Cachalot vs Fireflies.ai
Fireflies is built around a bot that attends the call for you and an archive everyone can search. Cachalot is built around the opposite constraint: nothing joins the call, and nothing leaves the Mac.
The structural difference
| Cachalot | Fireflies.ai | |
|---|---|---|
| Joins your meeting as a bot | No — nothing appears in the call | Yes — a notetaker joins the call and appears to participants |
| Where your audio goes | Nowhere. It stays in ~/Documents on your Mac | Stored and processed in Fireflies' cloud |
| Works offline | Yes — recording, transcription and notes all run locally | No |
| Runs on | macOS 26+, Apple Silicon | Web and meeting-platform integrations |
Based on Fireflies.ai's publicly documented behaviour as of September 2026. Prices and individual features change often, so they are deliberately left out. Spotted something wrong? Tell us and we will fix it.
When Fireflies.ai is the better choice
- you want CRM and workflow integrations that write meeting data into other systems
- your team needs one searchable archive of every call across the company
- meetings must be captured even when nobody from your side attends on a Mac
Cachalot is built for the opposite constraint: conversations that cannot be uploaded — client work under NDA, candidate interviews, medical, legal and financial calls — where a bot in the meeting or audio in someone else's cloud is not an option.
Try it on your next call
Free, no account, no trial period. Record, get notes, and see for yourself that nothing leaves the machine.