Pick Granola if…
you like typing your own meeting notes and want them enriched with the transcript rather than replaced by it.
Both were founded in 2023, both offer a permanent free plan with 30 days of meeting history, and paid plans start a few dollars apart. Granola blends your own typed notes with the transcript into a shareable summary. Circleback focuses on notes and action items from every meeting, online or in person, with CRM automations on top.
Pick Granola ($14/mo per user) if you take your own notes during meetings and want them merged with the transcript and sent to Notion, Slack or HubSpot. Pick Circleback ($18/mo per user) if you want action items from every meeting, including in-person ones, and recordings stored for a year.
| App | Free tier | Paid from | Top plan | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Granola | Yes | $14/mo | $35/mo | Teams that want meeting notes wired into their existing tools (Slack, Notion, HubSpot) plus MCP access to Claude/ChatGPT |
| Circleback | Yes | $18/mo | $35/mo | Teams that want unlimited free AI meeting notes and only want to pay for deeper history and CRM automations |
Monthly prices in US dollars before tax, from each vendor's official pricing (US list price; weekly-billed plans converted to a monthly figure). Updated November 2, 2026
| Granola | Circleback | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | AI notes, AI chat, shared folders, 30-day history | Unlimited meetings, AI notes & action items, 30-day history |
| Paid plan | Business: unlimited history, advanced models | Pro: unlimited history, 1-year recording storage |
| Integrations | Notion, Slack, HubSpot, Attio, Affinity, Zapier, MCP + API | Automations with Notion, HubSpot, Salesforce and more |
| Team features | Shared folders on Free; admin controls on Enterprise | Business: roles, unlimited free viewers, 2-year storage |
| Enterprise | SSO, auto-deletion, model-training opt-out | SSO, SCIM, HIPAA, unlimited storage |
you like typing your own meeting notes and want them enriched with the transcript rather than replaced by it.
you want hands-off notes and action items from every meeting, including in-person ones, or lots of free viewers on a team plan.
Granola, slightly: Business is $14/mo per user against $18/mo for Circleback Pro. At the top end, Granola Enterprise is $35/mo per user and Circleback Enterprise $35/mo.
Yes, both permanent and both limited to 30 days of meeting history. Circleback's free plan explicitly covers unlimited online and in-person meetings with speaker-labeled transcripts.
Circleback Enterprise adds SSO, SCIM, unlimited recording storage and HIPAA compliance. Granola Enterprise adds SSO, admin controls, org-wide auto-deletion and a team-wide model-training opt-out. Check each vendor's current compliance terms before buying for regulated work.
How we choose: prices come from each vendor's official pricing page and are re-checked every week. We take no affiliate fees, so rankings aren't for sale.