Donna vs Granola
Donna or Granola? Pick Granola if you want botless, notes-first capture on your own laptop. Pick Donna if the meeting record must stay on your own infrastructure and you want analysis beyond summaries — verbatim receipts, tensions, position shifts, and the room read, all from a bot on your own server.
Granola is the most tasteful of the cloud tools — no bot, no awkward “recording” participant, just your own notes made better. That taste has a cost: it only knows what your device heard and what you thought to write down. Donna is the opposite instrument: a full attendee with a perfect memory and her own opinions, reporting from your server.
Side by side, structurally
| Axis | Granola | Donna |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Desktop app; AI processing in Granola’s cloud | Your own server (privately hosted) |
| Where your recordings live | Audio captured on-device; transcripts processed by cloud AI | Your server’s disk and your own database — nothing on a vendor cloud |
| How it attends meetings | Botless — nothing joins the call; it listens to system audio | Joins Google Meet as a visible participant — on demand, or auto-joined from your calendar’s iCal feed |
| Meeting video capture | No | Yes — screen video + audio, compressed server-side after the call |
| Transcription engine | Vendor-managed | Flocci Speech Recognition, with your key |
| Who owns the AI keys | Granola | You — your Flocci Speech Recognition and Flocci Intelligence keys |
| What you get after the call | Your typed notes, enhanced and structured with the transcript | Meeting intelligence through one of six lenses: decisions with tradeoffs, exact-quote receipts, tensions, what nobody said, position shifts, the room read, and orders |
| Pricing model | Subscription after trial | No per-seat fee — credit-metered usage on the hosted service, or only your own infrastructure and API usage when deployed privately |
Where Granola genuinely wins
- No bot in the room — nothing for guests to see or admit, which some meeting cultures strongly prefer.
- The notes-first workflow is beloved: you jot fragments, it turns them into polished notes.
- Feels like a notepad, not surveillance software.
Where Donna wins
- Botless also means tied to your laptop: if you don’t attend or your machine sleeps, there is no record. Donna attends independently on a server, whether or not you make the call.
- Granola enhances what you noticed; Donna catches what you didn’t — the dropped question, the soft deadline, the position shift. Augmented notes still carry your blind spots.
- Granola’s AI runs in its cloud on its keys. Donna’s pipeline runs on your keys from your server, and captures the actual meeting video as evidence, not just audio-derived text.
The data question, since nobody else leads with it
Granola: Audio captured on-device; transcripts processed by cloud AI. Donna: your server’s disk and your own database — nothing on a vendor cloud. For boards, client work, hiring, negotiations, and one-on-ones, that line is usually the whole decision.
What each one charges
| Granola | Donna | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Unlimited notes with a 30-day history limit | One-time credit grant plus a monthly free allowance |
| Paid | Paid plan unlocks older notes | Credit-metered usage — meetings attended, minutes transcribed, reports delivered. No seat licence. |
Granola’s figures were read from their own pricing page on 29 July 2026; check it before you buy, because plans change without notice. Donna’s current credit costs live on your billing page at account.flocci.in.
Questions, answered straight
Is Donna botless like Granola?
No — by design. Donna joins the call as a visible participant from your server, which means she attends even when you can’t, captures audio and screen video, and is transparent to everyone in the room. Granola’s botless approach depends on your device being present and awake.
Granola has no bot in the meeting — isn’t that more private?
It is more discreet in the room, but less private in the pipeline: Granola’s AI processing happens on its cloud with its keys. Donna is visible in the room and private in the pipeline — everything is processed from your own server with your own keys. Donna is transparency where it matters ethically, ownership where it matters technically.
Can Donna enhance my own meeting notes like Granola?
Donna doesn’t merge your typed notes today. She produces her own nine-section report from the full transcript — including the parts of the meeting nobody wrote down, which is usually where the interesting material lives.
Put Donna in your next meeting
Access is open — sign in with your Google account and she’s in your dashboard in minutes. Rolling out to a whole team, or want a hand with the server setup? We’re glad to help.