Orb vs Brae
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Orb
This proactive AI assistant anticipates your needs, offering timely reminders and updates without being asked. It allows you to control your computer remotely via your phone, handling tasks like file organization and providing voice-first, human-like interactions. Your data remains private as it runs on your own hardware.
- Proactive notifications
- Remote computer control
- Voice-first interaction
- Open-source server
- Customizable AI engine
- Private data handling
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7:02 AM. You haven't said a word yet. "Morning. Rain clears by nine. Your ten o'clock moved to ten thirty — and that form you've been dodging is due today, so I put it at the top of your list." Every assistant until now has waited to be asked. Orb doesn't wait. IT KNOWS WHAT'S UP Orb keeps a running sense of your day and reaches out when something actually matters: "You've got four commits sitting unpushed since Tuesday. Worth protecting before the weekend." "NVDA's up four percent since you asked me to watch it." "You've been at this for twenty hours. I moved tomorrow's first ping to ten so you can sleep in." And when nothing matters? Silence. The bar for interrupting you is high. YOUR COMPUTER, IN YOUR POCKET Run the free, open-source Orb server on your own computer and your phone becomes its remote. Ask for real work from anywhere — "clean up my downloads folder" — and carry on with your day until the receipt lands: "Done. 214 files sorted, three gigs freed." Your machine did the work. Your phone just told you. JUST SAY IT Voice-first, human answers. "Remind me at eight" — "Done, eight tonight." No menus, no forms, no robot voice reading bullet points. IT REMEMBERS What you said last week. What you asked it never to let you skip. Where you left off. One continuous assistant across voice and chat — whichever AI engine you plug in, Orb stays Orb. ACTUALLY YOURS No account. No developer cloud — we couldn't read your data if we wanted to, because there's nothing of ours to read it with. Choose which AI powers it, swap anytime, name it what you like. Self-host and nothing ever leaves hardware you own. You've been promised this assistant for fifteen years. Nobody built it, because it can't be built in someone else's cloud — an assistant this close to your life only works if it's yours.
Brae
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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.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is update cadence: Brae at every 2 days against Orb's every 5 days. On price, ads, in-app purchases and device support 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
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
Orb ships an update every 5 days, Brae every 2 days. The most recent releases landed on October 22, 2026 and October 16, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Orb | Brae |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.0 (2 ratings) — better | — |
| Number of ratings | 2 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Every 5 days | Every 2 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | — |
| Devices | iPhone | iPhone, iPad — better |
| Requires iOS | 17.0 — better | 18.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 7 MB | 33 MB |
| Age rating | 12+ | 12+ |
| Developer | NATHAN BOYD LANGLEY | Haosheng Li |
In-app purchases
Orb
No in-app purchases
Brae
No in-app purchases









