Assistly Projects vs Granola folders: an honest comparison (2026)
By The Assistly team ·
Folders are table stakes in meeting AI now — Granola, Otter, and Fireflies all let you group meetings, and Granola's version is one of the best. So if you're comparing Assistly Projects to Granola folders, the honest framing isn't "who has folders" — everyone does. It's what the grouping is for. Granola's folders organize a shared archive for a team. Assistly's projects give each client its own memory and put it to work while you're still on the call.
We compared the two products overall in Assistly vs Granola; this piece is just about the organizing layer.
At a glance
| Assistly Projects | Granola folders | |
|---|---|---|
| Calls sort themselves | Yes — filed from the calendar (attendees, domains, recurring series), with a one-tap switch notice | Mostly manual; folders are curated by people |
| Ask questions scoped to one client | Yes — answers and history search scope to the active project, with citations | Yes — folder-scoped chat across the notes in a folder |
| Helps during the call | Yes — mid-call lookups search the active client's calls first and cite them | No — folders and chat are post-call tools |
| Shared with your team | No — projects are per-user today | Yes — shared folders keep a team's notes in one place |
| Containment between clients | Yes — one project's answers never draw on another's calls, and wider searches say so | Folders organize; chat can also run across your whole workspace |
| Default when you do nothing | General — feature invisible until your first project | Unfiled notes list |
| Where it lives | Native macOS & Windows desktop app | macOS, Windows, iOS |
Both products move quickly; details here are as shipped in mid-2026.
What Granola folders do well
Credit where it's due, because it's real. Shared folders are Granola's strongest card: point a folder at your team, and everyone's notes for an account or a project land in one place other people can actually read. For a sales team or an agency pod that wants a collective record, that's a genuine capability Assistly doesn't have — projects are per-user today, and if a shared team archive is the job, Granola is the better tool for it.
Folder-scoped chat is also good. Ask questions across just the notes in a folder and you get answers grounded in that slice of the archive. And Granola's core write-up quality — rough notes plus transcript in, polished notes out — remains arguably best in class.
Where folders stop
Folders have a shape, and the shape has limits:
- Someone has to do the filing. Folders are containers you (or a teammate) put meetings into. The discipline holds for a week and then the unfiled list grows. Grouping that depends on human tidiness degrades exactly when you're busiest — which is when you need it.
- They organize the past, not the present. A folder helps you after the call: read the notes, chat with the archive. During the call — when the client asks what you'd agreed in March — the folder is somewhere else, and so is the answer.
- They're a view, not a boundary. Folders group notes; they don't promise that an answer about client A was built only from client A's meetings. If your work carries confidentiality lines between clients, "organized" and "contained" are different requirements.
How Assistly Projects are different
- The calendar does the filing. You tell a project who belongs to it once — its meeting, its people, its company domain, tapped in from your recent calls. When a call starts and the calendar says it belongs to a different project, one dismissable notice offers a one-tap switch. The organized archive is a byproduct, not a chore.
- The memory works live, in the call. One project is active at a time, and mid-call Assistly's history lookups search that client's calls first — with citations — so the guidance in your overlay draws on what this client said. That only makes sense in a product that helps during the call at all, which is the category difference between the two tools.
- Containment is a hard rule. One project's answers never draw on another project's calls. Ask something the project can't answer and Assistly says so; if it ever searches wider, the response tells you. For consultants and agencies with real confidentiality lines between clients, that's the feature.
- Nothing to adopt on day one. Everything lives in General until you create your first project; the feature is invisible until then. No taxonomy to design, no backlog to sort.
Which should you choose?
If the job is a team's shared record — several people's notes on the same accounts, readable by everyone — Granola's shared folders do something Assistly simply doesn't, and it's an excellent notepad besides. If the job is your own client work — calls that sort themselves, a per-client memory you can question before and during the call, and a guarantee that nothing leaks between clients — that's what Projects were built for, on a desktop app that's helping you while the meeting is still happening.
It's free to try — 3 sessions a month with the full feature set. Get started for free, or read the Projects launch post for the full tour.