Alternatives
If you came here looking for a Granola alternative, the honest answer is that Whisply lives in a different category. Here are both, side by side, with the others worth knowing.
Granola is a post-meeting notetaker. Whisply is a real-time on-device AI overlay that helps you during the call, not after it. Different categories, different jobs.
Whisply is summoned with Cmd+Return, renders through a system-level content-protected overlay, and stays out of screen sharing and screen recording frames by default on macOS 13 Ventura or later.
Granola is a thoughtful product. It listens to your meetings on your Mac, enhances the rough notes you scribble during the call, and ships you a clean summary at the end. For a lot of people that is exactly the job. For others, three things start to grate after a few weeks of use.
The first is timing. Granola is post-call by design. The polished notes arrive when the meeting is already over, which is helpful for archival but useless for the question you fumbled twenty seconds ago. The second is scope. It is built around meetings. If the moment that mattered was a phone interview, a live demo, or a customer support call on a different surface, the assist is not really there. The third is privacy posture. Even on-device capture sends transcripts and summaries up to a cloud account, and that is enough friction for people in regulated industries or anyone who would rather their conversations not sit in someone else's database.
None of that makes Granola a bad product. It makes it a particular product. If your job is mostly recurring internal meetings and you want a tidy notebook at the end, Granola is genuinely good at that. If you want help in the second you need it, you are looking for something else.
Whisply does not compete with Granola on note quality. Whisply lives in the menu bar, summons with Cmd+Return, and answers questions in real time while the call is still happening. It sees your screen with your permission. It hears the meeting through your microphone. It speaks only to you, through an overlay that is invisible to the person on the other end and stays out of screen sharing and screen recording by default.
The closest comparison is a knowledgeable friend sitting just out of frame. You ask a quiet question, you get a quiet answer, the conversation keeps moving. There is no bot in the participant list because nothing dials in. There is no shared transcript sitting in a third-party account because the assist happens on the device in front of you.
If the moment is a job interview, a sales discovery call, a technical screen, a customer escalation, or a live demo, the help has to arrive while you are still in it. That is the gap Whisply is built for. Granola is built for the report you read on Friday afternoon.
Granola runs on Mac and Windows, with team plans designed around shared workspaces and meeting libraries. Whisply is Mac only, on macOS 13 Ventura or later, on Apple Silicon or Intel. If half your team is on Windows and you want everyone in the same notebook, Granola wins that argument without any drama.
On price, the two tools land in different spots. Granola has a free tier with a monthly meeting cap and a paid tier in the high single digits per month per user. Whisply has a free tier with limited daily messages, a $19.99 per month Pro plan (or $11.99 per month billed annually) that lifts the limits, and a $149.99 per month Pro Undetected plan (or $44.99 per month billed annually) that adds Computer Use and a proctor-resistant overlay for high-stakes exam scenarios. Models are included in every tier, so there is no separate OpenAI or Anthropic key to wire up.
Pick the tool that matches the moment. A meeting library and a per-seat plan for Friday recap reading is one job. A private real-time overlay for the call that decides your salary is a different one.
Open Whisply with Cmd+Return. A small panel appears, anchored to your screen but invisible to the meeting software and any screen recorder running on the system. Ask a question by typing or speaking. The answer arrives in line, with context drawn from what is on screen and what was just said in the call.
Common live uses are unglamorous and very specific. Recalling the exact figure the customer mentioned three minutes ago. Rewriting an answer on the fly when the interviewer reframes the question. Pulling up the line of code on screen and explaining why it does not compile. Drafting a one-line follow-up while the other person is still wrapping their sentence. None of this needs a polished post-call summary. All of it needs to happen now.
Computer Use mode, available on Pro Undetected with Accessibility permission, takes the next step. The overlay can act on the Mac directly, click through a form, fill a field, navigate a flow. It is the difference between an assistant that tells you what to do and one that can do the small parts for you while you stay focused on the conversation.
A few things Granola does that Whisply does not pretend to. Granola is genuinely good at structured meeting notes that read like something a person wrote, with action items pulled out and decisions surfaced. If you live in back-to-back internal meetings and your day ends with sharing a notebook page in Slack, that workflow is short and clean in Granola in a way it is not in a real-time overlay.
