Assistly vs Granola: an honest comparison (2026)
By The Assistly team ·
Granola has some of the strongest word of mouth in meeting AI, and it earned it: a quiet notepad that captures your call's audio (no bot joins), lets you jot rough notes during the meeting, and then turns them into polished notes afterward. If you're comparing it to Assistly, the honest starting point is that they answer different questions. Granola answers "what happened in that meeting?" Assistly answers "what do I say right now?"
At a glance
| Assistly | Granola | |
|---|---|---|
| Live answers while the question is still being asked | Yes — auto-assist, hands-free | No — notes are written up after the call |
| No bot joins the call | Yes — works from your computer's audio | Yes — same bot-free approach |
| Guidance for sales calls, meetings & interviews | Yes — talking points, objection handling, structured answers | No — it's a notepad, not a copilot |
| Notes & action items after the session | Yes — automatic summary | Yes — its core job, and it's excellent at it |
| Multi-speaker context (who said what) | Yes | Transcript-based notes |
| Works with headphones on | Yes — captures the call's own audio | Yes |
| Visible in screen shares | No — excluded from screen capture at the OS level | Ordinary app window (it isn't trying to hide) |
| Tuned to you | Personas built from your CV, docs & notes | Note templates per meeting type |
| Price | $14.99/mo, or $9/mo billed annually | ~$18/mo for individuals after the free trial |
| Free plan | 3 full sessions/month, 15 min each | Trial (~25 meetings), then paid |
| Platforms | Native macOS & Windows | macOS, Windows (newer), iOS |
Pricing for both moves around; check each site for current numbers. Granola's figures here are as listed in mid-2026.
What Granola does well
A lot. The no-bot approach means it works with any call app and adds nothing to the participant list — the same architectural choice Assistly made, and it matters just as much for a notepad as for a copilot. The "your rough notes + the transcript = polished notes" flow is genuinely clever: you stay engaged in the meeting, type three messy bullets, and get a clean, structured write-up that reads like you took great notes. Templates per meeting type, chat across your past meetings, and a design people actually enjoy using. As a record of what happened, it's arguably the best in class.
Where it stops
Granola's value arrives after the call ends — and that's by design, not a flaw. During the meeting itself it's a text box. When a client asks the pricing question you weren't ready for, when a candidate interview goes deep on system design, when a prospect raises the competitor you haven't researched — Granola will faithfully record that the moment went badly. It won't help you in it.
There's also no concept of you in the notes. Granola summarizes the meeting; it doesn't know your CV, your product's objection handling, or how you'd phrase an answer — so it can't put words in front of you even in principle.
How Assistly is different
- Help during, not after. The moment a question lands, talking points and structured guidance appear in an overlay only you can see — no hotkey, no prompt, no break in eye contact. That's the category difference: a live meeting assistant, not a notetaker.
- The recap is included anyway. Every Assistly session ends with an organized summary, decisions, and action items — so choosing live help doesn't mean giving up the write-up.
- It knows who's talking. Assistly separates your voice from every other participant and keeps speaker-level context, so guidance addresses the right person on a busy call.
- It sounds like you. Build a persona from your CV, docs, and notes, and switch modes for a sales call, a client review, or an interview round — answers grounded in your material, not generic output.
- Private overlay. The overlay is excluded from screen capture at the OS level, so it never shows in a share or recording. Granola isn't trying to be discreet mid-call — a notepad doesn't need to be. A copilot does.
Which should you choose?
If your only problem is remembering meetings, Granola is a lovely product and you should be happy with it. If your problem is the meeting itself — the question you didn't see coming, the objection you fumbled, the interview moment where structure deserted you — a notepad can't reach that, and Assistly is built exactly for it, with the notes and action items included at the end.
It's free to try — 3 sessions a month with the full feature set. Get started for free, or see how it compares to a bot-based notetaker in Assistly vs Fathom.