Oyma vs Granola

Granola and Oyma solve the same problem from opposite ends. Granola is a polished AI notepad for back-to-back meetings that runs its transcription and AI in the cloud and keeps your notes in its own service. Oyma is a Markdown notes app for the Mac that records the call, transcribes it on your Mac and saves the result as a file in a folder you choose.

Neither one sends a bot into your call. The real differences are where the work happens, where your notes live, and how much setup you’re willing to do.

How each handles your notes

Granola keeps your transcripts and notes in a US-hosted AWS virtual private cloud. You read them in Granola’s apps, organise them in folders, and share them with your team through Spaces. Getting them out is the weak spot: there’s no native file export. Reviewers describe two routes, copying a note as Markdown to the clipboard, or a CSV with titles and summaries.

In Oyma, a meeting is just a note. It’s a .md file with YAML frontmatter, sitting in your vault next to everything else you write. That has consequences you notice over months:

• Meeting notes link to project and people notes with wikilinks, and show up in backlinks, the graph and full-text search.
• Any other Markdown app can open them, Obsidian included.
• You can export a note to PDF, Word (DOCX) or HTML when someone outside needs it.
• Nothing ages out. Old meetings stay on your disk for as long as you keep the files.

Granola has no wikilinks or backlinks, because it isn’t trying to be a notes app. If meetings are the only notes you take, that may not matter to you.

How each handles meetings

This is where Granola is strongest. It notices meetings from your calendar, transcribes in real time on Mac and Windows, and writes enhanced notes that merge what you typed with the transcript. It handles 32 languages, and it has apps for iPhone, Android and Apple Watch as well as Mac and Windows. The polish shows: it’s built for people who move from call to call without thinking about the tool.

Oyma covers the core of that loop on the Mac:

• It records your microphone and the call audio without a bot. Call audio needs macOS 14.2 or later and the Screen & System Audio Recording permission, explained in recording permissions.
• It detects Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Webex, Slack huddles, Discord, Around and Whereby, and offers to start notes.
• It can pull attendees from macOS Calendar if you opt in.
• It transcribes live with Whisper on your Mac, in 13 languages plus auto-detect. Models download on demand, from Base at 148 MB to Large v3 Turbo at 1.6 GB; transcription models compares them.
• It summarises with five templates (general, standup, retro, design review, 1:1) and suggests a title.
• Ask answers questions about one note, a selection or a transcript. It doesn’t search across all your meetings the way Granola’s chat does.

Where it falls short of Granola: Oyma doesn’t identify speakers, so lines are marked by audio source (your mic or the call) rather than by person. Without headphones, echo can duplicate lines. There are no integrations, no shared team spaces and no phone app. Meetings walks through the whole flow.

AI and privacy: what leaves your Mac

Granola’s security page is clear about its architecture. Audio goes to transcription providers such as Deepgram and AssemblyAI. Text goes to AI providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, which aren’t allowed to train on it. Granola stores the transcript and notes, not the audio. It trains its own models on anonymised data unless you opt out in settings; that training is off by default only on Enterprise. None of this is hidden, and for many teams it’s a fair trade for zero setup.

Oyma moves the work onto your Mac by default:

• Whisper transcribes on your Mac. The model downloads once, then works offline.
• Summaries and Ask run through Ollama on your Mac, or through your own Anthropic or OpenAI key. With a key, the text you summarise goes to that provider under your account, and the key is stored in the macOS Keychain.
• Local-only mode blocks all network access from the app, so nothing can go out by accident.
• An egress log records every outbound request, and crash reports and usage stats are off unless you turn them on.

The cost of that is setup. Granola’s AI is ready the moment you sign in. Oyma needs Ollama installed with a model pulled, or an API key pasted in, before it can summarise. Privacy architecture shows what each feature sends and when.

Price and what you actually pay

Granola’s pricing has three plans:

• Basic, $0. Unlimited meetings, but only the last 30 days of history are visible. Older notes are hidden, a rule Granola introduced in February 2026.
• Business, $14 per user a month. Full history, more capable models, integrations with Notion, HubSpot, Zapier, Affinity, Attio and Slack, plus an API and MCP access.
• Enterprise, $35 per user a month. Adds single sign-on, user provisioning and organisation-wide controls, including training turned off by default.

The page shows no annual price. A solo user who wants their full history pays $168 a year on Business.

Oyma is free during the private beta, with no account and no paid plan yet. Running Ollama costs nothing; with your own key, you pay the provider only for what you use. Because notes are files on your disk, there’s no history limit to pay your way out of. The build is signed but not yet notarised by Apple, so the beta is invite-only for now. Pricing has the current plan.

Moving from Granola

There’s no importer, so moving is manual. Plan it like this:

1. Save what you need first. On Basic, you can only see the last 30 days. Copy each note you want to keep as Markdown and paste it into a new note in Oyma, where it becomes a normal .md file.
2. Accept what won’t come across. Granola doesn’t keep audio, so there’s no recording to re-transcribe. You bring the text, not the call.
3. Set up the parts that need your Mac. Choose a vault folder, grant the recording permission, download a Whisper model, and install Ollama if you want summaries on-device.
4. Run both for a week. Use each on a few real calls and compare the notes before you cancel anything.

If you have voice memos or recordings from elsewhere, Oyma can transcribe existing audio and video files into notes too.

Who should use which

Pick Granola if you want the most polished meeting notepad with no setup, you work across Windows, iPhone or Android, your team shares notes and pushes them into a CRM, or you meet in languages beyond the 13 Oyma handles.

Pick Oyma if you’re on an Apple silicon Mac, you want transcripts and summaries made on your own machine, and you want every meeting kept as a Markdown file that links into the rest of your notes. You trade Granola’s integrations, mobile apps and speaker names for ownership and control.

If client confidentiality drives the choice, look at Local-only mode and the egress log, then decide with your own policy in hand. Oyma lets you verify what goes out; it doesn’t make that decision for you.

Where Granola is better

• Very polished meeting notepad with calendar-aware auto-detection.
• Apps for Windows, iOS, Android and Apple Watch as well as Mac.
• Team Spaces, shared folders and integrations (HubSpot, Slack, Notion, Zapier, Attio).
• Transcription in 32 languages.

Thinking of moving? Your notes in Oyma are plain Markdown, so you can always take them with you. Start withgetting started, or read what leaves your Mac.