LumenQube vs Granola

Granola remembers the meeting.
We keep the meeting, and what it caused.

These two products barely overlap, and the honest version of this page says so up front: Granola is the better meeting notetaker today. LumenQube is where what was decided becomes the deck, the model and the document.

Every claim about Granola on this page was checked on August 19, 2026. Both products change quickly — if something here has gone stale, tell us and we will fix it.

Where Granola is stronger

Listed first, and not grudgingly. If one of these is what you need, Granola is the better buy and this page has done its job.

It is one job, done properly. Calendar-aware briefs before the call, your own notes during it, capture without a bot joining, and an enhanced set of notes afterwards. Every part of that is deliberate.
Memory across meetings. Ask a question that spans months of calls and get an answer. LumenQube has no equivalent — our transcripts attach to a page, not to a meeting the system understands.
Your notes and the transcript coexist. You are never choosing between paying attention and writing things down.
It is finished. Granola does what it says today. Our knowledge layer is a programme in progress, and we would rather compare honestly than optimistically.

Where LumenQube is different

Not “better at everything”. Different in five specific ways that matter if they describe your work.

The meeting becomes a record, not a document. The invitation, the people, the hour and the recording resolve to one thing — so a decision has a date, an author and a quote, and its action items become real tasks in the same place as the rest of your work rather than a list that agrees with nothing.
The output is a file, not a summary. The point of the meeting was usually the thing you have to build afterwards. LumenAgent takes the notes and produces the deck, the model, the memo or the form — in real editors, editable, exportable.
Real editors on the other side of the note. Pull a number into a spreadsheet, put the chart in a deck, redact the contract, publish the follow-up form. No second subscription and no export dance.
The follow-up can become a routine. Do the post-meeting work once, save it as a LumenFlow, and it happens on schedule after that. Watching for the trigger costs no AI credits.
Recording without sending anything. You can record straight into a page and keep the audio local. Transcription is a separate, explicit step — and the live transcript you read while recording comes from your own system’s speech engine.

Side by side

	Granola	LumenQube
Pre-meeting brief from calendar	Yes	An automation can prepare from a calendar lead, and Today shows the day it prepared against
Capture without a bot joining	Yes	Record into the page; live transcript from your system speech engine
Meeting as an object with decisions	Yes	Yes — the invitation and the recording resolve to one meeting, and decisions carry a quote that is checked against the transcript before you see it. How that check works
Cross-meeting recall	Yes	Partly. Meetings, people and notes are linked, so the assistant can follow those links — but there is no person page gathering someone’s meetings and commitments in one view
Turning notes into a deck or a model	Sends to other tools	Built in — the agent drives the editors directly
Editing the resulting file	Elsewhere	Here, in the editor that made it
Repeatable post-meeting workflow	Integrations	LumenFlow, with zero-credit watching
Audio can stay on the machine	Cloud service	Record locally; transcribe only when you ask (Plus and above)
Price	Per seat	Editors free; transcription needs Plus

Which one should you actually use?

Choose Granola if…

meetings are the centre of your working day
you want the best brief-capture-recall loop that exists right now
you need to ask questions across months of past calls
what you need afterwards is a good set of notes, not a built deliverable

Choose LumenQube if…

the meeting is the input and the deliverable is the output
you keep rebuilding the same report, model or deck after the same recurring call
you want the follow-up work to become an automation
you want the recording to stay on your machine unless you say otherwise

Plenty of people run both. Nothing here is exclusive — LumenQube reads and writes the file formats the rest of your stack already speaks.

Being straight about what we still do not have. The meeting object shipped, and with it cited decisions and attendee identities — so the paragraph that used to sit here, saying none of that existed, is gone. Three gaps remain and they are real. We do not identify speakers: where a recording does not label them, a turn says “speaker not identified” rather than guessing. There is no person page — the attendance links exist, the surface does not. And nothing runs while your laptop is shut: artifacts are gathered by this app, on this machine, when it is awake. If continuous cloud capture across a team is the job you are hiring for, hire Granola.

Questions people ask

Does LumenQube record meetings?

It records audio straight into a note page and can transcribe it with word-level timings, and it shows a live transcript while you speak. It does not join calls as a participant and it does not build a meeting record the way a dedicated notetaker does.

Where does my audio go?

Recording into a page keeps the audio in the page. Transcribing a saved recording uploads that audio to LumenQube’s managed transcription service and sends back text plus word timings; long recordings are chunked first. The live transcript you see while recording comes from your own system’s speech engine. If you would rather nothing left the machine, record without transcribing.

Do transcription features cost extra?

Transcription is on Plus and above. The recorder itself is free, as is every editor.

Can I use both?

That is the combination we would actually recommend today. Let Granola own the call, then bring the notes or the summary into LumenQube and hand the follow-up work to the agent.

When will LumenQube have real meeting notes?

Meetings are Phase 5 of the Context Engine programme, after the local object store, canonical tasks, retrieval and the calendar surface. We are not going to put a date on this page that we would then have to quietly change.

Try it against your own work

Every editor is free with no trial timer and no watermark, and a free account includes a monthly AI allowance. The fairest test is your own file, not our screenshots.

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Granola remembers the meeting.We keep the meeting, and what it caused.