ShogunAI vs Vela: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of ShogunAI and Vela — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
ShogunAI
ShogunAI
A local-first macOS memory and execution assistant that remembers your workday on-device and finishes work inside the tools you already use.
Key features
- On-Device Memory Layer: Captures mail, meetings, documents and screen context locally and indexes them into an encrypted store on your Mac, with no cloud copy by default.
- Contextual Recall with Sources: Answers plain-language questions across Mail, chat, docs and calendar from a single search, attaching the source and timestamp to every hit so answers can be checked.
- Execution Layer with Three Autonomy Levels: Reversible work runs automatically, drafts wait for review, and anything leaving your Mac stops for explicit approval — with every action logged as what ran, on what evidence, and what left the device.
- Inline Draft at the Caret: Press Option and ShogunAI reads the field around your cursor plus the memory behind it, then writes the continuation directly in the app you are already typing in as a local write you send yourself.
- Meeting Minutes, Not Recordings: Transcribes a meeting as it starts and on completion writes a summary, the decisions made and the commitments it heard, filing next actions into your work state with one tap; audio is never written to disk.
- Two-Way Live Translation: Set the language you speak and the language they speak — their speech reaches you in yours and yours reaches them in theirs, with only text retained afterwards.
- Daily Brief: Assembles what moved overnight, what is still open and what you promised someone before the day starts, rather than on request.
- Shared Memory Across Models and Agents: The same structured state of people, projects, commitments and open loops reaches Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT and anything driven over MCP, CLI or REST, so no session starts cold.
Best for
- Eliminating Cold Starts: Stop re-pasting last week's decisions and open threads at the beginning of every model session — every assistant starts from the same live memory of your work.
- Closing Open Loops: Surface the follow-up that is due today, draft the reply with the correct file attached, and hold it for approval before it reaches the recipient.
- Meeting Follow-Through: Turn a call into decisions, commitments and filed next actions automatically instead of re-listening to a recording.
- Answering 'What Did We Decide?': Recall a specific decision from a Notion brief or Gmail thread weeks later, with the source and time attached so it can be verified.
- Privacy-Constrained Work: Run an assistant over sensitive client or company context on machines where a cloud-indexed copy of the workday is not acceptable.
- Cross-Language Collaboration: Hold live meetings with counterparts in another language and keep only the translated text afterwards.
- Consultant and Founder Context Switching: Keep separate projects, people and commitments straight across many concurrent engagements without manual note discipline.
V
Vela
Vela
AI scheduling assistant that books, coordinates, and manages meetings across email, SMS, WhatsApp, and phone.
Key features
- Email and Messaging Integration: Accepts CC on email and direct messages via SMS or WhatsApp to start scheduling, reading message context to determine meeting intent and constraints.
- Multi-Participant Coordination: Aggregates availability from all participants' calendars, proposes options in each participant's timezone, and negotiates times until consensus is reached.
- Automated Follow-ups and Reminders: Automatically follows up with invitees who haven't responded, confirms bookings, and sends reminders to reduce no-shows and speed up scheduling.
- Real-time Conflict Management: Monitors calendar availability continuously, detects conflicts or double bookings, and triggers automatic re-coordination and updated invites when changes occur.
- Rescheduling and Change Handling: Handles cancellations and reschedules by re-coordinating with all stakeholders, updating invites, and notifying participants with minimal user intervention.
- Enterprise-Scale Operations: Designed to manage thousands of meetings per week for organizations, with administrative controls and reporting to measure time saved and usage.
- CC into email threads to delegate scheduling to the agent
- Direct messaging via SMS and WhatsApp for scheduling requests
- Phone call scheduling and outbound calling at scale
- Real-time calendar availability sync to avoid double bookings
- Timezone-aware time proposals for all participants
- Automated follow-ups and reminders for non-responders
- Automatic rescheduling and invite updates when conflicts arise
- Handles multi-attendee and multi-round scheduling workflows
- No separate links or logins required for participants
- Designed for high-volume, parallel scheduling operations
Best for
- Sales Discovery Calls: Automatically coordinate and book 30–60 minute discovery calls between sales reps and prospects across multiple timezones, reducing the back-and-forth email chains.
- Customer Success Check-ins: Schedule recurring or ad-hoc CS meetings across stakeholders from customer and internal teams, handling reschedules and reminders to maximize attendance.
- Cross-Functional Project Meetings: Organize multi-attendee planning sessions that require availability alignment across engineering, product, and design teams, negotiating times and updating calendars automatically.
- Executive Scheduling at Scale: Manage an executive's calendar by filtering requests, proposing appropriate time slots, and coordinating assistants or multiple stakeholders without manual intervention.
- Professional Services Coordination: For agencies and consultancies, consolidate client meeting requests via email or chat and handle all booking logistics, time zone conversions, and confirmations.
- Event and Interview Scheduling: Coordinate interviewer panels and candidate availability, handle last-minute changes, and automatically update invites and reminders to reduce scheduling overhead.
- Recruiting coordinator for scheduling candidate screens and full interview loops at scale
- Sales and demo meeting scheduling across multiple stakeholders and timezones
- Operations teams automating large batches of calls or meetings
- Administrative replacement for executive assistants to manage calendars
- Customer success teams coordinating cross-company stakeholder meetings