Riff and Granola

Granola is a meeting notepad for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android. You type notes during a call, and afterward Granola writes the full notes around them from the transcript. Riff works the same way for meetings, transcribes speech on your Mac instead of in the cloud, needs no account, and also dictates into any app.

Facts about Granola are as of September 28, 2026, each linked to Granola’s own page.

	Riff	Granola
Price	Plus One Pro, $19.99/mo or $199/yr	Basic free, Business $14 per user a month, Enterprise $35 per user a month
Free tier	None	Basic, which shows the last 30 days of notes
Where transcription runs	On your Mac	In the cloud, through Deepgram and AssemblyAI
Where writing runs	Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, or the model on your Mac	Models primarily from OpenAI and Anthropic
Account required	No	Yes, Google, Microsoft, or SSO
Trains models on your data	No	Anonymized data by default on Basic and Business, with an opt-out
Meeting audio	Kept on your Mac for as long as you choose	Deleted once transcription is complete
What it records	Your microphone, and every app but Riff or only the meeting app	Your microphone and all of your Mac’s system audio
Notes written around yours	Yes	Yes, your notes stay in black
Citations to the transcript	Every line Riff writes	Yes, beside each enhanced line
Calendars	Every calendar in the Calendar app on your Mac	Google and Microsoft Outlook, not Apple Calendar
Import a recording	Audio and video files	Not supported
Custom vocabulary	Words, replacements, and snippets	Up to 30 personal terms, for recognition only
Dictation into any app	Yes, hold fn	No, dictation is for questions in Granola Chat
App technology	Native Swift app in the App Sandbox	Electron
Platforms	Mac with Apple silicon and macOS 27	Mac with macOS 14, Windows, iOS, and Android

The main difference

Both apps write the notes around the ones you typed and tie each line to the transcript. The difference is where the work happens. Granola streams the call’s audio to Deepgram and AssemblyAI for transcription and keeps your notes on AWS servers in the United States under your account. Riff transcribes on your Mac, keeps the audio, transcript, and notes in its library on your Mac, and sends only text to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute to write the notes.

Because Riff keeps the audio, you can play the moment a line came from. Granola deletes the audio once the transcript is done.

Dictation

Granola’s dictation asks questions in Granola Chat. Riff also dictates into any app, with cleanup, styles for each kind of app, and a dictionary it shares with your meeting notes. Dictation in any app describes it.

When Granola is the better choice

Granola is the better choice if you need it on Windows, iOS, or Android, or on a Mac that can’t run macOS 27. It is also the better choice if your team shares notes, since Granola shares notes by link and in team spaces and sends them to Slack, Notion, Zapier, HubSpot, Attio, and Affinity. Granola also reads participant names from Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams, where Riff labels the two sides Me and Them.

If you want meeting notes and dictation on your Mac, with speech transcribed there and no account, Riff covers that. Meeting notes and Notes written around yours describe how.