Comparison
Lunar vs Granola
Both record your meetings without putting a bot in the call. The difference is what happens to the audio, and what you are holding when the meeting ends — a note, or a ticket in your backlog.
Free during beta — macOS today, Windows soon
The short answer
Pick Granola if you want the most polished bot-free notepad on the Mac and the notes themselves are the deliverable. Pick Lunar if the meeting is supposed to produce work — action items that land in Jira as issues — and if you would rather your audio stayed on your machine than passed through a vendor cloud.
The three differences that matter
Same promise at the front. Different machine behind it.
A bot in the call
Neither tool joins your meeting as a participant. This is the one place Granola and Lunar genuinely agree, and it is why both feel different from Otter or Fireflies.
Where the audio is processed
Granola captures locally but passes audio to a cloud transcription provider. Lunar can transcribe fully on-device — your choice — and sessions stay on your machine until you sign in.
What you hold at the end
Granola gives you a well-structured note. Lunar gives you a summary plus action items that become Jira issues in the right project — review, click, done.
Where Granola is genuinely strong
Granola is the tool that made bot-free note-taking mainstream, and it deserves the reputation. Its model — you type sparse notes during the call and it fills them out afterwards — produces documents that read like a thoughtful colleague wrote them rather than a machine transcript. It is fast, the Mac app is well made, and it does not keep a recording. If your job ends when the notes are good, Granola is a hard tool to beat, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Where it stops
Two places. First, bot-free is not the same as local. Granola captures on your machine but sends the audio to a cloud transcription provider, transcripts sit on US-hosted infrastructure, and on non-Enterprise plans your data is used to improve its models unless you opt out. For plenty of teams that is fine. For anyone holding an NDA, filling in a client procurement questionnaire, or working to an EU data policy, it is a conversation you have to have. Second, the output is a document. Someone still has to read it, work out which lines were commitments, and retype them into the backlog.
What Lunar does differently
Lunar closes the loop between the meeting and the work. You bind a folder to a Jira project once, with a default issue type and assignee, and after every call the action items are proposed as issues in that project — you review, you click, and the backlog is updated before you have left the call. Transcription can run fully on-device, sessions stay local until you sign in, and when a feature does use the cloud we say so in plain language rather than in a settings sub-menu. Built by an EU company, with a security page that shows the exact data flow per feature.
So which should you pick?
If you are a founder, designer, or researcher whose meetings produce understanding, pick Granola. If you are on a software or delivery team whose meetings produce commitments — standups, planning, retros, incident reviews, client calls — and those commitments currently die in a doc, pick Lunar. And if the deciding factor is that a client's IT team is going to ask where the audio goes, that is an easier answer to give with Lunar.
Try the one that files the tickets.
Free during beta. macOS today, Windows soon. No bot will ever join your call.
Lunar
Give every update a place.
Keep work moving.
Replace meeting-driven updates with async conversations that stay accessible, structured, and aligned with how your team works.