Granola also has shared team libraries, templates, and a Windows app. For organisations that want one place where everyone's meeting notes live, with consistent formatting across thirty seats, that is a real product surface and Whisply does not try to be it.
Worth saying out loud: a lot of people will end up using both. Granola for the recurring standups and the project syncs where you want a clean record. Whisply for the interview, the negotiation, the live demo, the support call where the help has to arrive in real time. They sit next to each other on the menu bar fine.
You do not have to delete anything. Whisply lives in the menu bar and runs alongside whatever notetaker you already use. Most people end up running both for a week, then deciding which one earns the dock space for which kind of call.
Download from /download, drag into Applications, and open. macOS will ask for Microphone (to hear the call), Screen Recording (to see what is on screen), and optionally Accessibility (for Computer Use on Pro Undetected). The /docs page walks through each prompt with screenshots.
Pick a call that matters. A discovery call, a one-on-one, a technical screen. When the moment arrives, press Cmd+Return and ask the overlay your question. The answer renders in a panel that the person on the other end cannot see and that screen sharing will not capture.
After a week, the split tends to be obvious. Recurring internal syncs and project standups where you want a clean shared notebook stay on Granola. Interviews, sales calls, support escalations, and anything live where you need the help in real time move to Whisply. Both can coexist on the same Mac without any conflict.
No, and we try not to pretend otherwise. Granola is a post-call notetaker that produces structured meeting notes after the conversation ends. Whisply is a real-time on-device AI overlay that helps you during the conversation through a Cmd+Return menu bar panel. Plenty of people run both on the same Mac, one for the meeting recap and one for the live moment when an answer has to arrive now. If your job is mostly internal syncs and you want a tidy shared notebook, Granola is a fine choice and we will not argue you out of it.
No. Whisply is Mac only and requires macOS 13 Ventura or later, on Apple Silicon or Intel. We made that choice deliberately because the overlay relies on macOS-specific APIs for content protection, Screen Recording permission, and Accessibility hooks for Computer Use. A Windows port would be a different product, not the same one with a different installer. If your whole team is on Windows, Granola or Fireflies is the more practical pick.
No. Whisply does not dial into the meeting as a participant, so there is no Notetaker entry in the attendee list. The overlay renders through a system-level content-protected window, so when you share your screen on Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or most other conferencing apps, the overlay stays out of the shared frame. Screen recordings captured on your Mac also will not pick it up by default. The person on the other end sees the same screen they would have seen without Whisply running.
Whisply has a free tier with limited daily messages, a $19.99 per month Pro plan (or $11.99 per month if you pay annually) that lifts the limits, and a $149.99 per month Pro Undetected plan (or $44.99 per month billed annually) that adds Computer Use and the proctor-resistant overlay. Granola has a free tier with a monthly meeting cap and a paid tier in the high single digits per user per month. The price gap reflects what each tool does. Granola is paying for notebook hosting and team features. Whisply is paying for real-time inference on the device, with models included and no separate API key required.
Yes, but it is not the headline feature. Whisply can produce a recap of what was said and what was asked during the session, and you can copy or share it. If a polished, team-shared meeting notebook is the primary thing you want from a tool, with templates and a library of past meetings, Granola is built around that workflow and does it better. Whisply is built around the live moment, and the summary is a side effect rather than the product.
The overlay is summoned and rendered locally and stays out of screen sharing and screen recording by default on macOS 13 Ventura or later. Inference runs through the included models, which means model calls go to the providers we use, not to a shared notebook workspace tied to your team account. There is no transcript shipped to a third-party cloud library that your colleagues can browse. If you want the deeper version of how the overlay stays private, the /undetectability page walks through the system-level content protection details.
The features that make Whisply useful, namely Screen Recording for seeing the call, Microphone for hearing it, Accessibility for Computer Use on Pro Undetected, and system-level content protection on the overlay, are not compatible with the sandboxing rules that the Mac App Store requires. Distributing directly from whisply.net is the only way to ship the actual product. The download is notarised by Apple and walked through step by step in /docs.
Mac only. macOS 13 or later. No bot in your calls.
