Alternative · Comparison
Looking for a Granola alternative that keeps audio on your Mac?
Daisy is an open-source, local-first meeting recorder for macOS. Audio never leaves your machine, transcription runs on the Apple Neural Engine, summaries use your own AI key, and a local MCP server lets Claude Desktop or Cursor query your transcripts without a round-trip through anyone’s cloud.
Free during beta · Lifetime after launch · Apple Silicon (M1+) · macOS 14+
Daisy vs Granola at a glance
| Feature | Daisy | Granola |
|---|---|---|
| Where transcripts & notes live | Your folder, on your disk — never uploaded | Granola's cloud (AWS, US) |
| Audio recording | Captured on your Mac; kept on your schedule (or not at all) | Captured on your Mac; deleted after transcription |
| Transcription | On-device (Whisper, Apple Neural Engine) | Cloud |
| AI summary | Bring your own key — Anthropic, OpenAI, Apple Intelligence, or local Ollama / LM Studio | Granola's own AI (cloud) |
| Open source | Yes — Apache 2.0 | No — closed SaaS |
| Pricing | Free during beta · one-time purchase after launch | $14/user-mo (Business) · $18 (Individual) |
| Bot in the call | No — local capture | No — local capture |
| Works offline | Yes — with Apple Intelligence or a local model (after first download) | Partial — local capture, cloud for notes |
| MCP server for AI clients | Local (127.0.0.1), free, any MCP client | Cloud API / MCP, on paid plans |
| Destinations | Notion, Linear, Attio, Slack, webhook, your folder (via MCP / webhooks) | Granola library + integrations |
| Speaker diarization | On-device (FluidAudio / pyannote) | Cloud |
| Platforms | macOS 14+ (Apple Silicon) | macOS, Windows, iOS |
Where the difference matters
Granola is a strong, polished product. The real difference is where your meeting text ends up. With Granola, transcripts and AI notes are stored in their cloud (on AWS, in the US); with Daisy, they're plain Markdown files in a folder on your Mac that are never uploaded. Both keep your raw audio off any server — Granola deletes it automatically after transcription, Daisy on whatever schedule you choose (including "don't keep audio at all"). Daisy is for the case where even the transcript shouldn't leave your machine: regulated work (legal, medical, finance), customer or research interviews, anything under NDA.
Where Granola is ahead
Multi-platform — Granola runs on Windows and iOS too, not just Mac. If you take meetings on more than your MacBook, that's a real gap Daisy doesn't close today. Granola also has a longer track record, a polished onboarding, and a well-funded team. Daisy is the right choice when you'd trade those for local-first, open source, and a one-time purchase.
Pricing model
Granola's Business plan is $14/user/month (the Individual plan is $18; Enterprise starts at $35) — roughly $168–216 a year per seat, indefinitely. Daisy is free during beta and a one-time purchase after launch: no monthly subscription, no per-meeting fees, no cost that scales with how much you record. Over a few years of daily use, that difference compounds. (Granola pricing as of June 2026 — check their site for current numbers.)
Open source
Daisy is Apache 2.0 on GitHub — you can read every line, build from source, audit the network calls, run a fork. Granola is closed SaaS, which means the privacy claims have to be taken on trust. Both can be defensible positions; if open source matters to you, only one of the two is open source.
Why MCP matters
Daisy runs a local MCP server, so Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, and any other MCP client can query your transcripts straight off your Mac — no cloud round-trip, no API key shared with us. Granola added a cloud MCP server and API in 2026, but it reads notes that already live in Granola's cloud and is gated to paid plans. Daisy's reads transcripts that never left your machine, free, with no plan to unlock. If you spend your day in Claude Desktop and want it to know what you discussed in your 1-on-1s — without anything leaving your laptop — that's what Daisy is built for.
Try Daisy
Free during beta. Download the signed DMG, drop it into Applications, grant microphone + screen-recording permissions on first launch, and start recording. No account, no email wall, nothing to sync.
More comparisons: Otter · Apple’s built-in apps
Comparison written by the Daisy team. Granola positioning verified against granola.ai as of June 2026. If anything is out of date or wrong, open an issue at github.com/addicted-studio/daisy-app/issues and we’ll fix it.