Quill vs. Granola: Privacy, Features, and Pricing Compared (2026)

If you've been looking at meeting note tools recently, Quill and Granola have probably both come up. They share some DNA — both record system audio directly from your device instead of joining calls as a bot, and both produce AI-powered summaries. No more "Recording Bot has joined the meeting" announcements.

But they're built on different foundations, and those differences matter depending on what you need. This post walks through where they overlap, where they diverge, and who each tool is best suited for.

The basics: what they have in common

Both tools capture meeting audio from your device, transcribe it, and generate AI-powered notes. Both support Google Calendar and Outlook. Both offer AI chat features that let you ask questions about your meetings. Both are SOC 2 Type 2 certified. And both have been shipping quickly — Granola recently closed a $125M Series C at a $1.5B valuation, and Quill launched Quilliam, its agentic AI, in early 2026.

If all you need is "record my meeting, give me a summary," both tools do that well. The interesting differences are underneath.

Where your data goes

This is the biggest architectural difference between the two tools, and it's worth understanding clearly.

Granola operates on a cloud model. During a meeting, your audio is streamed in real time to cloud transcription providers like Deepgram and AssemblyAI. The resulting transcripts and notes are stored on Granola's AWS servers, and AI features are powered by OpenAI and Anthropic. Granola's own help center describes the process plainly: "Granola passes audio directly from your microphone and system audio to our transcription provider." This is a well-secured cloud setup — their third-party AI providers are contractually prohibited from training on your data, regardless of your plan tier.

Quill uses a local-first architecture and gives users control over how their data is processed by AI.

Audio processing and transcription happen entirely on your device using local ML models — your audio never leaves your computer. Recordings are stored locally and you control how long they're kept, so you can refer back to the original audio whenever you need to. Quill can even transcribe meetings offline, with no internet connection at all.

For AI-powered features like note generation, the picture is a bit more nuanced. If you don't customize your LLM endpoint, when you use Quill's AI features, your meeting content is sent through Quill's LLM routing service to reach the AI provider. The content passes through Quill's infrastructure in transit but is not stored or logged; only billing metadata (token counts, costs) is persisted, never your actual meeting content. Think of it like a mail carrier who delivers a sealed envelope: they handle it briefly, but they don't open it or keep a copy.

If even that transit isn't acceptable for your use case, Quill offers a Bring Your Own LLM option. You can configure the app to connect directly to your own Azure, OpenAI, Google, or even self-hosted endpoints. In that configuration, meeting content goes straight from your device to your chosen provider. Quill's servers are never involved at all.

	Granola	Quill (default)	Quill (BYO-LLM)
Audio	Streamed to cloud providers (Deepgram, AssemblyAI)	Stays on your device; you control retention	Stays on your device; you control retention
Transcripts	Stored on Granola's AWS servers	Stored locally on your device	Stored locally on your device
AI processing	Granola's cloud	Transits Quill's router (not stored)	Direct to your LLM provider

What happens after the meeting

This is where the two tools diverge in capability.

Granola is a polished AI notepad. It captures what happened and helps you organize it. Their "Recipes" feature lets you save expert-written AI prompts — things like "extract objections from this sales call" or "coach me on how I showed up in this meeting" — and run them against your transcripts. They also offer a built-in People and Companies view that acts as a lightweight CRM, automatically tracking who you've met with and surfacing relevant context. It's well-designed and focused.

Quill takes a different approach with two distinct output formats: Live Minutes capture what happened chronologically in real time (useful when you need to know when something was said), and Post-Meeting Notes organize the same content by topic. Quill also supports Thread Notes, which connect a series of related meetings — your weekly 1:1s, your project standups — so you can see how a conversation evolved over weeks rather than reviewing each meeting in isolation.

And then there's Quilliam, Quill's agentic AI. Where Granola helps you capture and analyze meetings, Quilliam helps you act on them. It connects to your tools via MCP (Model Context Protocol) — Linear, Notion, Affinity, Obsidian, Airtable, and any other MCP-compatible server — and uses your meeting context to execute workflows. After a product meeting, it can create Linear tickets and update Notion docs. Before a client call, it can surface relevant history from past meetings. Over time, it learns your patterns and suggests automations based on how you actually work.

Sharing and access control

Granola makes sharing straightforward within their cloud platform. Notes can be organized into Team Folders, and sharing happens through Granola's built-in collaboration features.

