A comparison of the three best macOS meeting transcription apps

Granola, Ally, and Slipbox are all amazing apps for busy professionals who have a lot of online meetings.

At first glance, they all appear very similar. This article highlights some of the similarities and differences so you can make an informed decision on which app to choose.

Granola

Pricing: $14/month

Granola is a bot-free AI note taker which means there won’t be any bot attendees on your call making things awkward.

Granola uses a React-based frontend so you won’t get true native performance, but it’s better than a full React wrapper.

Granola is praised for it’s high quality summaries.

It’s sometimes criticized for not being able to replay recordings (it transcribes in real-time but there’s no audio playback if you want to replay a section of a meeting). It’s also criticized for being weak on speaker identification.

It’s also not capable of long-term context which means that it won’t be able to relate information from one meeting to another or bring past understanding into the current meeting.

Ally AI Note Taker & Transcriber

Pricing: Free and unlimited

Ally is a free macOS AI note taker for meetings. It’s a native SwiftUI app so you get true native performance. It’s also bot-free so no extra meeting attendees. For its AI features, it uses on device STT models for transcription and on device LLM models for its agentic processes like meeting summaries and pulling action items out of voice notes and creating tasks.

Ally emphasizes “Quick Capture” which is basically making getting things recorded as frictionless as possible. To that end, you can start recordings from:

• The iOS app and your phone’s Action button (you don’t even need to unlock your phone to capture a voice note!)
• The notch so you can start a recording no matter app you’re using at the time to quickly get a thought out of your head or, great for meetings, you can start a recording without ever breaking eye contact with whoever you’re meeting with.
• Global, customizable keyboard shortcuts. If you’re a keyboard warrior, you can set up whatever keyboard shortcut you want to start and stop recordings for transcription.

Where Ally really shines is on the intelligence and memory side of things. While Granola’s weakness may be context, it’s Ally’s strength. Ally features a robust, sophisticated, multi-layered context engine that includes a knowledge graph to understand how data is related and connected, key fact storage, semantic and vector search of past meetings, notes, and conversations, and more. This means Ally “knows” the bigger picture and how everything relates. This means it isn’t just looking at one isolated meeting, it’s connecting information across everything it knows to assist you.

Slipbox.ai

Pricing: $99/year

Like Ally, Slipbox is local only and privacy-first. And, like Granola and Ally, it’s a bot-free recorder. Also like Granola and Ally, you can chat with your transcripts so you don’t have to keep scanning a transcript to access key info.

Slipbox offers an Obsidian integration. Ally offers this as well via export locations. Granola has a Granola Sync Obsidian plugin.

While Granola relies heavily on cloud processing, a major downside for anyone who needs to protect company or customer data, Slipbox, like Ally, is 100% on device and fully private.

Slipbox’s standout feature is that it stores voice fingerprints for more accurate speaker diarization.

Which AI meeting note taker is best?

Granola is the most well-known but has the downside of being an API solution which means your data is shared with outside sources.

Slipbox is local like Ally but lacks Ally’s robust feature set which offers transcription as one input method. You can use Ally as only a meeting recorder, but it really shines when you use the web clipper, transcriber, and markdown notes as a complete productivity system.

While all three of these are amazing apps, Ally’s integrated Markdown editor means you work with your data right then and there and your meeting assistant has access to all of your notes, past transcripts, and conversations as context so it becomes a true “working partner” rather than just a transcriber.

So, not only is it free, it’s also the best option for not just capturing notes, but actually taking next steps and getting things done.