Stilou vs Granola
Granola decided years before us that nobody wants a robot sitting in their meeting. We are not going to argue with the part they got right.
Choose Granola if meeting notes are the job and you want the best-liked tool for it — it is more mature, cheaper, works on mobile and Apple Watch, and has real team features. Choose Stilou if you want those notes to land in the same local memory as your dictations, screenshots, notes and Slack threads, and to be answerable later by an assistant that has all of it.
Which one should you actually use?
This is the closest comparison on the site, because we made the same core decision and diverge only afterwards.
If what you need is good notes from calls and nothing more, Granola is more polished at exactly that, has been doing it longer, and costs $14 per user per month against our $29. Buying a memory system to solve a meetings problem is overkill.
Granola has mobile and Apple Watch apps. Stilou is macOS only. If you take notes away from your desk, that ends the comparison.
Granola has real team plans with shared workspaces and admin controls. Stilou has no team layer — the brain is deliberately yours alone, which is the right call for privacy and the wrong call for a sales team that needs shared call notes.
Granola's notes live in Granola. Joey's land in the same brain as the Slack thread where the deal was discussed, the screenshot of their pricing, the dictation you made walking out, and the email chain from March — linked to the client and the people involved, and answerable by Chat and Neo as one body of context.
What is Granola?
Granola is a Mac meeting-notes app built on a specific insight: the awkward part of AI notetakers is the bot. Instead of connecting to your calendar and sending a visible participant into the waiting room, Granola listens to what your machine can already hear while you take rough notes yourself, then combines the two into a clean, structured set of notes afterwards. Because it hears the room rather than joining the call, it works for in-person meetings as well as video ones, and nobody on the other side has to consent to a stranger named after a startup.
It has since grown mobile and Apple Watch apps, team workspaces, and the ability to ask questions across your notes. Pricing runs from a free Basic tier through Business at $14 per user per month to Enterprise at $35, with the option to opt out of model training on every tier.
Our meeting tool, Joey, works the same way and for the same reason. When our tool page says “like Granola”, that is not a competitive jab, it is the fastest available description of a design decision we think they got right first.
Joey vs Granola, side by side
Granola's pricing and platform support checked on granola.ai on 10 August 2026.
| Stilou (Joey) | Granola | |
|---|---|---|
| A bot joins the call | No | No |
| In-person meetings | Yes, if your Mac can hear it | Yes |
| Platforms | macOS only | Mac, mobile, Apple Watch |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes — Basic |
| Paid price | From $29/mo | $14/user/mo Business, $35 Enterprise |
| Team workspaces and admin controls | No | Yes |
| Where the notes live | Your local brain, with everything else | In Granola |
| Linked to the client, people and past calls | Yes, automatically | Notes are searchable in-app |
| Same memory as your notes and screenshots | Yes | No |
| Same memory as your Slack and Gmail | Yes, via connectors | No |
| Drafts the follow-up in your own voice | Yes, via your Voiceprint | Summaries and templates |
| Tracks what you promised in the call | Yes, via Cadence | Action items in the notes |
| Works with no network | Yes, in Private mode | No |
| Opt out of model training | Private mode sends nothing at all | Yes, on every tier |
| Maturity | Newer | Established, widely used |
As a meetings product, Granola is ahead of Joey and it would be strange to claim otherwise. The rows we care about are the four in the middle about where the notes go.
A meeting is not a document. It is one dot among several thousand.
The reason notetakers feel slightly disappointing three months in is not the quality of the notes. It is that a call is never self-contained. What was decided on Tuesday makes sense because of the thread from the week before, the pricing screenshot you were both looking at, and the thing you promised in an email in March. A notes app gives you an excellent record of sixty minutes and no record of the six months around it.
Granola handles the sixty minutes better than we do. But when you open a client's file in Stilou you are not opening a folder of transcripts — you are looking at every call, every thread, every screenshot, every note and every promise involving that client, connected because they all went into the same brain. Asking “what did we agree about renewal” searches all of it at once, and the answer can come from a Slack message even though the question sounded like it was about a meeting.
This is also why we do not have team workspaces and are not rushing to build them. The moment the brain is shared, it stops being a record of your working life and becomes a company system with retention policies and an admin who can read it. Granola made the opposite trade, correctly for a meetings product, which is why it works for teams and we do not.
Where Granola is the better choice
- It is better at meetingsMore mature, more polished, and it has been iterating on this single problem for longer than Joey has existed. If notes are the deliverable, buy the tool that specialises in notes.
- It is half the price$14 per user per month against $29, with a free Basic tier that a lot of people never outgrow.
- It leaves your deskMobile and Apple Watch apps. Joey needs your Mac to be in the room and awake.
- It works for teamsShared workspaces, admin controls, and an Enterprise tier. Stilou has no concept of a colleague.
- The notes are portableThey live in a product built to share and export them. A brain on your own disk is more private and less easy to hand to someone else, which cuts both ways.
Looking for a Granola alternative?
Most people searching that are not unhappy with the notes — they want the notes somewhere else, usually because the client context lives in four other tools and the meeting record is stranded from all of it. Some want it fully offline, which Joey does in Private mode and Granola does not.
There is no import from Granola. Your old notes stay where they are. What you can do is run Joey on new calls for a month while keeping Granola, and see whether a meeting connected to the rest of the client's file is worth more to you than a better-written summary of the meeting alone.
Worth knowing. If you work in a team that shares call notes, do not switch. Nothing in Stilou replaces a shared workspace, and we would rather say that here than have you find out in week two.
Frequently asked questions
Does Granola put a bot in the call?
No, and neither does Joey. Granola listens to what your Mac can hear while you take rough notes, then cleans them up afterwards. That means no visible participant, no waiting-room admission, and it works for in-person meetings too. It is the design decision we agree with most in this whole category.
Is Joey better than Granola?
At producing a set of meeting notes, no — Granola is more mature and more polished at that specific job. Joey's advantage is entirely about where the notes land: in the same local brain as your dictations, screenshots, notes, Slack and Gmail, linked to the client, so an assistant can answer across all of it rather than across your meetings only.
Which is cheaper?
Granola. Business is $14 per user per month and Enterprise is $35, against $29 a month for Stilou, and both have a free tier.
Does Granola work offline?
No. Joey's capture and transcription can run entirely on your Mac in Private mode, so a meeting recorded on a plane or in a building with no signal still produces notes. Granola requires a connection.
Can I use Granola and Stilou together?
Yes. They both listen to system audio and do not conflict, though running both on the same call is redundant. The more sensible split is Granola for team calls that colleagues need access to, Joey for the ones where the value is in connecting the call to the rest of the client's history.
Where these facts came from
Everything stated above about Granola is taken from their own site and documentation, on the date shown. Products change — if you find something here that has gone out of date, tell us at hi@stilou.app and we will fix it.
- Granola — Pricingchecked 10 Aug 2026
- Granola — official sitechecked 10 Aug 2026