Granola vs Sembly: AI Meeting Notes Compared for 2026

Sembly positions itself as an enterprise meeting intelligence platform. Granola is a personal meeting assistant that stays local. Both claim to capture your meetings and make them actionable. Here's how they actually compare when you run them on real work.

What Each Tool Does

Granola records system audio on your Mac, merges it with any notes you type during the meeting, and produces AI-enhanced notes that reflect both the conversation and your thinking. Local-first, no bots, no cloud recording.

Sembly is a server-side meeting intelligence platform with a focus on team analytics, searchable meeting history, and enterprise integrations. It joins your meetings as a bot and processes recordings in the cloud.

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Note Quality and Usefulness

This is where Granola earns its reputation.

The note-merging approach means your output is personalized. If you typed "follow up on budget timeline" during the meeting, Granola weaves that into properly structured notes with context from the surrounding conversation. The final output is what you would have written with unlimited time and perfect recall.

Sembly's automated summaries are competent — it identifies agenda items, decisions, action items, and follow-up tasks. But without your input layer, the notes are generic. They accurately describe what was said but don't reflect your priorities or interpretation.

For high-stakes meetings where the notes need to be your notes, Granola's approach wins consistently.

Team and Enterprise Features

Sembly is built for teams. It centralizes meeting history across your organization, supports meeting search and retrieval, tracks who said what across multiple calls, and generates analytics on meeting patterns. If your company needs a meeting intelligence layer — not just individual note-taking — Sembly has more infrastructure.

Granola added team features in 2025 (shared workspaces, collaborative notes) but it's fundamentally a personal tool. The team layer is functional but not Sembly's level of enterprise depth.

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Privacy and Security

Granola: Local audio processing, no cloud recording, notes on your device. Cleanest possible data handling. Passes most enterprise security reviews without modification.

Sembly: Server-side processing with SOC 2 Type II certification, GDPR compliance, and enterprise SSO. Solid enterprise security posture but cloud-resident recordings.

For individuals and small teams with sensitive conversations, Granola's local-first architecture eliminates a category of risk entirely.

Meeting Detection

Granola captures any audio playing through your Mac's system audio — Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, FaceTime, phone calls via Mac. No setup required per meeting.

Sembly joins meetings via calendar integration as a bot. You need meetings scheduled and connected to your calendar for Sembly to attend. Spontaneous calls don't get captured.

Pricing

Granola:

• Free: 25 meetings
• Pro: $18/month
• Business: $14/user/month

Sembly:

• Personal: $10/month
• Team: $20/user/month
• Enterprise: Custom

At the individual level, Sembly is cheaper ($10 vs $18). At the team level, pricing is similar. Sembly's enterprise tier adds significantly more capability if you're buying across an organization.

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The Decision Framework

Choose Granola if you:

• Want meeting notes that reflect your thinking, not just the transcript
• Prioritize local-first privacy with no cloud recording
• Work independently or on a small team
• Have spontaneous meetings not always on your calendar
• Use a Mac

Choose Sembly if you:

• Need team-wide meeting intelligence across your organization
• Want centralized, searchable meeting history
• Require SOC 2 compliance with full audit trails
• Use Windows or need cross-platform coverage
• Value analytics on meeting patterns across your team

Bottom Line

Granola is a better personal meeting assistant. The note quality is higher, the privacy model is cleaner, and the zero-friction capture (no bots, no scheduling) makes it easier to actually use consistently.

Sembly is a better enterprise meeting intelligence platform. If you're buying for a team and need analytics, centralization, and organizational search across meeting history, Sembly's infrastructure justifies the complexity.

For most individuals and knowledge workers, Granola is the right tool. Start with the free 25-meeting tier and see if the approach clicks.