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Granola proved people love bot-free notes, and its writing is excellent. Two things it doesn’t do: it has no live in-call assist, and on the free plan you can only open the last 30 days of your notes — older ones are stored but locked until you pay $14/user/mo. Raven is bot-free too, but adds real-time help during the call, keeps unlimited history locally and free, and is open source.

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At a glance

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Price

Granola’s free Basic plan is a real product, but its catch is time: only the last 30 days of notes are accessible in the app. To unlock full history (the main reason people upgrade) you’re on Business at $14/user/mo — and Granola bills monthly only, with no annual discount, so that’s ~$168/user/year. Raven keeps all your history, locally, for free. Your only cost is your own API usage (a few dollars a month for regular use).

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Where your meetings live

Both are calm and bot-free. The difference is ownership: Granola stores your notes in its cloud (older ones remain there, just gated on the free plan). Raven stores everything in a local SQLite database you own — no account, no server — and being open source, that’s auditable rather than promised.

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What Granola does better (honestly)

  • A beautifully refined notes UX and template/recipe system.
  • Mature integrations (HubSpot, Notion, Slack, Attio, Zapier) and MCP/API access on Business.
  • Team workspace features.
If you want a polished hosted notes app with deep integrations and don’t need live help, Granola is lovely.

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When Raven wins

  • You want help during the call, not just a clean write-up after.
  • You want all your history, free, without a 30-day wall.
  • You want meetings on your machine and a tool you can audit.
  • You’re on Windows and want native capture.

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Switching from Granola

  1. In Granola, export a CSV of your notes (Settings → Profile → Generate CSV) so you keep your back catalog.
  2. Download Raven, add your keys, and turn on meeting auto-start.
  3. Run both for a week; cancel Granola once Raven covers your notes habit. (Importers are on the roadmap.)

Download Raven

Free, open source, Mac + Windows. Bring your own keys.

Ask across your meetings

Local Q&A over your whole history, with cited sources.
Granola pricing and the 30-day free-history limit verified August 2026 (granola.ai/pricing, docs.granola.ai). Vendors change pricing often — confirm before relying on a figure.