Dalm as a Granola alternative, and where Granola is still better

Dalm and Granola are close. Both take notes from your computer’s sound and microphone with nothing joining the call, both work from the notes you type, and neither app saves the audio of a call. They part at one step: where speech becomes text. Granola sends the sound to its transcription provider; in Dalm the speech is recognised on your Mac, and the transcript then syncs to our servers automatically. Granola also runs on Windows and phones, tags speakers by their names in the call, and can write the summary in the meeting’s own language. On its free plan, the app shows the last 30 days of notes. There is a Free plan in Dalm too.

Dalm and Granola at a glance

	Granola	Dalm
How it hears a call	Your computer’s audio and microphone; no bot	Two separate streams — your microphone and the call’s sound on the Mac; no bot either
Your own notes	Written as much or as little as you like; the notes are built from them and the meeting	Typed during the meeting; the summary grows from them
Where speech becomes text	Its transcription provider	On your Mac; the transcript then syncs to our servers
The audio afterwards	Not recorded or saved	Deleted once the text exists, with one exception below
Who said what	Speaker tags from display names in Google Meet, Zoom and Microsoft Teams; face to face in the phone app	Voices told apart by sound, on a call or across a table; a name is the model’s guess or a number until you confirm it
Summary language	English or the meeting’s main language, your choice	Built for meetings in English and Russian
Questions across meetings	Yes, the free plan included	One meeting at a time; across all your recordings — in development
Free history	The last 30 days are visible in the app	See “Your notes a year from now”
Apps	macOS, Windows, iPhone, Android	Mac with Apple Silicon · macOS 15.0 or later

The transcript syncs to our servers. Everything said here about Granola comes from Granola’s own pages and help, read on 27 September 2026.

Where Granola is better than Dalm

• Windows and phones. Granola has apps for Windows, iPhone and Android as well as the Mac; Dalm is a Mac app for Apple Silicon · macOS 15.0 or later.
• Speaker names without asking you. In Google Meet, Zoom and Microsoft Teams, Granola labels who said what with each participant’s display name. Dalm tells voices apart by sound and puts its guess or a number in place of a name until you confirm it.
• Questions across meetings, even on the free plan. Granola’s chat works within one meeting and across many. In Dalm you ask about one meeting at a time; questions across all your recordings are in development.
• Summaries in your language. Granola writes the summary in English or in the meeting’s main language, and its desktop app follows a meeting that moves between its languages. Dalm’s summaries are built for meetings in English and Russian, and a recording that moves between two languages has not been measured — how Dalm handles languages.
• Your other tools. Notion, HubSpot, Attio, Affinity and Zapier, an API and MCP on the Business plan. Dalm connects to Google Calendar.
• Folders to share, free. Shared folders and custom note templates are on Granola’s free plan. In Dalm, a group shares a dictionary, templates and tags on the Team plan.
• Model training is opt-out. Granola lets anyone opt out of model training at any time, on every plan.

Where Dalm is better than Granola

• The sound of the meeting stays with you. Granola sends it to its transcription provider. In Dalm the speech is recognised on your Mac and the audio is not sent to anyone — not to us, not to a transcription service, not to a language model. What leaves is the text: each transcript is copied to our servers without you doing anything, and the summary is written from that text by a language model.
• Voices from the sound itself. Dalm separates voices by listening, on any call app and across a table, so a meeting in the room gets who said what on the Mac as well.
• Dictation in the same app. Hold a key, speak, and the words go into any app; the dictionary of names and terms is shared between dictation and meetings.
• Older meetings stay open on the Free plan. More on that in the section after the prices.

What Granola and Dalm cost

	Granola	Dalm
Free	Basic: the last 30 days of notes visible in the app	Free: a plan, not a trial
Paid	Business $14 a month for each user; Enterprise $35	Pro $16 a month, or $12 a month billed annually (paid plans are not open yet)
For a group	Business and Enterprise	Team $40 a month for each member, or $32 a month billed annually

The recording, the transcript and the summary of a meeting come with Dalm’s Free plan; what the paid plans add is on the pricing page, and how a group works together is on working as a team. Dalm needs a Mac with Apple Silicon · macOS 15.0 or later; while it is not public, the way in is the waitlist. Granola’s prices are from its pricing page, checked on 27 September 2026.

Your notes a year from now

On Granola’s free Basic plan, the app shows the last 30 days of notes. Older notes are kept but not open in the app; a CSV export gives you their titles and summaries, and the Business plan shows the full history.

No plan puts a limit on recording minutes, on the length of a recording, or on how long anything is kept. Everything you say lands in one archive you can search: meetings, phone calls, conversations in the room, and what you dictate to a model. Asking one question across all of it is still in development. In the summary, each point keeps a word-for-word quote. Every quote shows you where it was said — open it and the transcript opens at that place.

Taking it with you works one document at a time: summaries and documents save as Markdown, Word or PDF. There is no single export of the whole account.

Who should stay with Granola

• Stay with Granola if colleagues are on Windows, you take meetings on your phone, you want names on every line without naming anyone, your meetings are in a language other than English or Russian, or your notes need to flow into Notion, HubSpot or Zapier.
• Move to Dalm if you work on a Mac, the sound of your meetings should not go to a transcription service, you need the free archive past 30 days, or you dictate as well as meet.

More note takers, by name

Granola and Dalm are two of the note takers that record from your computer rather than joining the call. One more that records from your computer, with its data kept in Europe. Seven of them, with where each beats us, side by side; and before names, the kinds of AI note taker.