A Fireflies.ai alternative with nothing in the cloud
Fireflies promises it won't train on your data. Oats removes the need for the promise.
Short answer: Fireflies is a solid cloud notetaker with a bot that joins your calls, starting at $10 per seat per month. Oats does the capture and summarising on your own Mac, with no bot, no account, and no bill. If your team lives in a CRM, Fireflies wins. If your conversations shouldn't leave your laptop, Oats does.
Fireflies vs Oats, side by side
| Fireflies.ai | Oats | |
|---|---|---|
| Bot joins the call | Yes — visible participant | No |
| Where audio is processed | Their cloud | Your Mac |
| Where transcripts live | Their cloud | Your Mac |
| Works with no internet | No | Yes |
| Account required | Yes | No |
| Free tier | 800 min/month | Unlimited |
| Paid plans | Pro $10 · Business $19 · Enterprise $39/seat/mo | $0 |
| Trains on your data | States it does not | Structurally cannot |
| CRM & workflow integrations | Extensive | None |
| Source code | Closed | Open (MIT) |
Fireflies pricing as of July 2026, from fireflies.ai/pricing.
“We don't train on your data” vs. “we never receive it”
Fireflies states that it does not use customer data to train AI models, and applies zero-retention terms with its AI vendors. We have no reason to doubt that, and it's a better posture than several competitors have.
But notice what kind of statement it is. It's a policy — something a company chooses, and can revise at the next funding round, acquisition, or change of counsel. Policies also don't survive events the company doesn't control: a subpoena, a breach, a misconfigured bucket.
Oats makes a different kind of statement, and it's weaker-sounding but harder to break: there is no server. The audio is processed by a model running on your own machine. There's no bucket to misconfigure and no dataset to subpoena. When people say local-first is “privacy by architecture rather than by promise,” this is the distinction they mean.
Neither approach is automatically right. A promise from a company with real security engineering may serve you better than local files on an unencrypted laptop. Turn on FileVault either way.
Where Fireflies is genuinely better
- Integrations. Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, and a large automation surface. Oats exports Markdown and PDF; that's the whole integration story.
- Unattended recording. The bot covers calls you skip. Oats has to be in the room with you.
- Team search. Shared, searchable transcripts across an org. Oats searches your machine only.
- Conversation analytics for sales coaching — talk ratios, keyword tracking. Oats doesn't do this.
Who should actually switch
Switching makes sense if you're a solo practitioner or small team, your meetings are with clients rather than colleagues, and the compliance conversation is easier when the honest answer is “it never left my laptop.” Lawyers, therapists, clinicians, coaches, and consultants keep arriving for exactly that reason.
If you're a sales org that lives inside a CRM, Fireflies is doing work Oats has no plans to do.