Quill takes a different approach with published notes. When you share a note, it's encrypted on your device using AES-256-CBC before it's uploaded. The decryption key lives in the URL fragment — the part after the # — which browsers never send to the server. This means Quill can't read your shared notes even if someone wanted to. You also get granular visibility controls (anyone with the link, any Quill user, your organization only, or specific email addresses), a view log showing who accessed the note and when, and configurable expiration that permanently deletes the encrypted content from Quill's servers.

Privacy and compliance

For teams in regulated industries, a few specific differences are worth calling out.

HIPAA: Granola's documentation states they are "not currently HIPAA compliant" and that they "may pursue HIPAA compliance in the future" but can't share a timeline. Quill's local-first architecture means meeting content stays on your device by default, which can simplify compliance conversations — though organizations will still need to evaluate the full picture based on their specific requirements.

Model training: Granola's own model training uses anonymized data and is opted in by default for Basic and Business users. Any user can opt out in settings, and Enterprise organizations have it disabled by default. Their third-party providers (OpenAI, Anthropic) are contractually prohibited from training on user data at any tier. Quill does not train models on user data.

Data residency: Granola stores data on AWS in the United States. Quill stores meeting data locally on your device. With BYO-LLM, you choose exactly which AI provider and region processes your data.

Feature comparison

Feature	Quill	Granola
Bot-free recording	Yes	Yes
Real-time transcription	Yes	Yes
Offline transcription	Yes	No
AI chat with transcripts	Yes	Yes
Custom templates	Yes	Yes
Meeting search	Yes	Yes
Calendar support	Google + Outlook	Google + Outlook
Platforms	macOS, Windows, iOS (Android coming soon)	macOS, Windows, iOS
Speaker recognition	Yes, all platforms. Contacts recognized across meetings. Processed locally.	iOS only
Built-in people/company tracking	Yes (built-in + CRM integrations)	Yes (built-in + CRM integrations)
Agentic AI	Yes	No
MCP client	Yes (connects to any MCP server to expand post-meeting actions)	No
MCP server	Yes — 34 tools (18 read + 16 write), local server + native Claude extension, data stays on your machine	Yes — 5 tools
Webhooks	Yes	Via Zapier
SOC 2 Type 2	Yes	Yes

Pricing

Granola (pricing page):

• Basic: Free
• Business: $14/user/month
• Enterprise: $35/user/month

Quill:

• Free: Unlimited transcription
• Lite: $7.99/month
• Unlimited: $19.99/month
• Teams: $15/seat/month ($12/seat/month billed annually)

Who each tool serves best

Granola is a great fit if you want a clean, focused notepad experience for capturing and organizing meetings. It's especially strong in the VC and startup ecosystem where it has wide adoption, and its built-in People and Companies view is genuinely useful if you don't already have a CRM. Both tools have iOS apps for capturing in-person meetings on your phone. And with $192M in funding and rapid shipping, the product is evolving quickly.

Quill is a great fit if you need your meeting data to stay on your device, you want control over which AI providers process your content, or you're looking for meeting notes that drive action rather than just documentation. Thread Notes and Live Minutes address workflows that most meeting tools don't, and Quilliam's agentic capabilities are genuinely different from anything else in this category. If you're in a regulated industry — finance, healthcare, legal, defense — the local-first architecture and BYO-LLM option address compliance requirements that cloud-only tools can't.

Honest limitations

Granola: You can't control which AI models process your data or route to your own providers. Model training is opted in by default for non-Enterprise users (though you can turn it off). No offline transcription. Speaker diarization is iOS-only.

Quill: The desktop app has a larger footprint than browser-based tools because it runs local ML models, though it scales up or down depending on your hardware and works on most machines from 2019 onward. The most powerful privacy features (BYO-LLM, direct provider routing) require some technical setup. If you just want a quick three-sentence summary with zero configuration, the depth of templates and Quilliam's capabilities might be more than you need.

The bottom line

Granola is a well-designed AI notepad that helps you capture and organize what happened in your meetings. Quill is a local-first meeting intelligence platform that captures your meetings and helps you act on them. They're built on different assumptions about where data should live and what should happen after a meeting ends.

The right choice depends on which of those assumptions matches yours.

---

Ready to try Quill? Download it here