Granola is a personal AI notebook that cleans up your scratch notes after a meeting. relly is a voice teammate that joins the meeting live, speaks when invited, and delivers shared follow-up to the team while you're still talking. Pick Granola if your job is producing a tidy personal note. Pick relly if your job is running a meeting that decides and ships things. Most teams that try both end up using each for different rooms.
The one-line difference
Granola is a single-user notebook with AI polish. relly is a voice teammate that participates with the team. That gap shapes every other comparison on this page, so it's worth holding in your head before reading the rest.
Both products use modern speech models. Both want to take the pain out of meetings. They aim that pain in opposite directions. Granola assumes you'll still type during the call and want the result to look better. relly assumes the meeting itself is the bottleneck and removes the typing.
How each one actually behaves in a meeting
Granola: silent listener, post-meeting cleanup
Granola is a Mac desktop app. You open it before a call, type your own scratch notes the way you always have, and end the meeting. Granola has been listening to your system audio the whole time. After the call, it edits your scratch notes into a clean, structured note using the transcript as ground truth.
The output is a personal notebook. The bot does not join the call. The other side does not see a participant named "Granola." Your teammates do not get a shared artifact unless you choose to share one. It feels like having a writer copy-edit your notes the moment the call ends.
That model has real strengths. Solo founders, consultants on back-to-back client calls, and people who already think in notes get a lot out of it. The output reads like you wrote it, which is exactly the point.
relly: live voice participant, shared output
relly is a voice AI that joins your call as a named participant on Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams. It listens, holds context, and speaks when the room needs it. When the team mentions a research item, a doc, or a decision check, relly either offers ("Want me to pull last week's metric?") or starts on the work in parallel.
The output is shared by default. Decisions land in Notion or your wiki. Action items go to Linear or Jira with owners and dates. A recap is posted to the right Slack channel before anyone has closed their laptop. The team leaves the meeting with the work already on the rails, not waiting to be requested.
That model assumes meetings are collective work, not solo content. If your meetings are mostly you talking and a customer talking, relly is overkill. If your meetings are five people deciding what ships next quarter, relly is the right shape.
Side-by-side, the way people actually compare
The honest comparison is not "which is better." It is "which job is the AI doing." Tidy notes and a participating teammate are not the same job, even though both involve a microphone and a transcript.
Audience
Granola: individuals who take a lot of meetings and want their personal notes to look better.
relly: teams whose meetings produce decisions and shared work.
Presence in the call
Granola: none. It listens to system audio quietly from your laptop.
relly: a named participant. Visible, can be addressed, can speak.
When the work happens
Granola: after the meeting ends. Cleanup is the product.
relly: during the meeting. Research, doc lookups, action capture happen live.
Who owns the output
Granola: you. The note is in your notebook.
relly: the team. Decisions, action items, and recaps land in shared tools.
Editing model
Granola: AI rewrites your scratch notes using the transcript.
relly: AI generates structured outputs (decisions, owners, actions) from the conversation, no scratch notes required.
Best meeting type
Granola: 1:1s, customer calls, interviews, solo content where a personal note is enough.
relly: strategy reviews, client pitches, design crits, standups, any room where the team decides things together.
Where Granola wins
Granola is a great pick when the meeting is mostly someone else's content and you want your own polished version of it.
- Customer interviews: you ask, they talk. You want a clean transcript-grounded note when the call is over.
- Sales discovery calls handled solo: a personal record of what was said, sent to your CRM later.
- Investor or partner calls where you do not want a bot in the room. Granola's silent presence is a real product choice.
- Note-takers who already type during meetings: Granola amplifies the habit instead of replacing it.
If you described your AI need as "make my personal notes nicer," Granola is the right answer.
Where relly wins
relly is the right pick when the meeting itself is doing the team's work and the cost of stopping for an AI prompt is high.
- Strategy and planning meetings: someone asks for last quarter's retention number, the chart appears before the next sentence ends.
- Client pitches and live demos: a prospect asks a hard question, the answer is in your docs, relly surfaces a one-line summary while you keep eye contact.
