Productivity · Head-to-head

Granola vs Hey Noah

Granola (freemium, AI Score 8.5/10) vs Hey Noah (freemium, AI Score 7.5/10). Side-by-side pricing, features, pros and cons, and which to pick.

The verdict

Pick Granola if…

→overall capability matters more than price (AI Score 8.5 vs 7.5)
→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.
→you need: research

Try Granola →

Pick Hey Noah if…

→your primary use case is solo founders and small-team operators who lose deals and hires to unanswered threads across email and sms, and who want an assistant that chases follow-ups on its own rather than one they have to remember to prompt.
→you need: agents

Try Hey Noah →

Spec	Granola	Hey Noah
Category	Productivity	Productivity
Pricing model	freemium	freemium
Headline pricing	Freemium — Free 25 meetings, Pro $10/mo, Business $25/user/mo	Free tier + paid plans — check website for current pricing
Free tier	25 meetings total with AI note enhancement and basic templates — a lifetime allowance, not a monthly reset	Yes — a free tier is available, though its specific limits aren't documented publicly
AI Score	8.5/10	7.5/10
Best for	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.	Solo founders and small-team operators who lose deals and hires to unanswered threads across email and SMS, and who want an assistant that chases follow-ups on its own rather than one they have to remember to prompt.
Editor's pick	✓ Yes	—
Use cases	productivity research	productivity agents
Date added	2026-05-01	2026-08-07

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

Productivity · freemium

✓Proactive by design — acts on what it sees rather than waiting for a prompt, which is the actual gap in the AI-assistant category
✓Covers SMS as well as email and calendar, where most competitors stop at the inbox
✓Relationship memory makes follow-ups specific to a real conversation instead of a generic reminder
✓Free tier lets you evaluate its judgment before granting deeper account access

×Launched 4 August 2026 — effectively no track record, and no independent long-run reviews of how the autonomy behaves under real inbox load
×Requires broad read access to email, calendar and text messages, the largest privacy surface in this category, with no publicly documented retention policy
×Paid tier names, prices and usage limits are not published — you have to sign up to find out what you'd pay
×An agent that sends messages on your behalf fails loudly when it misjudges; a bad follow-up damages a relationship, it isn't an output you can delete

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