Granola or Read AI for team meetings: bot-free capture or a joining agent?

Start with what your team will accept in the call

Choose Granola if participants should not see a bot and each person owns their notes. Choose Read AI if you want a shared archive that spans meetings, email and CRM, and your team accepts a visible agent. Both produce transcripts, summaries and action items, so the real split is how capture happens and who controls what is stored.

The privacy defaults point the same way. Read AI says model improvement stays off unless you opt in. Granola says it trains on anonymized data and gives each user a setting to opt out, with training off by default only for Enterprise users. If your legal team cares about that default, it can settle the choice before any feature does.

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Capture: your computer's audio or an agent in the call

Granola starts only when you start it. It reads your microphone and your computer's meeting audio, so Zoom, Meet and Teams all work without an extra participant, and the mobile app handles in-person meetings. The vendor says it stores no audio: transcription is live on macOS and Windows, or from temporarily cached audio on mobile, and only the transcript and your notes are kept.

Zapier's case study shows why this matters. Its design team had tried tools that joined as external participants and found them intrusive. With Granola, a desktop notification opens Zoom and the notepad together, and participants receive an automated notice and consent before capture proceeds. Vanta describes a similar recording notice, switched on after it moved to Enterprise.

Read AI works the other way. Its privacy page says the agent announces itself at the start and needs host approval, and a participant who opts out has that meeting's data deleted immediately and permanently. The homepage lists Windows, macOS, Android, iPhone and Chrome apps and says attendance is optional because the agent summarizes the meeting. The Free plan caps meetings at one hour and five a month.

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Sharing and search: private notes or a shared archive

Granola notes are private until you share them, and shared folders exist even on the free Basic plan. Brex shows the pattern: summaries post automatically to Slack channels, shared folders hold past meetings, and chat can query a folder. Brex began with a Business trial and went live on Enterprise within weeks. Vanta's SVP of Post Sales saved 12 roundtables in one folder and asked chat for the top customer success themes.

Mind the plan limits. On Basic, meeting history is 30 days and cross-meeting chat uses automatic model selection only; Business and Enterprise give unlimited history.

Read AI is built around the shared archive. Candlefish, a company that acquires and operates established businesses, gives new hires access to shared folders of past meetings and relies on enterprise search instead of repeated onboarding sessions. SmartPM's customer success team searches an account's meetings, Gmail threads and HubSpot activity with Ask Read, and keeps prompt templates for each meeting type. Candlefish reports 40% faster onboarding and SmartPM reports 70% less post-meeting admin. These are vendor-published figures from different teams with different metrics, so they are not a benchmark.

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Integrations and plans

Granola's Business plan, $14 per user per month, adds Notion, Zapier, HubSpot, Attio, Affinity, API and MCP access. Salesforce sits in Enterprise at $35, alongside SSO and admin controls. The homepage presents an MCP connector so AI apps can use your meeting notes.

Read AI's Pro plan, $15 per user per month billed annually, carries Notion, Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, Confluence, Zapier and webhooks. Enterprise+ at $29.75 requires five or more licenses and adds HIPAA, SAML and SCIM, domain capture and a custom retention policy. Read AI is also offered as a Claude connector, ChatGPT app and MCP server.

In practice, a sales team that needs Salesforce on a small budget reaches it sooner with Read AI, while a team that lives in Notion, Attio or Affinity gets those on Granola Business. Editorial suggestion, not a vendor feature: pilot both on one recurring customer meeting for two weeks and check where the action items land.

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Privacy details beyond the training default

Granola stores transcripts in a US-hosted AWS environment, encrypted at rest and in transit, and describes a SOC 2 Type 2 audit. A DPA is available on request. Retention and auto-deletion are per user, with a workspace-wide admin policy on Enterprise.

Read AI describes AES-256 encryption, an annual SOC 2 Type II audit, a HIPAA BAA on request, and a DPA with standard contractual clauses. Its trust center lists AWS in the United States, with EU and Canada on request. A custom retention policy requires Enterprise+.

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Limits of this comparison

Customer lists are not a quality test. Brex, Vanta and Zapier are CONFIRMED through case studies, all describing Enterprise rollouts, with figures the vendor and customers published. Read AI's named customers are OBSERVED on its own pages, and no company appears on both lists. Read AI's privacy page gives no retention period, and the trust center's retention answer could not be read, so ask about it directly if retention is a requirement.

Granola's organization-wide notice that it is in use is marked as a pilot on the pricing page and is admin-enforceable only on Enterprise; on other plans it is set per user.

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