- Design and product reviews: a Figma frame is mentioned, relly opens it for everyone. A competitor is referenced, relly pulls a comp.
- Standups and weekly reviews: blockers, decisions, and owners are captured automatically. Linear tickets are filed before the call ends.
- Cross-timezone async-friendly teams: the recap is shaped for someone who was not in the room, not just a backup of the conversation.
If you described your AI need as "stop making the meeting do the AI's work," relly is the right answer.
What about price, language, integrations
These move quickly on both products, so check the live pricing pages before you decide. The category-level pattern looks like this. Granola tends to be priced as a per-seat personal tool with a free tier, language coverage that is broad for transcription, and integrations focused on personal note destinations like Notion, Apple Notes, and email.
relly is priced for teams, with seat-based and usage-based components, English-first today, and integrations focused on shared team tools: Slack, Notion, Linear, Jira, Google Docs. relly is in early access with 50% off the first year for teams that join before public launch.
None of these line items should decide the call by itself. The presence model and the output model are the real fork.
The two-shifts test
A simple way to choose: for the meeting you care about most, ask which shift you want the AI in.
- The during shift: while the meeting is happening, work gets done. Research arrives. Decisions are captured. Action items file themselves. The team leaves with the follow-up already in their tools.
- The after shift: when the meeting ends, your messy scratch notes turn into a clean personal record. You do the rest of the follow-up by hand later.
Granola owns the after shift. relly owns the during shift. If your team is feeling the pain of "we keep deciding things and then losing them between the call and the cleanup," that's a during-shift problem and a relly job. If your pain is "my personal notes are a mess," that's an after-shift problem and a Granola job.
For more on why the during shift matters so much, see the two-shifts problem.
Can you run both?
Yes, and many teams do for a few weeks before settling. A common pattern is relly for team meetings where shared output matters, and Granola for solo client calls or interviews where a personal note is the deliverable. After a month, most teams keep one for most calls and use the other only when the meeting type genuinely calls for it.
The mistake is using both for the same meeting. You'll get duplicate transcripts, duplicate recaps, and a small but annoying overhead deciding which note is canonical. Pick one per meeting type and stick with it.
How to actually choose this week
Three questions cover most of it.
- Is the AI's job a clean personal note, or shared team output? Personal note: Granola. Shared output: relly.
- Do you want a participant in the call, or a quiet listener? Quiet: Granola. Participant: relly.
- Where does the pain live, before or after the meeting? After (cleanup): Granola. During (decisions, research, follow-up): relly.
If you answered all three for relly, the simplest next step is to put it on your next live team meeting and watch what changes. Early access is open through May 18, 2026, with 50% off the first year, no card needed until launch.
Common questions
What is the main difference between relly and Granola?
Granola is a personal note-taking app that polishes your scratch notes into clean notes after a meeting. relly is a voice teammate that joins the meeting live, speaks when the room needs it, and delivers shared follow-up work to the whole team. One is post-meeting, single-user, silent. The other is during-meeting, team-shared, conversational.
Is Granola better than relly for solo note-taking?
Granola is great if your goal is a clean personal note out of every call you take, especially if you already type during meetings. It's a single-user notebook with AI cleanup. relly is built for teams that want the AI to participate, not just record. If only you need notes, Granola fits. If your team wants shared decisions and live action, relly fits.
Does Granola join meetings as a bot the way relly does?
Granola listens to your computer's audio in the background and does not appear as a participant in the call. relly joins as a named participant on Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams, can speak when invited, and posts updates to your shared tools during the meeting. The presence model is different on purpose.
Can I use both relly and Granola together?
Yes. Some teams use relly for live team meetings where decisions and follow-up are shared, and Granola for one-on-ones, solo client calls, or interviews where a personal notebook is enough. They optimize for different jobs, so running both is reasonable until your workflow tells you which one to keep.
Want a voice teammate in your next meeting?
relly joins your next call and does the work while your team talks. Early access is open through May 18, 2026, with 50% off for your first year.
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