Minute vs Granola
A Granola alternative that runs entirely on your Mac
Granola and Minute both take meeting notes without a bot in the call. The difference is where the AI runs. Granola uses cloud providers to write the transcript and the summary. Minute is a free, open-source Granola AI alternative that does both on your Mac, offline.
Version 1.13.0 · Mac only, macOS 11 or later · Signed and notarized by Apple
Minute and Granola, side by side
| Feature | Minute | Granola |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free and open source, MIT license | Basic is $0 with 30 days of meeting history. Business is $14 per user per month. Enterprise is $35. |
| Bot in the call | No. Minute records your Mac's audio. | No. Granola captures your device's audio. |
| Transcription | Whisper, on your Mac | In the cloud, by providers such as Deepgram and Assembly |
| Summaries | A local language model, on your Mac | In the cloud, by AI providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic |
| Where notes live | Plain files in a folder on your Mac | A US-hosted AWS VPC |
| Offline | Records, transcribes, and summarizes after a one-time model download | You can view stored notes. Transcription and summaries need the cloud. |
| Audio | Stays on your Mac. By default, Minute deletes it 30 days after transcription. | Granola deletes it after transcription |
| Devices | Mac only | Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and Apple Watch |
Checked on 10 November 2026 against granola.ai/pricing and granola.ai/security. Minute facts come from its README.
What an offline Granola alternative changes
In Minute, the speech model and the language model run inside the app. The audio, the transcript, and the summary stay in a folder on your Mac. Turn off Wi-Fi and Minute still records, transcribes, and writes the summary.
Minute has no account and no analytics. It goes online only to download a model, to list models, and to check for an update, and you can switch off the update check. The code is open, so you can check all of this yourself.
What you get
Whisper transcribes as people talk, in 99 languages. When the call ends, a local model writes the summary, the decisions, and the action items. Ask answers questions about a meeting, and each answer links to the moment it was said. Minute labels speakers, can remember the voices you name, and saves each note to Obsidian or as Markdown.
Turn on meeting detection and Minute offers to record when a call starts in Zoom, Teams, Webex, Slack, FaceTime, Discord, or a browser, Google Meet included.
When Granola is the better choice
Minute is not the right Granola AI alternative for everyone. Granola fits better in two cases.
You take notes on more than a Mac.
Granola has apps for Windows, iOS, Android, and Apple Watch. Minute runs only on macOS 11 or later.
You do not want to run the models yourself.
Granola does transcription and summaries in the cloud. Minute downloads its models once, and Whisper small with Qwen3.5-4B takes about 3.2 GB. The smaller models need 8 GB of memory. Apple silicon is the tested target. The Intel build is not yet tested on real Intel hardware, and the large Whisper models need Apple silicon.
Keep your meetings on your Mac.
Minute is the free, offline AI note taker for macOS.
Version 1.13.0 · Signed and notarized by Apple · macOS 11 or later
See everything Minute does