Why people leave a bot-based note taker
Almost every reason comes back to the same thing: the tool is visible to everyone else in the meeting, and it changes the conversation.
- It's in the participant list. A named recorder shows up on a client call, a candidate interview, or a 1:1 — and people talk differently once they see it.
- Someone has to let it in. Waiting rooms, external guests, and locked-down corporate meetings mean the bot gets denied exactly when you needed the notes.
- It only covers scheduled video calls. No bot can join a phone call, a hallway conversation, or an ad-hoc huddle nobody put on a calendar.
- The recording persists. Fireflies stores audio and transcripts in its cloud (US, verify), which is a different concern from the bot and doesn't go away when you turn auto-join off.
What Nod does instead
Nod sits in your Mac's menu bar and captures the audio your machine is already playing and recording. There is nothing to invite and nothing to admit, so it works identically on a locked-down client Zoom, an external Teams call, a Google Meet, a Slack huddle, or a phone on speaker. Capture is local on your Mac; transcription isn't. Each audio segment is sent through a European proxy to a hosted transcription service and discarded the instant the text returns, under Zero Data Retention and with no model training. No audio is stored at either end. Only the transcript and summary are saved, encrypted at rest in the EU (AWS eu-west-1). See the security page.
- No participant, no admission, no bot to be denied
- Works on calls a bot structurally cannot reach — phone, in-person, ad-hoc
- No stored audio; transcript and summary encrypted at rest in the EU
- "Ask Nod" recall across your entire history, in 14 languages
- Answers during the call, not just a recap after it
- Readable inside ChatGPT and Claude, scoped to your account
Where Fireflies still wins
Fireflies runs anywhere a browser does and pushes call data into CRMs and team workflows at a depth Nod doesn't attempt. It keeps the recording, so you can re-listen months later. And because the bot joins the meeting rather than your machine, it captures a call you weren't personally on — a genuinely useful thing Nod cannot do, since Nod only ever hears what your Mac hears.
If you're on Windows, or the CRM pipeline is the product for you, stay with Fireflies. If the bot and the stored recording are the problem, Nod is the switch.
Try it on your next call
Nod is free for 14 days with no card, then $12–$20 a month billed annually (pricing). Download Nod for Mac.
More: the head-to-head Nod vs Fireflies, the wider field in our Fireflies alternatives roundup, and why the bot itself is a risk in what a meeting bot actually sees.
Frequently asked questions
What's the best Fireflies alternative without a bot?
On macOS, Nod — it captures your Mac's own audio, never appears in the participant list, and never stores the recording. Granola and Jamie are the other credible bot-free options; Jamie is the one to consider if you need Windows.Does Fireflies.ai join meetings as a participant?
Yes. Fireflies works by sending its notetaker into the call, where it shows in the participant list and has to be admitted from waiting rooms. That's the core design difference — Nod never joins anything.Can Nod record a meeting I'm not attending?
No, and that's a real limitation compared to Fireflies. Nod captures your Mac's audio, so it only hears calls you're actually in. Sending a bot to a meeting on your behalf is something a bot-based tool does and Nod deliberately doesn't.Where does Nod store my meeting data versus Fireflies?
Nod stores only the transcript and summary, encrypted with AES-256 in the EU (AWS eu-west-1, Ireland) under per-user Row-Level Security, with no model training; the audio is discarded from memory about five seconds after capture. Fireflies retains cloud recordings and transcripts and is commonly documented as US-hosted — verify current specifics on their pages.