Productivity · Head-to-head
Granola vs Shortwave
Granola (freemium, AI Score 8.5/10) vs Shortwave (freemium, AI Score 7.8/10). 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 7.8)
- →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
Pick Shortwave if…
- →your primary use case is google workspace power users — founders, recruiters, sales leads — who live in a 200-thread-a-day inbox and want retrieval across years of mail plus a keyboard-fast client, not just reply suggestions.
- →you need: agents
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | Granola | Shortwave |
|---|---|---|
| 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 exists with capped AI usage; confirm the current cap and feature split on shortwave.com/pricing |
| AI Score | 8.5/10 | 7.8/10 |
| 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. | Google Workspace power users — founders, recruiters, sales leads — who live in a 200-thread-a-day inbox and want retrieval across years of mail plus a keyboard-fast client, not just reply suggestions. |
| Editor's pick | ✓ Yes | — |
| Use cases | productivity research | productivity agents |
| Date added | 2026-05-01 | 2025-09-15 |
Pros and cons
Granola
Productivity · freemium
Pros
- ✓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
Cons
- ×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
Shortwave
Productivity · freemium
Pros
- ✓Semantic retrieval over a long mail archive is the standout — it answers questions Gmail search structurally cannot
- ✓The assistant reasons across threads and calendar rather than only the open message
- ✓Genuinely fast keyboard-driven client underneath the AI, so it survives as a daily driver
- ✓Drafts are conditioned on your own past replies rather than a generic corporate voice
- ✓Real native apps across desktop, web and mobile rather than a browser extension
Cons
- ×Google-centric — the deep features assume Gmail/Google Workspace, and other mailboxes are a lesser experience
- ×You pay a per-seat subscription on top of a mailbox you already pay for, while Google and Microsoft bundle comparable basics into the default clients
- ×The free tier caps AI usage enough that the assistant is effectively a paid feature
- ×A small independent team competing against AI shipped by default inside Gmail and Outlook
Related comparisons
Updated 2026-08-10. Spec data sourced from official product pages and tracked in our public directory at /tools.