Brainwave vs Ari Helper
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Brainwave
Capture and organize your thoughts with this note-taking application. Create calendar events, reminders, and export notes in various formats. Protect sensitive information with password protection and manage your data with backup and restore options.
- Organize notes with tags
- Password protect sensitive notes
- Create calendar events and reminders
- Export notes to PDF or text
- Supports various links (web, phone, maps)
- Backup and restore notes
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Transfer your ideas from brain wave to Brainwave. • Organize on the fly by tagging notes with any number of tags • Flag important notes; password protect sensitive notes • Create calendar events and reminders based on your notes • Change the size and font of the text • Export notes directly from Brainwave to a variety of destinations, in formats including: ◦ Email as PDF ◦ Send to Dropbox or almost any app as PDF ◦ Email as text • Create restore points, backing up all notes to a single file • Supports links (web, phone numbers, map addresses - that can even be opened in Google Maps, calendar dates) • Numerous configuration options • Length of a note is limited only by device memory • Supports all device orientations Sometimes an idea can circle around and around in your mind - like a whirlpool swirling, or a tidal wave growing, it confuses, it overwhelms, and it isn't until you write it down that it becomes clear. Write it down. Get it out. Record it before it’s washed away. Free your mind to work on other thoughts. Store your brain waves in Brainwave.
Ari Helper
This AI assistant operates entirely offline, prioritizing user privacy by not collecting personal data. It integrates with Siri for hands-free activation and offers text-to-speech capabilities. Users can manage conversations, download custom models, and even interact with self-hosted or cloud-based AI services.
- Offline AI operation
- Siri and App Intents integration
- Privacy-focused, no data collection
- Text-to-Speech with voice options
- Conversation history sync via iCloud
- Downloadable custom AI models
- Code syntax highlighting
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Introducing Ari - Your Easy-to-Use AI Assistant! Meet Ari, your personal AI assistant, right on your device! Ari runs its models on the device itself, so it works entirely offline — no internet connection required. Your privacy is our priority – Ari doesn't collect any of your personal data. Start Ari anywhere with Siri and App Intents — just say "Ask Ari," speak your question, and hear the answer back. Power users get a full Shortcuts catalog: Ask Ari with any model (Apple Intelligence, local, or cloud), start chats, generate and edit images, analyze PDFs, speak replies, change settings, queue Code Session tasks on Mac, and dispatch prompts to other devices — all chainable in Shortcuts. Ari is on your wrist too: the Apple Watch app remote-controls Ari on iPhone. Dictate from the "Ask Ari" complication or Smart Stack, watch answers stream in, hear them spoken, and hand long replies to iPhone. Questions queue when the phone is away; private chats stay off the watch. Conversations show up in Spotlight — including by what's in their images. Ari reads text and objects in chat pictures on-device so you can search for "that screenshot with the receipt". Private media is never indexed. With Sensitive Content Warning on, flagged images blur behind "Show Anyway" (verified adults can opt out). More to love: Text-to-Speech (device voice or Ava); long-press to copy or retry across models; syntax highlighting with one-tap code copy; Previous Chats synced via iCloud. On Apple Intelligence (iOS 26 / macOS 26 and later), Ari uses the on-device foundation model by default — private, no API key, no network. Attach images: on iOS 27 and macOS 27 the model sees them directly; on OS 26 Ari describes them on-device with the Vision framework (text, tables, barcodes, subjects). Prefer full vision models? Pick one from the menu. Download on-device models with a tap — Google's Gemma 4 for chat, Stable Diffusion converted for Core ML for pictures — or import a model folder of your own. Self-host with Ollama or any OpenAI-compatible server (LM Studio, vLLM, llama.cpp, LiteLLM), or generate images with Draw Things over gRPC. New in Ari 7: Ari makes pictures and films, and repairs the ones you already have. Films is a studio — write a film as a list of shots, render them one at a time, keep the ones that work, and watch the cut come together in a player above the timeline. Pictures get a canvas editor: brush over a crease and heal it, paint a leash or a stranger out of the frame, or treat the whole photograph — repair, denoise, sharpen camera shake, colorize, upscale four times. Every restoration model runs on your device and downloads on first use rather than shipping in the app. Point the camera at something and ask about it. Look at Something sends the frame to whichever model you have selected — on-device, self-hosted or cloud — captions the answer under the picture and speaks it if you like. Talk to it and it listens, answers, then listens again. It sits beside the microphone, and goes on the Lock Screen, Control Center, the Action Button or Siri. Cloud providers with your own keys: OpenAI (GPT-5 family and GPT Image), xAI Grok (4.5 plus Grok Imagine), Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini (plus Imagen and Veo), and AWS Bedrock. Image-capable models accept photos; import text and source files. Cloud use reminds you each provider's privacy policy applies. On Mac, open a Code Session on a project folder with Grok for agentic tools — read, edit, search, git, shell, browser, web, and MCP — so Ari's GUI agent matches a terminal coding agent. Note: For strongest privacy with iCloud sync, enable Advanced Data Protection. Without it, conversations stay limited to your iCloud account but are not fully end-to-end encrypted. Optionally powered by Gemma 4 (HuggingFace) for offline chat and image understanding. Download Ari and keep your AI assistant at your fingertips!
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is review sentiment: Ari Helper at 100% against Brainwave's 20%. Ari Helper also leads on rating (5.0 vs 2.0) and update cadence (weekly vs every 3 months). Brainwave's advantage is price ($0.99 vs $24.99) and iOS requirement (11.0 vs 26.0). On ratings volume, ads, in-app purchases and monetization model there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Brainwave costs $0.99 and Ari Helper $24.99 up front. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
Ari Helper holds the better App Store score, 5.0 against 2.0. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 1 and 1 respectively. Written reviews point the same way: 20% of Brainwave's written reviews are positive against 100% of Ari Helper's.
Brainwave ships an update every 3 months, Ari Helper weekly. The most recent releases landed on October 1, 2026 and October 13, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Brainwave | Ari Helper |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0.99 — better | $24.99 |
| Rating | 2.0 (1 ratings) | 5.0 (1 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 20.0% of reviews | 100.0% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 1 | 1 |
| Update frequency | Every 3 months | Weekly — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Paid | Paid |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod | iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch — better |
| Requires iOS | 11.0 — better | 26.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 9 MB | 90 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 17+ |
| Developer | Zymbiotic Technologies | Blaine Miller |
Customer experience
Brainwave
Ari Helper
In-app purchases
Brainwave
No in-app purchases
Ari Helper
No in-app purchases









