an honest comparison
Both capture your calls without a bot, straight from your Mac's audio, and label speakers Me and Them. What happens next is where they part ways: notes are for you to read — memory is for your agents to use.
you want beautiful, human-readable summaries with templates, follow-up emails, sharing, and team features. Granola is excellent at its job, and its job is notes.
you live in Claude Code (or any MCP agent) and want your meetings to become memory your agents actually use — verbatim local Markdown, searchable by meaning, recalled unprompted while agents work.
| Granola | contorch | |
|---|---|---|
| Bot joins your call | No — captures locally | No — captures locally |
| Speaker labels | Me / Them by default | Me / Them |
| The output | Polished notes and summaries, written for humans | Verbatim transcripts + a memory layer for agents — plain Markdown on your disk |
| Transcription | Cloud ASR (Deepgram / AssemblyAI per Granola's security docs); audio not stored | Local capture; transcription via Gemini (audio sent transiently, then deleted) — disclosed plainly |
| Where your data lives | Granola's cloud | Your disk — ~/transcripts Markdown + a local index |
| Your agents can use it | No agent interface | Any MCP agent — Claude Code, Codex, anything |
| Beyond meetings | Meetings only | Notes, docs, tasks, and lessons agents save — one memory layer |
| Open source | No | Apache-2.0 — read every line that can hear you |
| Price | Subscription | Free |
Granola's pipeline ends when a human reads the notes. contorch's ends when an agent acts on the memory — days later, unprompted, possibly on another machine. When you told a client "it ships tonight, behind a flag," Granola gives you a tidy summary containing that promise. contorch makes sure the agent deploying that fix next week already knows, quotes your words back, and ships it behind the flag.
If your work doesn't involve coding agents, Granola is probably the better product for you today — genuinely. If it does, notes that only humans can read are a dead end for the most useful thing your meetings produce: context.
Free, Apache-2.0, local-first. One command installs the whole layer.
$ curl -fsSL contorch.com/install | bash