Optiq vs Granola for confidentiality-sensitive professionals

Granola and Optiq agree on more than most head-to-head pages admit. Both refuse to send a bot into your meetings, both capture audio on the device, and both treat raw audio as radioactive: Granola deletes it once the note is made, and Optiq never uploads it in the first place. That shared instinct is exactly why the remaining difference matters.

The difference is where the boundary sits. In Granola, the audio dies but the transcript and note are uploaded to Granola's US-hosted AWS cloud, retained indefinitely unless an Enterprise retention policy deletes them. In Optiq, the transcript and note never leave your machine at all. They live in an encrypted local database, and only individual model requests transit a confidential backend with zero retention. For a normal company, cloud notes are a convenience. For a firm or practice handling confidential client work, every stored transcript is something a compliance officer has to account for.

Granola trains its models on de-identified user data by default on its free and Business plans, with an opt-out in settings and a default opt-out for Enterprise. It also routes meeting content through third-party AI providers, which are contractually barred from training on it. That is a reasonable, disclosed setup, but it depends on de-identification pipelines and vendor contracts working as promised, and on every user remembering to flip the toggle.

Optiq's answer is shorter: nothing is trained on your data, on any plan, and model calls default to private Venice models with zero data retention. There is no toggle to remember because there is nothing to opt out of.

Granola is straightforwardly honest here, and we respect it: its docs state that it is not HIPAA compliant, cannot sign business associate agreements, and should not be used to store or process protected health information. For a healthcare team, that is a hard stop, not a trade-off. The same caution applies more broadly: Granola makes no privilege or confidentiality commitments for legal or financial data either.

Optiq is in private beta and does not claim HIPAA or other formal compliance certifications yet either; the difference is direction. Optiq is being built for organizations handling sensitive client and patient work, with local-first storage that keeps most sensitive material off servers entirely, and compliance work is in progress rather than out of scope. There is more detail on our security page.