Granola vs tl;dv

This is the most interesting privacy comparison in the directory, because the obvious answer is wrong. The tool that keeps out of your meeting is not the one with the stronger privacy position.

Nothing joins, but everything stays in one country

Granola records on your device. Nothing appears in the participant list, nobody else knows it is running, and the audio is deleted once the transcript exists. If the concern is that people behave differently when a bot is watching, Granola solves it completely and tl;dv does not.

Then the storage question arrives. Granola keeps everything in the United States with no regional choice at all, and training uses anonymised data unless you find the setting and switch it off — a default that most people will never change because they will never know it is there. Granola scores 3 for privacy.

tl;dv puts a bot in the call, which everybody sees. It also lets you choose EU or US hosting for the AI processing, and states that no customer data is used to train the models. tl;dv scores 5 for privacy, the highest here.

So one protects the room and the other protects the recording. Which you need depends on whether your risk is a candidate clamming up or a contract clause about where data lives.

What each one asks of you

Granola will never turn up on its own — you have to remember to start it, and a meeting you forget produces nothing at all. tl;dv joins automatically.

On the notes, Granola sharpens what you type during the call rather than writing its own, with custom templates and cross-meeting chat on the free tier. Granola scores 4 for coverage against tl;dv's 3 and 4 for output depth against 3. tl;dv is built around clipping moments out of a recording and scores 4 for workflow fit against Granola's 3.

Free tiers differ in shape rather than generosity: tl;dv gives unlimited transcription and deletes free recordings after three months, and holds archive search behind a paid tier.

Which should you choose?

Choose tl;dv if a contract or a data protection officer will ask where the processing happens, and a visible bot is acceptable.

Choose Granola if the meeting itself is the sensitive part — interviews, one-to-ones, anything where a recorder in the participant list changes what gets said — and switch the training setting off on your first day.