Transcripted vs Granola
Granola charges $18/month and processes your meetings in the cloud. Transcripted is free, open source, and runs 100% on your Mac. Here's how they compare.
Download Transcripted — FreeAt a glance
| Transcripted | Granola | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free forever | $18/month |
| Processing | 100% local | Cloud |
| Audio sent to servers | Never | Yes |
| No meeting bot | ✓ | ✓ |
| Speaker identification | ✓ Persistent | Limited |
| Learns voices over time | ✓ | ✗ |
| Obsidian / local sync | ✓ Native files | ✗ Removed |
| Agent-ready output | ✓ Files on disk | Cloud MCP only |
| Works offline | ✓ | ✗ |
| Open source | ✓ MIT | ✗ |
Why local processing matters
Granola is a good product. But its core architecture — cloud processing — creates a trust dependency you can't opt out of. Every meeting you record, every conversation you have, goes through Granola's servers. That includes sensitive discussions: compensation reviews, client strategy, product roadmaps, hiring decisions.
With Transcripted, audio is processed on your Mac using Apple's Neural Engine. The files Transcripted creates live in ~/Documents/Transcripted/. They never touch a server. You can read them, move them, delete them, sync them wherever you want — and no one else can.
That's not a feature. It's an architectural guarantee.
The Obsidian situation
In early 2026, Granola removed their Obsidian local sync integration. Users who had been routing their meeting notes into their local Obsidian vault suddenly lost that workflow. Granola's replacement is a cloud MCP server — your agent can query your meetings, but the data flows through Granola's infrastructure to get there.
Transcripted's approach is simpler. Your meetings are markdown files on your Mac. Point Obsidian at the folder. Point Claude Desktop at the folder. Point any agent at the folder. The files are plain text — readable by anything, owned by you, forever.
The cost math
Granola is $18/month — $216/year. Over three years that's $648 for meeting transcription. Transcripted is $0. It's MIT licensed, which means it's free to use, free to modify, and free to ship to your whole team. There's no paid tier being planned.
The reason it can be free: it runs on hardware you already own. The M-series Neural Engine handles the transcription pipeline faster than a cloud API and costs nothing per request.
Where Granola is better
To be honest: Granola has AI summaries. Transcripted doesn't yet. If you need automatic meeting summaries, action items, and follow-up drafts inside the app, Granola does that today.
Granola also has a polished, consumer-facing UI and a more established product. If you're not technical and want everything in one place without thinking about files, Granola works.
But if you care about privacy, if you're using AI agents that need context about your meetings, if you use Obsidian, or if $18/month for transcription feels wrong — Transcripted is the answer.
Frequently asked questions
Can Transcripted replace Granola completely?
For transcription and speaker identification — yes. For in-app AI summaries and action items — not yet. Those are on the roadmap. If you primarily use Granola for its transcription accuracy and speaker labeling, Transcripted is a direct replacement at $0.
What happened to Granola's Obsidian integration?
Granola removed local Obsidian sync in early 2026, replacing it with a cloud MCP server. This means meeting data routes through Granola's servers to reach your agent. Transcripted stores everything as local markdown files — point Obsidian directly at ~/Documents/Transcripted/ with no intermediary.
Does Transcripted have AI summaries like Granola?
Not yet. Transcripted generates speaker-labeled transcripts with timestamps. AI summaries are planned. In the meantime, you can point any LLM (Claude, ChatGPT, local models) at the transcript files to generate summaries yourself.
How accurate is Transcripted vs Granola?
Transcripted uses Parakeet TDT V3 from NVIDIA — one of the highest-accuracy English STT models available. Granola uses cloud AI (likely Whisper-based). Both are good. Parakeet benchmarks are competitive with or better than Whisper on English speech.
Try the local alternative
Free forever. No account. No cloud. Works on M1 through M5.