Alternatives / Granola
Looking for an open source Granola alternative? We compared 5 local-first AI meeting note-takers and dictation apps by license, privacy, transcription, self-hosting, and pricing. Most record system audio without a bot and keep your data on your device.
Written by Maxime DERAME
Last updated:
| Alternative | Best for | License |
|---|---|---|
| Meetily | Private, local meeting summaries | MIT |
| Anarlog | Turning rough notes into summaries | MIT core + enterprise |
| Minutes | AI agent workflows with MCP | MIT |
| Amical | AI dictation | MIT |
| Prismical | Free local note-taking | MIT |
We looked for open-source projects that overlap with Granola's core experience: capturing meeting audio without a bot, transcribing it, and turning it into structured notes. We then verified each project's license in its GitHub repository, how much runs locally, and pricing. Some projects are meeting note-takers, while Amical is primarily a dictation app. See our methodology for the full criteria.
Meetily, Minutes, Amical, and Prismical are MIT. Anarlog is MIT outside its enterprise/ directory, which is under a commercial license; older listings show it as GPL, but the repository is now MIT after its rename from Hyprnote. Meetily also sells a paid Pro tier and Enterprise plans alongside its free Community Edition.
Meetily, Anarlog, Minutes, and Prismical record meetings and produce summaries. Amical is an AI dictation app for speech-to-text in any application, useful for notes and hands-free typing but not a meeting assistant on its own.
Meetily, Minutes, and Prismical transcribe locally with Whisper, whisper.cpp, or Parakeet. Anarlog and Meetily let you pick AI backends, including local models through Ollama or cloud providers. Local processing needs a reasonably capable machine, and cloud models send text to third parties.
Minutes exposes 31 MCP tools so AI agents can query your conversation history, and Prismical offers an MCP server. This suits developers who want meeting notes inside their existing AI workflows.
Granola records and summarizes meetings on your device without a bot, but it is a proprietary, cloud-connected service. Teams and individuals look for open-source alternatives to keep audio and transcripts as local files, choose their own transcription and AI models, work offline, and meet privacy or compliance requirements in healthcare, legal, and finance.
| Alternative | Type | License | Self-hosted | Pricing | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meetily | Meeting assistant | MIT | Yes | Free; Pro $10/user/month | Regulated teams |
| Anarlog | Meeting notes | MIT core + enterprise | Yes | Free community app | Privacy-conscious users |
| Minutes | Meeting recorder | MIT | Yes | Free | Agent workflows |
| Amical | Dictation app | MIT | Yes | Free | Speech-to-text |
| Prismical | Meeting notes | MIT | Yes | Free | Students and creators |
Want the most popular open-source option
Meetily has the largest community, with local Whisper and Parakeet transcription, pluggable AI summaries, bot-free recording, and exports to Markdown, PDF, and DOCX.
Want the closest Granola-style workflow
Anarlog records system audio without joining the call, then turns rough notes into editable summaries, keeping audio, transcripts, and notes as local files.
Want meetings available to AI agents
Minutes records locally with whisper.cpp, writes Markdown to disk, and exposes 31 MCP tools to query your conversation history.
Want dictation instead of meeting notes
Amical converts speech to formatted text in 50+ languages with custom vocabulary, using local or cloud processing.
Want a free, simple local note-taker
Prismical transcribes meetings and voice notes locally with speaker identification, summaries, and action items, but it is a much smaller project.