Granola Alternative: Sally in the GDPR Comparison

Looking for a Granola Alternative? What to Know First

Granola is a fast, bot-free AI notetaker, and a good one. But anyone looking for a Granola alternative usually has a clear reason: Granola hosts data in the US, with no EU residency, and processes transcripts through US subprocessors. This comparison covers Granola's strengths honestly, frames the data-protection question for businesses under the GDPR, and sets Sally, a GDPR-compliant alternative from Germany, against it.

What Granola Does Well

Granola's strengths are real, and they are the reason it has spread so quickly among professionals.

Bot-Free, and No Audio Stored

Granola does not join your call as a visible bot. It captures your microphone and the meeting's system audio directly on your device, transcribes in real time on macOS and Windows (and via a temporary cache on iOS), and then discards the audio. Only the transcript and your notes are retained. Not keeping the audio at all is a genuine data-minimisation advantage over tools that archive every recording.

Fast, Polished Notes

The output is the part users rave about. Granola produces clean, well-structured notes quickly, lets you chat with your meetings and works across any conferencing platform because it captures system audio rather than integrating per platform. For an individual professional who simply wants good notes with minimal friction, it is hard to beat.

A Well-Funded, Reliable Provider

Granola Inc. is well-funded, reached a high valuation in 2026 and holds a SOC 2 Type 2 certification. For German buyers who worry about whether a tool will still exist in two years, that stability is reassuring. The reliability question here is not about the company's longevity, but about where it processes your data.

Is Granola GDPR-Compliant? The Honest Answer

Granola gets several important things right, but its data jurisdiction is the sticking point for German businesses.

Data Is Stored in the US, With No EU Residency

Granola's own security page states it plainly: notes are stored in a US-hosted AWS Virtual Private Cloud. There is currently no EU data residency option; EU-specific arrangements require a conversation with the sales team. For any German organisation that processes personal data in meetings, which is nearly all of them, sending notes and transcripts to the US is a third-country transfer that must be assessed and documented. Whether such a transfer is permissible at all depends on the provider's standing under the EU adequacy framework.

Transcription and AI Run on US Subprocessors

Granola does not transcribe or summarise in-house. It relies on US subprocessors: Deepgram and AssemblyAI for transcription, OpenAI and Anthropic for summaries. Even though Granola does not store audio, the transcript content flows to these US providers. A complete Transfer Impact Assessment under Schrems II has to cover this chain, including the risk arising from US surveillance law.

What Granola Gets Right on Privacy

To be fair, Granola's privacy engineering is above average. It is SOC 2 Type 2 certified, does not retain audio, and contractually prevents OpenAI and Anthropic from training on your data. Its Data Processing Addendum incorporates EU and UK Standard Contractual Clauses. One caveat worth knowing: by default Granola may use anonymised customer data to improve its own product, which individual users can opt out of and which is disabled by default for Enterprise. None of this changes the core fact that the data lives in the US, but it does mean Granola is far from careless.

§ 201 StGB: Bot-Free Means No Automatic Transparency

Granola's bot-free design is convenient, but it has a legal flip side. Because it records microphone and system audio without joining the call as a visible participant, the other people in the room or on the call get no automatic signal that recording is happening. § 201 StGB (violation of the confidentiality of the spoken word) prohibits the covert recording of non-publicly spoken words and carries a penalty of up to three years' imprisonment. Anyone using Granola in a client meeting or internal discussion must inform all participants and obtain their consent. A visible meeting bot makes the recording obvious and helps document that consent. Sally's help center explains how consent and data protection work in practice.

Where Granola Falls Short for German Users

Beyond data residency, two practical points matter for the German market.

German Language and Dialects

Granola supports German alongside other languages, but it uses general-purpose models that are not tuned for the DACH region. Austrian German, Swiss German and pronounced regional dialects such as Bavarian, Alemannic or Cologne German are recognised less accurately than standard High German, and German medical, legal or technical terminology remains a known weakness for models trained predominantly on English data.

The US Question in Procurement

For regulated industries such as legal, healthcare, finance or the public sector, a US server location is frequently a disqualifying criterion regardless of how good the tool is. Even where it is permissible, the Standard Contractual Clauses and Transfer Impact Assessment add real work for a small or medium-sized business without an in-house data protection officer. A provider that hosts in Germany removes that work entirely, as we lay out in our overview of German servers versus the US cloud.

Sally: The Alternative Hosted in Germany

For German businesses that want Granola's convenience without the US data path, Sally offers a different footing. Sally is an AI meeting assistant from Aliru GmbH in Mannheim, hosted and developed exclusively in Germany.

Data Stays in Germany

All data is processed and stored exclusively on servers in Germany. There is no third-country transfer to assess, no US subprocessor chain and no Transfer Impact Assessment under Schrems II, because all processing takes place within the EU. The contractual partner is Aliru GmbH, a German company that signs a German data processing agreement and is liable under German law. Sally is also ISO-certified, with information security verified by independent audits.

German Language and a Visible Bot

Sally is optimised for German and German dialects rather than adapted from a general English model, and it joins meetings as a visible bot, so recording is transparent from the start and consent is easy to obtain and document. For online meetings it joins Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Meet automatically; for in-person conversations the Sally App on iOS and Android records directly. Meeting notes flow into seven native CRM integrations, including HubSpot and Salesforce.

Granola vs. Sally: A Direct Comparison

An overview of the key differences at a glance:

Conclusion: Is Granola the Right Tool for German Businesses?

Granola is an excellent product and a serious, well-funded provider. If you are an individual professional who wants fast, polished notes and is comfortable with US-hosted processing, it delivers, and its privacy engineering (no stored audio, SOC 2, no third-party training) is better than most.

For a German business, the calculation turns on jurisdiction. The data lives in the US, there is no EU residency option, the transcription and AI run through US subprocessors, and the bot-free design puts the consent burden entirely on you. Add German-language quality that is not DACH-tuned, and the gap to a German-hosted solution becomes clear.

Anyone who wants comparable convenience with the data kept in Germany will find Sally a GDPR-compliant alternative, developed and hosted in Germany, with German support, native integrations and a visible bot that keeps recording transparent. Sally can be tested free of charge for 30 days; see the pricing page for details.

Disclaimer: This is not legal advice.