Comparison

Ari Helper vs SessionsAI

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

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.

Highlights
  • 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
Features
Read full description

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!

About

SessionsAI

This app offers private AI chat sessions that run entirely on your device, ensuring your conversations and data remain secure. It allows for offline use, local model execution, and on-device image generation, giving you full control over your AI interactions.

Highlights
  • On-device AI processing
  • No cloud servers or accounts
  • Local language model execution
  • On-device image generation
  • Private knowledge base integration
  • Offline functionality
Features
Read full description

Sessions AI is a private AI workspace that runs entirely on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Not just a chat box: it uses real tools, works from your own documents, and creates images—all on device, with no account and no cloud. More than a chat box Most on-device AI apps just run a model. Sessions AI gives the assistant real tools and lets it do the work: calculate, convert units, look things up on Wikipedia, check your calendar, add reminders, search the web, fetch a page, generate an image. Ask for something involved and it writes a plan first—which you can read, edit, and approve before it spends a moment of compute. You see every step it takes. Ask by voice, or from a Shortcut Say "Start a chat in Sessions AI" to Siri and speak your question—it opens the app and lands the answer in a real conversation you can carry on. The Ask Sessions AI action appears in Spotlight and the Shortcuts app too, so you can build it into your own workflows. Ground answers in your own knowledge Give a persona its ownprivate knowledge base—add documents from a file or a URL, including Word, RTF, and PDF. When you ask a question, Sessions AI searches that content on device and bases its answer on it, and shows you which passages it used. Nothing is uploaded; indexing and search happen locally. Personas that keep work separate Set up a persona for each kind of work, each with its own system prompt, knowledge base, and connected tools. Switch per chat. Research stays separate from writing, and work stays separate from home. Bring your own tools (MCP) Connect Model Context Protocol servers and their tools appear right in your chat, alongside the built-in ones. Add custom HTTP headers for authentication, stored securely in the Keychain. It's your workspace—extend it however you like. Create images on device Ask the assistant to draw, sketch, or visualize—and it generates images right on your device, no cloud APIs. Choose from fast models like Stable Diffusion XL Lightning and Z-Image Turbo through to higher-quality ones like FLUX.2 Klein, with larger models such as Qwen Image on high-memory Macs. Watch a live preview as it draws, start from one of your own photos with image-to-image, and reuse the seed shown with each result to reproduce or vary it. Browse everything you've made in a built-in Gallery. Your chats are yours Every conversation is saved on your device as a plain Markdown file you can open in the Files app—no proprietary format, no lock-in, no export button needed. Pin, rename, group, and search across every chat by name or content. Your model, your choice Sessions AIruns open language models in a range of sizes—Gemma, Qwen, Ministral, Mistral, and Ternary Bonsai families among them. Pick a small, fast model for quick answers or a larger one for harder work, and set a different model per conversation. Download only what you need; remove any model to free space. Made for every screen Designed for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with full Dark Mode support. On iPad and Mac, a roomy sidebar lets you group and pin chats and jump between your models and Gallery; on iPhone, a simple tab bar keeps everything a tap away. Built for privacy Chat transcripts, the knowledge base, and all model data stay on your device. Language models and image generation both run locally—nothing you type is sent to the cloud for AI processing. Calendar and reminder access are used only on device to answer your questions. Web search is optional; when enabled, only the search query is sent to the provider (e.g. DuckDuckGo), not your full conversation. No telemetry, no analytics, no account—just you and your device. Who it's for Sessions AI is for anyone who wants a capable AI workspace without handing their work to the cloud. Whether you care about privacy, work offline, or simply prefer to own your data, it gives you a full assistant that runs where you do: on your own device.

Screenshots

Ari Helper4 screens
SessionsAI4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is price: SessionsAI at $14.99 against Ari Helper's $24.99. Ari Helper's advantage is update cadence (weekly vs monthly). On rating, ratings volume, ads and in-app purchases 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

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Ari Helper costs $24.99 and SessionsAI $14.99 up front. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.

ReceptionRating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings

On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 5.0 for Ari Helper against 5.0 for SessionsAI. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 1 and 2 respectively.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Ari Helper ships an update weekly, SessionsAI monthly. The most recent releases landed on October 13, 2026 and October 11, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard2 real differences · 8 level
Ari Helper versus SessionsAI: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterAri HelperSessionsAI
Price$24.99$14.99 — better
Rating5.0 (1 ratings)5.0 (2 ratings)
Positive reviews100.0% of reviews—
Number of ratings12 — better
Update frequencyWeekly — betterMonthly
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNoNo
MonetizationPaidPaid
DevicesiPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch — betteriPhone, iPad, Mac
Requires iOS26.026.0
Further details — not scored
Size90 MB87 MB
Age rating17+4+
DeveloperBlaine MillerErich Champion

Customer experience

Ari Helper

All ratings1 ratings
Positive100.0%
Neutral0.0%
Negative0.0%
Written reviews5 reviews
Positive100.0%
Neutral0.0%
Negative0.0%

SessionsAI

All ratings2 ratings
Positive100.0%
Neutral0.0%
Negative0.0%

In-app purchases

None

Ari Helper

No in-app purchases

None

SessionsAI

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is Ari Helper free?
Ari Helper costs $24.99, with no in-app purchases.
Is SessionsAI free?
SessionsAI costs $14.99, with no in-app purchases.
Which has better reviews, Ari Helper or SessionsAI?
Ari Helper and SessionsAI are both rated 5.0 out of 5 on the App Store, from 1 and 2 ratings respectively.
Do Ari Helper or SessionsAI have ads?
Neither Ari Helper nor SessionsAI shows ads.
Which is updated more often, Ari Helper or SessionsAI?
Ari Helper ships an update weekly, and SessionsAI monthly. Most recently, Ari Helper was updated on October 13, 2026 and SessionsAI on October 11, 2026.

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