DockPilot AI vs Sidecar ML
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
DockPilot AI
Read full descriptionHide full description
DockPilot puts an AI copilot for your servers in your pocket. Chat with an AI agent that actually does the work — it SSHes into your servers, runs real commands, reads logs, edits files, and fixes issues, always with your approval (or hands-off in Full-Auto mode). Manage your whole fleet from iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. WHAT YOU CAN DO • Talk to your servers — "why is nginx down?", "deploy the latest build", "free up disk space" — and watch the AI run the commands. • Full SSH terminal with per-command approval, or Full-Auto for trusted tasks. • 24/7 uptime monitoring with live status, latency, and instant push alerts the moment a site goes down. • Deploy from GitHub — read repos, edit, deploy, and merge pull requests straight from chat. • Apple Watch app — server status, latency, and a live feed of what the AI is doing on your wrist, plus watch-face complications. BRING YOUR OWN AI Use Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini — connect your own account or API key. Switch anytime; your project's memory carries over. PORTABLE AI MEMORY DockPilot remembers your infrastructure so you never re-explain it. Export that memory and drop it into any AI — it's yours to keep. PRIVATE BY DESIGN Your SSH keys and API keys are stored in the device Keychain and never leave your device. Projects and chats sync privately through your own iCloud account. DOCKPILOT PRO Full access is available via subscription with a 7‑day free trial — $4.99/month or $39.99/year. Payment is charged to your Apple Account. The subscription auto-renews yearly unless cancelled at least 24 hours before the end of the period. Manage or cancel anytime in Settings. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
Sidecar ML
Read full descriptionHide full description
Turn your iPhone into a private, on-device AI server for your whole network. Sidecar ML runs a lightweight HTTP server on your iPhone that exposes Apple's built-in machine-learning models to any device on your local network. Tap Start Server, scan the QR code, and your Mac, PC, Raspberry Pi, or browser can call powerful on-device AI over plain REST — no cloud, no accounts, no API keys, no usage fees, and no data leaving your network. Everything runs on the phone. Nothing is uploaded to a server and there's nothing to pay for. (The one exception, music recognition, matches against Apple's catalog and tells you so up front.) ONE IPHONE, A DOZEN AI CAPABILITIES • Chat with the on-device large language model through a chat-completions endpoint that's compatible with the popular OpenAI API format — streaming, JSON mode, and structured output included. Point existing tools and SDKs at your phone and they just work. • Generate images from a text prompt in a choice of art styles. • OCR — pull text out of photos, receipts, and screenshots with per-line boxes and multi-language support. • Read barcodes and QR codes (EAN, Code128, and more). • Classify images across roughly a thousand categories, or produce image embeddings for similarity search. • Remove backgrounds and isolate subjects or people as clean PNG cut-outs. • Detect faces and facial landmarks, body pose, and hand pose. • Scan documents with automatic edge detection and perspective correction. • Convert speech to text and text to speech, with a wide range of voices (including Personal Voice). • Translate text between languages completely offline. • Analyse text: language, sentiment, named entities, tokens, and embeddings. • Classify sounds across hundreds of categories, or identify the music that's playing. BUILT FOR DEVELOPERS AND MAKERS • Clean REST + Server-Sent Events API — call it from curl, Python, JavaScript, or any HTTP client. • Chat endpoint compatible with the OpenAI format, so many existing tools and SDKs work unchanged. • Automatic discovery on your network via Bonjour. • Honest capability reporting: ask the server what it can do and it tells you exactly what's available on your device, and why. • Optional bearer-token authentication to lock the server down on shared networks. FREE WEB CONSOLE AND CODE EXAMPLES A ready-to-use web console — plus Python examples, a command-line client, and full API documentation — is free and open-source. Download the single-file console and browse the source here: https://github.com/AndersFB/Sidecar-ML-Console/ Open the console in any browser, enter your phone's address, and try every capability with a friendly UI — nothing to install. GOOD TO KNOW • The on-device large language model and image generation require an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone. The other capabilities run on a much wider range of devices. • The server runs while the app is in the foreground; a keep-awake option helps during longer sessions. • Some features (offline translation language pairs and certain speech models) download their models on first use. Turn the iPhone in your pocket into a private AI endpoint for your projects, your home lab, and your prototypes — Sidecar ML.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Sidecar ML at none against DockPilot AI's 2. DockPilot AI's advantage is update cadence (daily vs monthly) and device support (3 vs 1). On price and ads 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. DockPilot AI sells 2 in-app purchases, starting at $4.99 per month. Sidecar ML asks for nothing beyond the download.
DockPilot AI ships an update daily, Sidecar ML monthly. The most recent releases landed on October 7, 2026 and October 20, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | DockPilot AI | Sidecar ML |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Update frequency | Daily — better | Monthly |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | No — better |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch — better | iPhone |
| Requires iOS | 17.0 — better | 26.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 21 MB | 4 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | RiverLens Sdn Bhd | Anders Fog Bunzel |
In-app purchases
DockPilot AI
- DockPilot Pro (Monthly)7 Days trial$4.991 Month
- DockPilot Pro (Annual)7 Days trial$39.991 Year
Sidecar ML
No in-app purchases









