Which of these two actually costs you nothing: Fathom or Granola?

On 20 August 2026 I opened fathom.ai/pricing and granola.ai/pricing in two windows and read them line by line, mostly to check a shorthand I’d been repeating for months. The shorthand was simple. Fathom sends a bot, Granola doesn’t. That’s now wrong, or at least out of date, because Fathom’s free-plan bullet reads “Choice of bot-free (in beta) or bot capture”. So a Fathom vs Granola decision that hangs entirely on the bot needs a footnote before it’s worth anything.

Below is what the two pages say today, what they leave undefined, and the gaps I couldn’t close by reading alone. I’ve stamped the date on the numbers because both companies move them, and a price without a date is just a rumour with a dollar sign in front of it.

Fathom vs Granola pricing, as listed on 20 August 2026

Prices came off each vendor’s own pricing page. Not a review site, not memory.

Two things jump out of that table. The first is that Granola’s pricing page shows no monthly-versus-yearly toggle at all as of 20 August 2026, so the $14 figure is what you pay per user per month with no advertised discount for committing. Fathom’s page does have a toggle, labelled “Annually (save 25%+)”, and it’s the toggle that makes the comparison interesting rather than the headline prices.

Run the arithmetic on a two-person team, which is Fathom’s minimum for its Team plan. Fathom Team at $15 per user billed yearly is $180 a seat per year, so $360 for the pair. Granola Business at $14 a month is $168 a seat per year, so $336 for the pair. That’s a $24 annual gap. It is not a real reason to choose either one.

The gap widens if you’re solo. Fathom’s individual paid tier, Premium, is $20 a month or $16 billed yearly. Granola doesn’t have a separate individual tier, so a single seat of Granola Business costs $14. Cheapest paid seat goes to Granola.

One more line on that page is easy to miss. Fathom advertises a nonprofit offer of 10 free seats, plus a portfolio programme where startups affiliated with selected VCs and accelerators get up to two years of Fathom Team free. The tiers on that page also carry a “90 day guarantee” badge.

The bot question isn’t the clean split it used to be

Granola’s whole positioning is built on this. It says it uses your computer audio, so nothing joins the call as a participant, and the download line reads “Available for macOS, Windows, iOS, Android”. Four platforms, one capture method, no bot anywhere in the story.

Fathom used to be the other side of that line and isn’t any more. Its free plan lists “Choice of bot-free (in beta) or bot capture”, and the feature table further down the same page spells the caveat out: “Choice of bot-free* and bot capture-types (*Beta feature for Mac)”. Read that asterisk twice. Bot-free capture exists at Fathom, on the free plan, and it’s flagged beta and flagged Mac.

Here’s the part I think matters more than the pricing, and I might be wrong about it. The people who care hardest about no bot in the call are usually the ones on external calls with clients, candidates or regulators, and a big share of them are issued a Windows laptop by an employer who chose it for them. A beta feature scoped to Mac doesn’t reach that person. If you’re on a Mac and you like Fathom’s free tier, though, the asterisk costs you nothing except the usual beta caveats. Two very different answers depending on a laptop you probably didn’t pick.

Worth saying plainly: a bot in the participant list isn’t automatically bad. It’s visible, which some teams prefer, and consent is easier to handle when there’s an obvious thing named after your company sitting in the call. We’ve written about the trade-off in more depth in our roundup of no-bot Otter alternatives, and the short version is that visibility is a feature for internal meetings and a liability for some external ones.

The free plans are generous in opposite directions

This is the real fork. Both companies give away a genuinely usable product, and they give away completely different halves of it.

Fathom’s free plan lists “Unlimited recordings + transcriptions”, “Instant AI call summaries” and “Clips, playlists + search across calls”. Unlimited is doing a lot of work in that first bullet, and it appears to mean what it says on volume. The catch sits in the feature table below the tiers, where several AI rows carry a “Limited use” label instead of a tick or a number. Ask Fathom and AI action items both appear in rows tagged that way. The page doesn’t define the limit.

Granola’s Basic plan reads differently. It lists “AI meeting notes”, “See limited meeting history”, “AI chat within and across meetings”, “Shared folders for collaboration”, “Customized note templates”, “Multi-language support” and “Opt out of model training any time”. So you get nearly the whole feature surface, including the AI chat, and the wall you eventually hit is history. The Business tier’s first upgrade bullet is “Unlimited meeting notes and history”, which tells you exactly what Basic is holding back.

Put it in plain terms. If you sit through 30 calls a week and mostly want every one of them recorded, transcribed and searchable, Fathom’s free plan is very hard to argue with. If you take five thoughtful calls a week and want the AI to remember what was said across all of them, Granola Basic hands you more of the product, right up until the history limit bites. Neither page tells you where that limit is.

There’s a privacy line worth flagging as well. Granola puts “Opt out of model training any time” on the free Basic plan, while the org-wide version, “Opt out of model training for everyone in your team”, sits up on Enterprise at $35 per user. Fathom’s pricing page carries no equivalent bullet. That doesn’t mean the control is missing, only that it wasn’t on the page I read on 20 August 2026. If training opt-out is a procurement blocker at your company, ask both sales teams directly instead of inferring it from a pricing grid.

What I couldn’t pin down from either page

Four things stayed unresolved after reading both pricing pages end to end on 20 August 2026, and I’d rather list them than guess:

• The number behind “See limited meeting history” on Granola Basic. No figure appears on the pricing page.
• What “Limited use” means in Fathom’s feature table. No cap, no reset period, no number.
• Whether Fathom’s bot-free capture reaches Windows. The asterisk says Mac; the page doesn’t say when or whether that changes.
• Any annual discount at Granola. The page shows per-user-per-month figures and nothing else.

If you’re deciding between the two on a real budget, those four unknowns are worth an email to each vendor before you commit a team. I’d start with the Granola history limit, since that’s the one most likely to surprise somebody three months in.

Neither of them is trying to help you during the call

Both products are built around the same shape: sit quietly, capture, then hand you something useful after everyone hangs up. That’s the right design for most meetings. It’s the wrong design for the meetings where you needed the answer while the other person was still talking, which in our experience is discovery calls, pricing pushback and technical objections.

That’s the gap Craqly was built for. It’s a desktop app that listens to the live conversation and puts suggestions on your screen while the call is running, across meetings, sales calls and interviews. Checked on craqly.com/pricing on 20 August 2026: the free Starter plan is $0 with 20 credits a month, the page defines credits as “1 credit = 1 minute of live session · credits reset every month”, and “Stealth mode (undetectable)” is listed on every tier including the free one. Paid plans run $19, $39 and $69 a month billed yearly. If you want the head-to-head against one of the two tools in this post, we have a longer Craqly and Fathom breakdown.

How I’d actually pick

Reasons to take Fathom:

• You want unlimited recording and transcription without paying, and you’ll live with undefined limits on the AI extras.
• You’re on a Mac and the bot-free beta covers you.
• You want a real sales stack later, since the Business tier adds CRM field sync and coaching metrics that Granola’s tiers don’t advertise.
• Your team is two or more people and the yearly toggle applies.

Reasons to take Granola:

• No bot is a hard requirement rather than a preference, and you’re not all on Macs.
• You’re one person who’s going to pay anyway, in which case $14 beats $20 and $16.

The honest summary of Fathom vs Granola is that they’re not really competing on price, since the gap on a two-seat team works out at $24 a year. They’re competing on which limit you’d rather live with. Fathom caps the AI on its free plan without telling you the number. Granola caps your history without telling you the number either. Pick the one whose undefined limit you’re less likely to notice, and go and ask them what it is before you roll it out to anyone else.