Productivity · Head-to-head

Glean vs Granola

Glean (paid, AI Score 8.4/10) vs Granola (freemium, AI Score 8.5/10). Side-by-side pricing, features, pros and cons, and which to pick.

The verdict

Pick Glean if…

→your primary use case is enterprise it and knowledge-management leads at 1,000+ seat companies whose work is split across both google and microsoft plus slack, jira and salesforce, and who need search that respects existing permissions.
→you need: agents, support

Try Glean →

Pick Granola if…

→you need a genuinely free option
→budget is the constraint
→you want our editor's pick for this category
→your primary use case is founders, product managers and investors running back-to-back external calls who want their own notes sharpened, without a recording bot appearing as a participant.

Try Granola →

Spec	Glean	Granola
Category	Productivity	Productivity
Pricing model	paid	freemium
Headline pricing	Custom enterprise pricing — check website for current rates	Freemium — Free 25 meetings, Pro $10/mo, Business $25/user/mo
Free tier	—	25 meetings total with AI note enhancement and basic templates — a lifetime allowance, not a monthly reset
AI Score	8.4/10	8.5/10
Best for	Enterprise IT and knowledge-management leads at 1,000+ seat companies whose work is split across both Google and Microsoft plus Slack, Jira and Salesforce, and who need search that respects existing permissions.	Founders, product managers and investors running back-to-back external calls who want their own notes sharpened, without a recording bot appearing as a participant.
Editor's pick	—	✓ Yes
Use cases	research productivity agents support	productivity research
Date added	2026-05-01	2026-05-01

Productivity · paid

✓Mirrors each source system's permissions per user, so answers can't surface documents the searcher lacks access to — the failure mode that sinks most in-house RAG projects
✓Genuinely broad connector library (100+) covering both the Google and Microsoft worlds, plus Slack, Atlassian, Salesforce and developer tooling
✓Model-agnostic: not locked to one lab's stack, with customer-hosted and BYO-model paths for regulated buyers
✓Agents can write back into source systems and speak MCP, so it functions as an action layer rather than only a question-answering surface

×No self-serve tier and no published pricing — every deployment routes through sales and an IT-led rollout
×Microsoft 365 Copilot and Google Gemini Enterprise now ship comparable grounded search bundled with suites most buyers already own, making Glean a second line item to justify
×Answer quality tracks source-data hygiene: stale wikis and over-shared drives produce confidently wrong answers, and cleanup is on you
×Value scales with how fragmented your stack is — a company living almost entirely inside one suite gets far less out of it

Productivity · freemium

✓No bot in the participant list, which matters on external calls where recording changes how people talk
✓Summaries are built from your own notes, so they read like something you wrote rather than a generic recap
✓Cross-meeting chat retrieves what was said months ago without opening individual notes
✓Now covers macOS, Windows and iPhone, closing the in-person and PC gaps that limited it at launch
✓Fast native app that stays out of the way instead of a heavy Electron shell

×You have to type something during the call — with no input, the output is an ordinary transcript summary and the price premium disappears
×Free tier is 25 meetings for the lifetime of the account, so evaluation runs out fast and there is no ongoing free option
×Zoom, Google Meet and Teams now bundle free note-taking, which covers internal meetings well enough to make a second subscription hard to justify
×CRM and workflow integrations are thinner than Fireflies.ai or Fathom, which have deeper HubSpot and Salesforce plumbing

Updated 2026-08-10. Spec data sourced from official product pages and tracked in our public directory at /tools.