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Listen and the other ways to stop taking notes

Otter, Fireflies, Granola, Plaud and Pocket are all good at what they were built for. This is where they differ from Listen, for conversations that are your own.

The short version

Otter and Fireflies send a notetaker into your meetings and keep everything in their cloud, shared across a team; Fathom does too, with a recorder that needs no bot in beta on the Mac. Granola leaves the bot out, and still keeps your notes in its cloud, built around a team workspace. Plaud and Pocket are recorders you wear or carry, with the audio processed in their cloud. Listen is for the conversations that are yours, whether that is one voice memo a week or calls all day: a Zoom or WhatsApp call on your Mac with nothing joining it, a room or a memo on your iPhone, everything in a folder you own, and what was said turned into what you do next.

Side by side

	Listen	Otter	Fireflies	Granola	Plaud	Pocket
A bot joins your call	No	Its notetaker joins Zoom, Teams and Meet; its app can also record without it	Its notetaker joins; its desktop app can record without it	No	No, it records the room or the phone	No, it records the room or the phone
What you need	A Mac, an iPhone, or both	A browser, computer or phone	A browser, computer or phone	A computer or phone	A Plaud recorder	A Pocket recorder
Where transcription happens	On your own Mac or iPhone	Otter’s cloud	Fireflies’ cloud	Granola’s cloud	Plaud’s cloud	Pocket’s cloud
How much you can transcribe	No limit, free	300 minutes a month free, 1,200 on Pro	Transcription credits by plan	No minute limit; 30 days of history on the free plan	300 minutes a month free, more on paid plans	A free tier, and Pro by subscription
Where your recordings live	A folder on your Mac, audio kept to replay	Otter’s cloud	Fireflies’ cloud	Notes in Granola’s cloud; audio deleted after transcription	Plaud’s cloud	Pocket’s cloud
After the call	Promises in both directions, each the sentence that was said, open until you or a later conversation closes it	A summary with action items	A summary with action items	Notes with action items, and a recipe that gathers to-dos across meetings	A summary of each recording	A summary of each recording
Built around	One person’s library	A team workspace	A team workspace	A team workspace	A recording device	A recording device
Hardware to buy	None	None	None	None	From $189 for the Note Pro	$99 at launch, $199 regular

As each company described itself on 25 September 2026: Otter’s pricing, Fireflies’ pricing, Fathom’s pricing, Granola’s pricing, Plaud’s plans and Pocket’s site. Prices and plans change; check theirs before deciding.

Where Listen is the better fit

Your conversations are yours, not your team’s. A call with a client, a coaching session, a memo to yourself: there is nobody to share it with and plenty you would rather not upload. Listen has no workspace and no account, so there is nothing to share by accident.
Nothing joins the call. The other person hears a conversation, not a bot announcing that it is taking notes.
You never want to think about minutes. Transcription runs on your own Mac or iPhone, so one memo a week and ten calls a day cost the same: nothing.
Notes that don’t end up in a graveyard. A notetaker gives you a summary per meeting, and six months later you are rereading old ones. Listen builds on every call instead: a person’s page grows with each conversation, and asking “what did we agree with Priya in March” brings back the sentence she said it in, with the date and the call, playable from that second.
What was said turns into what happens next. The Promises page keeps what you owe and what you are owed, in the words that were said; a person’s page shows where you left off with them; and a later call can close a promise on its own. How that works →
No device to charge or carry. It uses the Mac you take calls on, and the iPhone in your pocket for a room or a memo.
Your AI can use it. Claude Code, Codex and any MCP client can read your library and keep your promises current, from your own Mac.

Where another one is the better fit

Your team shares notes as a matter of course. Otter, Fireflies and Granola are built for that, with shared workspaces, admin controls and integrations with tools like Notion and HubSpot. Listen has none of those.
You work on Windows or Android. Listen is Mac and iPhone only.
You want to record all day, away from any phone or laptop. A wearable recorder like Plaud or Pocket is made for exactly that.

What leaves your Mac

Recording and transcription never do. The features that use an AI model, such as Chat, profiles and promises, send the text of a conversation, never the audio, and only once you switch them on. Point Chat at a model on your own Mac and nothing about a conversation leaves it. Every connection Listen can make →