BastionChat vs SessionsAI

Your data belongs to you. Your AI should too. Bastion Chat puts a powerful, private AI assistant in your pocket — no subscriptions, no usage limits, no servers watching over your shoulder. Everything runs locally on your device, so your conversations stay completely confidential. Even offline. ——— KEY FEATURES ——— YOUR PRIVATE AI, YOUR RULES Experience top-tier reasoning and "thinking" models without compromising an ounce of privacy. All processing happens on-device. Your conversations are never uploaded, never analyzed, never sold. Just you and your AI. CURATED MODEL CATALOG Browse and download a hand-picked selection of the best open-source models — from compact 1B models that run on any iPhone, to powerful 27B models on iPad and Mac. Thinking models, vision models, tool-use specialists — all pre-configured and ready to run. VISION & MULTIMODAL AI Ask questions about images, analyze screenshots, describe photos, or extract text from documents. Bastion Chat supports multimodal models that see and understand the world alongside you. AGENTIC AI — YOUR AI THAT ACTS Go beyond chat. Enable Agent Mode to let Bastion Chat reason through complex tasks, plan multi-step solutions, and execute actions autonomously using built-in tools. Your private AI that doesn't just talk — it does. FULL RAG & DOCUMENT INDEXATION A complete knowledge pipeline in the palm of your hand. Import PDFs, web pages, Wikipedia articles, or plain text. Bastion Chat indexes your personal knowledge base using full retrieval-augmented generation so answers are always grounded in your content. AI-POWERED SUMMARIES IN SECONDS Overwhelmed by lengthy articles or dense reports? Bastion Chat distills complex content into clear, actionable summaries. Grasp the key points instantly and save hours of reading. SMART WEB SEARCH, ON DEMAND Need real-time information? Enable the optional web search tool to ground your answers in live results — without sacrificing your privacy or your workflow. BRING YOUR OWN MODEL Import any GGUF model directly from Hugging Face or your local files. Capabilities like advanced reasoning, tool use, and vision are detected and configured automatically on import. SCALES WITH YOUR DEVICE On iPhone, run fast and efficient models for everyday tasks. On iPad and Mac, unleash frontier-class models like Qwen 27B for deep research, long-form writing, and complex reasoning — all still 100% local. ONE PURCHASE. YOURS FOREVER. No usage caps. No API costs. Pay once and run unlimited queries for as long as you own your device.

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.