Short answer: Granola is a well-built tool with a real security program. It is not a local tool. No bot joins your call, which makes it feel private. The audio it captures on your Mac still goes to the cloud for transcription, and your notes live in Granola’s cloud too. Whether that counts as “safe” depends on what people say in the meeting.

Bot-free and local are two different things

Granola’s signature move is capturing audio from your Mac instead of sending a bot into the call. Nothing joins the meeting, nobody sees “Granola Notetaker” in the participant list, and there is no awkward consent moment with a robot in the room.

Where the audio is captured and where it is processed are separate questions. Granola captures on your Mac, then sends the audio to the cloud for transcription and runs its AI features through large-model providers. It stores your notes and transcripts in its cloud and syncs them across devices, which is what makes its sharing and mobile features work.

The accurate description is bot-free capture, cloud processing, cloud storage. As of this writing, Granola’s own documentation describes real-time transcription through cloud speech providers, transcripts and notes retained in your account, and audio itself not kept after transcription.

None of that is a scandal. Nearly every cloud notetaker works this way, including the ones that do use bots, like Otter. It does mean the content of your meeting transits and rests on infrastructure you don’t control, operated by Granola and its subprocessors.

”Safe” depends on the meeting

For a daily standup or a podcast prep call, cloud processing is a non-issue. The calculus changes when the conversation itself is the sensitive asset:

NDA and client work. Many NDAs restrict disclosing covered information to any third party. A transcription vendor and its AI subprocessors are third parties. Some agreements permit standard service providers; many don’t say, and “we assumed it was fine” is a weak position.
Legal, M&A, and board conversations. Privilege and deal-confidentiality arguments get weaker each time content leaves your custody.
Hiring, HR, and user research. You are recording other people’s words. GDPR and similar regimes make you responsible for where that data goes, and “it went to a US cloud provider and their model vendors” is something you must be able to disclose.
Healthcare, finance, and anything regulated. If a compliance officer would ask “where is the audio processed?”, you need a better answer than a marketing page.

If your meetings live in the first category, Granola is a reasonable choice. If any land in the second, the question shifts from whether Granola’s cloud is well secured to whether the content should be in anyone’s cloud at all.

Questions to ask any notetaker

Before you trust a tool with confidential calls, get concrete answers to five questions:

Is the audio processed on my machine, or uploaded for transcription?
Which subprocessors (speech and LLM providers) see the content?
Does the vendor use my content for model training, and is the opt-out on by default?
What does the vendor retain after the meeting (audio, transcript, notes), and for how long?
Can I export and delete everything, and where do the notes physically live?

Cloud tools differ on questions 2 through 5. Only local tools change the answer to question 1, and question 1 makes the other four mostly moot.

The on-device alternative

This trade-off used to be acceptable because local transcription used to be bad. That is no longer true. Apple Silicon runs Whisper large-v3, the same class of model cloud services use, on your Mac at cloud-grade accuracy.

Quietly takes that approach: bot-free capture like Granola, with the transcription and the AI cleanup pass running on-device. The audio never leaves your Mac, there is no account and no cloud store, and Quietly writes notes as plain Markdown to a folder you choose. For the NDA, legal, and hiring category above, that property is what makes the tool usable at all.

We keep a side-by-side of the two approaches in Quietly vs Granola, and a deeper explainer on what “local” means in private meeting transcription for Mac.

Trust Granola with the meetings you would be comfortable seeing in a vendor’s cloud. For the ones you wouldn’t, keep the audio on your Mac.