Granola vs. Otter at the One-Year Mark

Twelve months ago we reviewed AI note-takers as a comparison piece across Granola, Fireflies, and Otter. Granola won for executive use; Otter won for hard rooms; Fireflies won for sales-led organizations. The category was, at the time, just past the threshold where the products were good enough to use as primary minutes. Twelve months on, the products are unambiguously good and the differentiation has shifted.

We re-tested Granola and Otter — the two products most relevant for executive workflows — across 80 hours of real meetings over Q2 2025. The conclusions are continuous with last year's review but the gap has narrowed.

Where Granola has extended its lead

The local-first model is the durable structural advantage and it has gotten better. The recording-and-summarization pipeline is now meaningfully faster than it was. The product handles the "you didn't realize you wanted to record this" case better than any competitor — the rolling buffer captures the previous several minutes when you decide retroactively that the meeting deserves a summary.

The summary quality is the second area of meaningful improvement. The new "intent-aware" summarization — which uses your own meeting notes as context for what the summary should emphasize — produces output that reads like a thoughtful chief-of-staff prepared it. We have not yet had a Granola summary returned in our test sessions that any executive would describe as wrong on substance.

The category has matured to the point where the wrong choice is the choice nobody made deliberately.

The third Granola strength is the integration ecosystem. The CRM, document, and project-management integrations have shipped at a steady cadence over the last 12 months. Granola is no longer the integration-poor product it was in 2024. The Salesforce, Notion, and Slack connections are now mature; the Google Workspace integration is the strongest in the category.

Where Otter has narrowed the gap

Summary quality. The Otter of 2025 produces summaries that are meaningfully better than the Otter of 2024. The "topic-segmented summary" — which breaks a long meeting into thematic sections — is a real differentiator and is, in our testing, the strongest format for board-prep and customer-business-review use cases. Granola's equivalent is good; Otter's is sometimes better.

The diarization quality continues to be Otter's structural strength. Multi-speaker meetings, particularly with poor audio quality (large conference rooms, panel-style discussions, field interviews), are still better captured by Otter than by any competitor. The use case is narrower than it was — the modern executive's meetings are mostly small video calls — but it is real.

Otter's pricing remains the most competitive of the three. The Business tier is materially cheaper than Granola's equivalent, and the per-seat economics work better at scale.

Where both still fall down

Multi-language meetings remain a category-wide weakness. None of the products in our testing handles code-switching speakers or genuine multi-lingual meetings cleanly. For organizations with a meaningful European or global executive team, the summaries produced from these meetings often require manual review to catch substantive errors. This gap is not closing as fast as the rest of the category is improving.

The privacy-posture question is the second persistent gap. Granola's defaults are the right ones for executive work; Otter's are not. The Otter user has to actively configure the product to behave well for sensitive sessions. Most users do not. The administrative overhead of getting Otter to a posture appropriate for board-level work is a real cost.

On Fireflies

We did not include Fireflies in this re-test because the product's structural fit is for sales-led organizations consolidating into CRM, which is a meaningfully different workflow than the executive note-taking one. The product is real and has improved. The case for Fireflies is unchanged from the 2024 review; the case for Granola or Otter for executive work is stronger.

The verdict

Granola remains the right answer for executive work, with a wider lead on summary quality and integration depth than the competitive landscape suggests. Otter remains the right answer for hard-room and field-research use cases, and is now a defensible second choice for executive use if the privacy posture is configured carefully. The category has matured to the point where there is no longer a wrong choice for the team that picks deliberately. The wrong choice is the choice the team makes by default.