I switched from Granola to Transcripted — honest review

Why I was paying for Granola

Let me be clear up front: Granola is not a bad product. I used it for nearly a year. The transcription quality was solid, the UI was polished, and I liked having meeting notes generated automatically. For a while, the $18/month felt worth it.

My workflow was simple. Record meetings with Granola, let it generate notes, then sync those notes into my Obsidian vault where I keep everything else. Meetings became part of my second brain. It worked.

Then three things happened in quick succession, and each one eroded a little more of the trust I had in the product.

The three things that made me switch

1. The cloud processing question. I was in a compensation review meeting with my co-founder. Midway through, I realized: this entire conversation — names, numbers, equity splits — was being sent to Granola's servers for processing. I'd known this intellectually, but in that moment it hit differently. These aren't meeting notes. They're the most sensitive conversations in my professional life.

2. The $18/month that kept compounding. I started doing the math. $18/month is $216/year. Over the time I'd been using it, I'd spent over $150 on meeting transcription — a task my M2 MacBook Pro could handle locally. The Neural Engine in Apple Silicon exists specifically for workloads like this. Why was I paying a cloud service to do what my laptop could do on its own?

3. The Obsidian sync removal. This was the final straw. Granola removed their local Obsidian sync and replaced it with a cloud MCP server. My workflow — record → sync to Obsidian → done — was broken. The replacement required my meeting data to flow through Granola's infrastructure to reach my own tools. That's not a sync. That's a dependency.

Finding Transcripted

I found Transcripted on GitHub while searching for local alternatives. First impression: this is an open source macOS app that records meetings using your system audio and mic, transcribes everything locally using Apple's Neural Engine, and saves clean markdown files to a folder on your Mac. No account. No cloud. No subscription.

I was skeptical. Free and local usually means janky. But I installed it and recorded my next standup.

What surprised me

The voice learning. This is the feature I didn't expect. Transcripted uses WeSpeaker embeddings to build voice profiles for each speaker. The first meeting, it labeled speakers as "Speaker 1" and "Speaker 2." By the third meeting, it had learned who was who. Now, weeks later, it correctly identifies my co-founder, my designer, and my lead engineer across every meeting — without me ever manually labeling anyone.

Granola doesn't do this. It identifies speakers per-meeting, but it doesn't learn voices over time. Transcripted's persistent speaker identity means I can search "what did Sarah say about the API redesign" and get results across months of meetings. That's a fundamentally different capability.

The file-based approach. Every meeting becomes a markdown file in ~/Documents/Transcripted/. I pointed my Obsidian vault at the folder and was done. No plugin. No sync service. No API. Just files. This is how software should work.

The speed. Transcripted processes audio on the Neural Engine. A 30-minute meeting transcribes in about 2 minutes on my M2. It's faster than waiting for a cloud API response, and it works without internet.

The price. $0. MIT licensed. No paid tier planned. The economics make sense — it runs on hardware you already own, so there's no server cost to recoup.

The honest downsides

I'm not going to pretend Transcripted is perfect. Here's where Granola still wins:

No built-in AI summaries. Granola generates meeting summaries, action items, and follow-up drafts automatically. Transcripted gives you the transcript. You can point Claude or ChatGPT at the file to get summaries, but it's an extra step.

Mac only. If you're on Windows or Linux, Transcripted doesn't exist for you yet. Granola has broader platform support.

No web app. There's no cloud dashboard, no shared workspace, no team features. It's a local app that produces local files. If you need collaborative meeting review, Granola is better for that today.

Less polished UI. Granola has a consumer-grade interface designed by a well-funded team. Transcripted is functional and clean, but it's an open source project — the focus is on the engine, not the chrome.

Who should switch vs. who should stay

Switch to Transcripted if: You care about privacy. You use Obsidian or any file-based knowledge system. You're tired of paying $18/month for transcription. You want your AI agents to have direct access to your meeting data without a cloud intermediary. You're on a Mac with Apple Silicon.

Stay on Granola if: You need built-in AI summaries and action items today. You work on a team that needs shared meeting notes in a web app. You're not on macOS. You value polish over privacy.

For me, the switch was worth it. I got my data back, my Obsidian workflow back, and $216/year back. The voice learning feature alone is something Granola doesn't offer. And knowing that my compensation discussions, client strategy sessions, and product roadmap meetings never leave my Mac — that's not a feature I'm willing to give up.