Granola vs Wispr Flow: two free tiers, one week to decide

Pick Wispr Flow if your day goes into writing across many apps, and Granola if it goes into back-to-back meetings: Granola shipped dictation this week and Wispr Flow already had a notetaker, so the free caps decide more than the prices do. Our Wispr Flow entry carries the measured side; Granola we have never run on an account, so every Granola figure here comes from its own pages, opened this morning.

Pick the tool that matches where your words happen

Until yesterday you could split the two without thinking: Flow dictated, Granola listened to meetings. TechCrunch reported the launch yesterday, months after Wispr launched its Notetaker, and Granola's own homepage now announces "New Voice typing by Granola". Its voice typing page says "Unlimited words, for free" on every plan including Basic, on Mac today, with the other platforms promised. Wispr's product page answers with "Wispr Flow Notetaker is now available on Windows and Mac".

Flow types wherever your cursor is, no plugins, in Gmail, Slack, iMessage, a terminal or an AI tool, in 100+ languages, syncing across every device it ships on. Granola is a notepad for meetings: it records your device audio without inviting a bot, works with Zoom, Google Meet and Teams, preps a Brief before external meetings from your calendar, and hands you notes, action items and follow-ups when the call ends. Flow has been my main text input since 2024, after testing dozens of dictation tools, and the dashboard counted 1 145 134 words dictated as of 25 September 2026, at an average of 113 words a minute, across 144 distinct applications, with a 27-day streak running. What dictation still gets wrong, and what it fixed, is in dictation that finally works.

Wispr publishes its own "Wispr Notetaker vs Granola" post, dated 3 August 2026 on their blog, and it wins every row that matters to them. Wispr credits its Notetaker with named speakers in the final transcript, against display-name tags for the competitor on Google Meet with a browser extension. Wispr also claims 21 transcribed languages for the Notetaker, and a one-click import of your existing notes from the other tool.

Read the caps before the prices

Wispr Flow's pricing page, read on 30 October 2026, puts Pro at 15 dollars a user each month, or 12 with annual billing, on a toggle that takes 20 percent off the annual rate. Free at 0 dollars: speech-to-text in any app, 100+ languages, a dictionary that learns your names, snippets, and limited Notetaker access. Growth at 23 dollars a user, monthly, or 18 annual, dictation only, with the Notetaker added at 33.

On Mac and Windows you see "Weekly dictation limit reached" after 2,000 words, but new dictations are blocked only above 5,000. On Android dictation slows after 2,500 words in a week and caps at 3,000. On iPhone it slows after 550 words and stops at 750. Unused words do not carry over, and Notetaker meetings do not count toward this allowance.

Granola's pricing page, read the same day, lists Business at 14 dollars per user, per month, and no annual option anywhere on the page. Basic at 0 dollars: AI meeting notes, 30 days of meeting history, AI chat within and across meetings on Auto, shared folders, customized note templates, voice typing in any app, multi-language support, and an opt-out of model training. Enterprise at 35 dollars: SSO, priority support, org-wide auto-deletion, with unlimited notes and history and the advanced integrations sitting on the Business tier, including Attio, Notion, HubSpot, Affinity, Zapier, MCP and API access. Pre-meeting briefs and follow-up emails are marked not included on Basic.

Flow's answer is the cancel-anytime line; Granola's page just says Download for free, and lists no trial terms.

Run your own Monday for a week

Dictate your real messages in Flow for five working days and watch the counter: at our measured 113 words a minute, the first notice is about 2,000 divided by 113, or 18 minutes of Monday speech. If your Monday alone clears that, you have your answer on the dictation side before the week ends, and the block above that tells you how far the free tier really stretches. Then sit through two real calls with Granola running and grade its summary and action items against the notes you would have kept yourself. The history lock will not show up inside a week, so judge the notes side on summary quality and on whether you miss the briefs that Basic excludes.

If both caps pinch, paying both sides runs 15 plus 14, or 29 dollars a user each month, which is the price of finding out the hard way instead of counting first. Students get a published break on the Flow side: their students page gives 3 months of Pro free, then 6 dollars a month billed annually, verified with a .edu email or an enrollment document. There is also a negotiated free month on Flow for accounts opened through the link on our Wispr Flow page; no public page publishes that arrangement, and it was re-confirmed on 22 September 2026. The full breakdown of what each Flow tier includes lives in our Wispr Flow pricing piece.

Check what breaks before the second month

• Treat the notice as a message, not a stop. Their docs separate a soft limit, which changes messaging or slows dictation, from a hard cap, which blocks new dictations; on desktop the block lands days after the notice for a heavy writer.
• Do not expect tricks to work: restarting the app does not renew the allowance, and the reset is one shared weekly window, shown in some messages as "Dictation resets Sunday, 12 a.m. PT".
• On Android, the ceiling binds only Free accounts without an active Google Play subscription, and a Play purchase lifts it without restarting the app.
• A dictation already started is never interrupted when the cap lands mid-sentence; what you began, you finish.
• Flow's free Notetaker carries a weekly meeting limit of its own, and their pricing FAQ says recordings under five minutes do not count toward it.
• Granola deletes audio after transcription on every tier, and on Basic its MCP reaches only personal notes from the last month: the archive lock also bounds what Claude and ChatGPT can see.

The two free tiers sit on the same Mac without fighting over the microphone: one fills the app your cursor is in, the other records the call and writes it up afterwards. Wispr Flow is an affiliate on this site, so the catalogue entry carries our link and we earn a commission on subscriptions through it; Granola pays us nothing either way.