A Granola alternative that keeps everything on your Mac

Same no-bot idea, opposite answer to the cloud.

Credit first

Granola deserves the credit for making one thing mainstream: meetings can be captured from your own machine, with no bot squatting in the participant list. If what you want is meeting notes written for you — summaries, action items, a polished document at the end — Granola is genuinely good at that, and this page will not talk you out of it.

But the notes are written by cloud AI, which means the meeting leaves your machine to be processed, under an account, on a subscription that renews monthly. A lot of people arrive at “Granola alternative” searches from exactly that clause. This page is for them.

The actual difference

RecordCue answers the cloud question in the opposite direction: nothing leaves the Mac, ever. It makes no network requests of its own — no account, no server, no analytics. The price of that is honest and simple: it writes no summaries. It records both sides of the call into an ordinary file, transcribes it on the device with macOS's own speech recognition, labels who was speaking, and files it.

No AI inside — which is the point

The AI notetakers bundle two jobs into one subscription: capturing the conversation, and thinking about it. RecordCue deliberately does only the first, and does it completely — the cue so the recording actually happens, both sides in one file, a labeled transcript, tidy filing. The thinking half it hands to your AI: a read-only agent CLIprints each recording's metadata as JSON, so Claude Code, a script, or any tool that can run a shell picks up a finished call the moment it is saved. You get the summaries if you want them — from the AI you already pay for and already trust — and the raw conversation never has to leave the Mac to get them.

That split is also what makes the one-time price honest: a notetaker's subscription pays for their servers thinking about your meetings, forever. A capture tool has no such meter running. You buy RecordCue once, and the recordings are ordinary files that keep working after any company — theirs or ours — changes its mind.

There is one thing RecordCue does that the notetakers do not bother with: it treats forgetting as the core problem. Granola knows about your meetings from the calendar; RecordCue watches the microphone itself, so the unscheduled call — the client who just rang, the huddle that just started — gets a cue too. Detection is automatic and recording never is: every recording begins with a press.

Side by side

Bot joins the meeting

Granola: No
RecordCue: No

Account required

Granola: Yes
RecordCue: No — none exists

Pricing

Granola: Monthly subscription
RecordCue: One purchase, once

Where the meeting ends up

Granola: Processed in the cloud to write notes
RecordCue: A local file; nothing leaves the Mac

AI summaries and notes

Granola: Yes — its core feature
RecordCue: No — by design

Transcription

Granola: Cloud-assisted
RecordCue: macOS on-device recognition, speaker sides labeled

Knows a call started

Granola: From your calendar
RecordCue: From the microphone — including unscheduled calls

Output format

Granola: Notes in the app
RecordCue: Ordinary .m4a/.mp4 and plain-text transcripts

How to pick

Want notes written for you and comfortable with cloud processing: Granola. Want the recording itself — private, local, yours, in files no vendor can expire — and a cue so it actually gets made: RecordCue. It is free on the Mac App Store (macOS 13+, Apple silicon), with every feature in the free version and a single one-time purchase to remove the ten-minute recording limit. The FAQ says the rest plainly.