Fenn alternative: Peekaboo vs Fenn
By Vishva Variya · Updated
Fenn brings a local AI model to file search: it indexes 120+ file types, transcribes audio and video, remembers what was on your screen, recognises faces, and lets you search by meaning or chat with your files, all on your Mac. It needs Apple silicon and costs $9 a month or $249 lifetime. Peekaboo does a lighter kind of plain-English search, built from Spotlight’s index and on-device filters, and adds the rest of a file app.
Looking for Fenn itself? It’s at usefenn.com.
- Fenn price
- $9/month, or $249 lifetime
- Fenn requires
- macOS 14 (Apple silicon only) or later
- Peekaboo
- $24.99 one-time (launch price $9.99 until Nov 13), 14-day trial, macOS 14+
Fenn figures from usefenn.com (pricing and FAQ), verified 2026-11-03.
Why pick Peekaboo over Fenn?
Plain English, parsed into filters
“pdfs from last week over 5 MB” becomes editable chips for kind, date, size, source and location, with an “Understood as” line. It’s parsed on your Mac with no model to download, so it runs on Intel Macs too.
Photos and screenshots by what’s in them
Vision text recognition and Apple’s on-device image classifier let you find a screenshot by its words or a photo by what it shows.
Then tidy up
Space Map, Duplicates, App Caches and an uninstaller, with one-click undo, sit in the same app.
Peekaboo vs Fenn, job by job
| Job | Fenn | Peekaboo |
|---|---|---|
| Searching by meaning | Fenn: Semantic AI search and chat over your files | Peekaboo: Plain English turned into filters, plus document text via Spotlight |
| Audio and video contents | Fenn: Transcribed and searchable | Peekaboo: Not offered; found by name, date, size and source |
| Text in screenshots and photos | Fenn: Scanned PDFs; screen memory | Peekaboo: On-device OCR of images and PDFs; photos by what they show |
| Disk cleanup | Fenn: Duplicate finder | Peekaboo: Duplicates, Space Map, App Caches, App Uninstaller, all undoable |
| Macs it runs on | Fenn: Apple silicon, macOS 14+, 4 GB free RAM | Peekaboo: Apple silicon and Intel, macOS 14+ |
| Price | Fenn: $9/month or $249 lifetime | Peekaboo: One-time per Mac after a 14-day trial |
The honest verdict
If you need to search what was said in recordings, or ask questions across your documents, Fenn’s AI does things Peekaboo doesn’t attempt. If what you want is to describe a file (“the invoice PDF from March”, “screenshots with a tracking number”) and have it appear, Peekaboo does that on any Mac, for a one-time price, and helps you clear space too.
Fenn vs Peekaboo: questions
How much is Fenn?
- Flex is $9 a month, Lifetime is $249 once (with updates for a year, then $99 to renew updates), and Teams is $999 for 5 Macs, with a 7-day free trial, per usefenn.com on November 3, 2026. Purchases are non-refundable.
Does Fenn work on Intel Macs?
- No. Fenn needs an Apple silicon Mac with macOS 14 and at least 4 GB of free RAM. Peekaboo runs on Apple silicon and Intel with macOS 14 or later.
Does Peekaboo use AI to search?
- Not a language model. Peekaboo turns your words into filters on your Mac, reads text in images with Apple Vision, and labels photos with Apple’s on-device classifier. Nothing is sent anywhere.