Earmark vs Granola: AI Meeting Notes vs “Meeting → Shippable Work”

If you’re comparing Earmark vs Granola, you’re probably looking for the best AI meeting assistant to handle meeting transcription, AI meeting notes, meeting summaries, and action items—without turning every conversation into more cleanup work. Granola has become popular as an AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings, designed to take what you jot down during a call and enhance it with context from the transcript, while staying bot-free (no awkward meeting bot joining). Earmark is built for a different job: it’s not just trying to make notes prettier, it’s designed to turn meetings into execution-ready artifacts—tickets, decision logs, follow-ups, and stakeholder updates—so work starts moving the moment alignment happens.

Granola’s strength is that it feels like a lightweight layer on top of your existing meeting habits. It’s positioned as “your notes + transcript → AI enhanced,” meaning you can take raw notes in your own style and have Granola polish and structure them into something cleaner after the fact. It’s also intentionally designed around a no meeting bot workflow. Instead of joining your Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams call as a participant, Granola captures audio from your device and transcribes it, which can reduce friction for teams that hate “bots in the attendee list.” Granola also connects to Google Calendar so you can start a meeting note from an upcoming event and begin transcribing when the meeting starts.

That said, Granola is ultimately optimized for meeting notes, not meeting execution. It’s great at producing a clean record—good-looking summaries, personal recall, and sharable notes—especially for people who already like taking notes and want AI help polishing them. But most teams don’t lose hours because they can’t produce a summary. They lose hours because the meeting doesn’t reliably turn into work. The biggest tax in modern collaboration is the translation layer that happens after the call: someone has to turn a discussion into decisions, owners, follow-ups, and tickets that can actually enter the system of record. That’s where Earmark is intentionally biased.

Earmark is built for the “last mile” of meetings: turning alignment into shippable outputs in the formats teams execute with. In practice, “AI meeting notes” only matter if they create momentum—if they become Jira or Linear tickets, if decisions become decision logs, if action items become owned tasks, and if stakeholders get crisp updates without a human rewriting everything late at night. Granola helps you leave a meeting with better notes. Earmark helps you leave the meeting with the work already underway.

This also shows up in small but important workflow details. Granola documentation notes there isn’t an automatic way to extract transcripts; you typically open a note and copy the transcript manually. That’s fine for personal recall, but it hints at the broader posture: Granola’s center of gravity is the note itself. Earmark’s center of gravity is the downstream artifact—the deliverable that unblocks execution in the tools your team already runs on.

On pricing, Granola’s Business plan is listed at $14 per user per month, including unlimited meeting notes and history plus integrations like Notion and Slack (and other systems), and it offers an Enterprise tier for larger companies. Granola can be a great choice if what you want is a bot-free AI note-taking experience that makes meetings feel more organized and your personal meeting history easy to search and revisit.

But if your real problem is that meetings create a second shift, Earmark is the better choice—because it’s built for meeting outcomes, not meeting recap. Notes are table stakes now. The teams that win are the ones that can convert conversation into execution fast, consistently, and in the same shapes their workflow already demands. Granola helps you remember the meeting. Earmark helps you ship it—and that’s why, for execution-heavy teams, Earmark is the tool you bet on.