Came to Granola for the no-bot capture? You’ll like Quietly. Stayed annoyed at the encrypted DB and the monthly bill? You’ll switch — same on-device capture, but plain .md in a folder you pick, for $49 once.
Plain .md. Front-matter has attendees, calendar, duration. Body is clean, LLM-polished Whisper output.
Encrypted SQLite, locked down. Community helpers had to reverse-engineer it; then Granola changed the format and broke them.
Sync you can't turn off. Notes round-trip through Granola's backend even when you didn't opt into it.
$14/seat Business. $35/seat Enterprise. $168–$420 a seat per year, billed forever, for notes you took yourself.
One company between you and your data. If Granola pivots, raises prices, or goes away — what do you have? An encrypted blob.
| Quietly | Granola | |
|---|---|---|
| No bot joins the call | Yes | |
| Audio capture | On-device | On-device |
| Where notes live | Plain .md, your folder | Encrypted SQLite + cloud sync |
| MCP for Claude / Cursor / Codex | Shipping next | Yes |
| Works fully offline | Cloud-dependent | |
| Open in VS Code / any editor | ||
| Bring your own LLM key | OpenAI · Anthropic · Ollama (next) | Granola's stack |
| If the company disappears | Your .md files | Encrypted blob |
| Pricing | $49 once | $14/seat Business · $35/seat Enterprise |
We're not pretending. If these matter to you, stay on Granola.
Granola runs on both. Quietly is macOS-only today; a Windows port is on the roadmap.
Granola's pre-built templates (sales recap, 1:1, retro) are excellent out of the box. Quietly's built-in Chat summarises with your own key, or hand the transcript to any LLM you like.
Granola's Business tier has shared folders + admin. Quietly keeps notes in your own folder — no shared cloud; team licensing is available on request.
Granola's local cache is encrypted; the community had to reverse-engineer it. Quietly writes plain .md with front-matter the day you install it.
Outbound traffic is limited to model downloads, update checks, and (if you opt in) Google Calendar polling — never audio or transcripts. Granola syncs notes through its own backend by default.
Granola Business = $168/seat/year. Quietly = $49 once. Less than four months in you're ahead, forever.
You already pay for Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus. Hand the transcript to your own model, or use Quietly's built-in Chat with the same key — no AI credits, no per-summary cap, cited to the transcript.
Pick Transcribe a file… in Quietly — a .m4a from voice memos, a .wav from a field recorder, a .mp3 of a podcast. Same Markdown, same folder.
VS Code, Atlas.ti, Cursor, Codex CLI, your shell. Granola encrypts; Quietly was never closed in the first place.
Export from Granola. Settings → Export. Granola gives you plain text or an API dump.
Drop the files in your Quietly folder. iCloud / Dropbox / your repo / any folder — wherever you point Quietly.
That's it. Quietly indexes new ones from the moment you install. One-click import is in the works.
Stuck? Email support@meetquietly.com. We help.
Free 7-day trial · No account, no card. 7-day refund. $49 once, no subscription.