Comparison
Cachalot vs Granola
Neither one puts a bot in your call, so the question is narrower than usual: after the audio is captured on your Mac, where does it go? Granola sends it onward. Cachalot does not.
Download free for MacmacOS 26+, Apple Silicon · No account required
The structural difference
| Cachalot | Granola | |
|---|---|---|
| Joins your meeting as a bot | No — nothing appears in the call | No bot — it captures the audio playing on your Mac |
| Where your audio goes | Nowhere. It stays in ~/Documents on your Mac | Sent to Granola's cloud for transcription and AI notes |
| Works offline | Yes — recording, transcription and notes all run locally | No — the notes are generated server-side |
| Runs on | macOS 26+, Apple Silicon | macOS (and its own cloud) |
Based on Granola'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 Granola is the better choice
- you want notes synced across devices and shared with a team through a hosted workspace
- you prefer a frontier cloud model's writing quality over an on-device model
- you are not constrained by a policy that forbids sending meeting audio to third parties
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.