIT, full app on GitHub	No
Self-host / bring your own AI keys	Yes, incl. fully local models	No
Trains its own AI on your data	No	Anonymized, on by default (opt-out)
Platforms	Windows 10/11	Mac, Windows, iOS, Android
Speaker attribution	Dual-channel (Me/Them physically separate)	Single mixed capture
Free tier	Full app, self-hosted, forever	30-day note history
Paid tier	US$9/mo or US$90/yr (Plus)	US$14/user/mo, monthly billing only

Details verified against both products' official pages in July 2026. Vendors change plans often — check Granola's pricing page for current figures.

Where Granola wins, honestly

• Cross-platform. Granola runs on Mac, Windows, iOS and Android, and captures in-person meetings from your phone. Earshot is Windows-only today (macOS is planned — it's the most-requested feature).
• The notes workflow. Granola's signature move — you type sparse notes during the call and it merges them with the transcript into something polished — is a genuinely lovely UX, with templates and team features around it.
• Team polish. A venture-backed team ships fast; if you want shared workspaces and company-wide rollout with SSO, Granola's Business and Enterprise tiers are built for that.

Where Earshot wins

• Your data stays on your machine — all of it. Granola deletes the audio, which is better than most, but your transcripts and notes still live in its US cloud, tied to an account. Earshot keeps the recording and the notes on your PC. There is no Earshot server copy; deleting a meeting deletes it from your disk.
• Open source. Earshot's entire desktop app is on GitHub under the MIT licence. For a tool that hears your most sensitive conversations, "read the code" beats "trust the policy." Granola is closed source.
• Bring your own AI — or none of anyone's. Self-hosted Earshot runs on your keys: local Whisper for transcription, a local model via Ollama for notes, and your meetings never leave the building. Granola's AI pipeline is fixed and cloud-side; it may also train its own models on anonymized data unless you opt out. Earshot never trains on your content.
• Cleaner speaker attribution. Earshot records your mic and the meeting audio as two separate channels, so "Me" vs "Them" is physical fact, not a model's guess.
• Price. Earshot Plus is US$9/month (or US$90/year — Granola has no annual option at US$14/month), and the self-hosted tier is genuinely free forever, not a 30-day window.

Which one should you pick?

If your meetings are ordinary work coordination and you value the slickest possible notes UX across Mac and iPhone, Granola is a fine choice and we won't pretend otherwise. If your meetings include things that shouldn't live in anyone else's cloud — client work, legal, health, HR, deals — or you simply believe a tool this personal should be inspectable and yours, that's exactly the gap Earshot was built to fill. Try it in an afternoon: download it free and self-host, or take the 7-day Plus trial with zero setup. See also how Earshot compares with Otter, Fireflies and Fathom, or the full comparison.