Cedar Assistant vs Brae

Cedar is a flexible AI workspace for iPhone and iPad that lets you choose the right model for the job. Use Apple Intelligence for on-device experiences, connect to your own Ollama server for self-hosted open-source models, or work with cloud models from Claude, OpenAI, and Gemini, all from one app. Switch between providers and models per conversation, fine-tune behavior with conversation-specific settings, attach files in supported workflows, generate images with supported OpenAI and Gemini models, and view web citations when supported responses include them. Cedar also brings Claude Managed Agents into the app, giving you a more powerful way to handle multi-step work and specialized assistants in one place. You stay in control of how each conversation is handled. Keep work on-device with Apple Intelligence, route it through your own Ollama setup, or use connected providers when you want access to their hosted models and tools. Cedar is designed to make those choices clear and practical, while securely storing API keys in Keychain. Whether you want private on-device help, self-hosted open-source models, or access to leading cloud AI systems, Cedar makes it easy to move between them without changing apps or workflows. It’s built for people who want one place to explore, compare, and work with modern AI on their own terms.

Brae is a local-first AI assistant for daily work and personal notes. It gives you a calm place to chat, capture ideas, review meetings, and keep useful context on your device. Use Brae to: - Chat with an on-device assistant for everyday questions and drafts. - Talk in Live mode, with typed fallback when speech is unavailable. - Use See World to ask about what the camera sees, powered by an on-device vision model when available. - Capture Meeting Notes, edit the transcript, and save it to your Library. - Review saved notes, call records, imported files, and generated artifacts in Library. - Keep Today focused on local follow-ups from your own notes and calls. - Manage local models in Model Setup, including downloads you explicitly choose. - Control privacy-sensitive features from Settings. Brae is built around local-first behavior. There is no account, no analytics, no advertising, and no tracking. Your chats, transcripts, notes, files, memory, and settings stay on your device by default. Brae does not operate a Bubustudio backend that stores your content. Network use is explicit and user-initiated: - Model downloads happen only when you choose to download a local model from Hugging Face. - Location, nearby-place, destination, and route lookups use Apple MapKit and Core Location only when you ask. - Optional iCloud sync is off by default and, when enabled, uses your private CloudKit database. - Optional web search is off by default. When enabled, Brae sends the search query to DuckDuckGo’s keyless Instant Answer API so results can be returned.