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Head to head · Assistants reached by message · October 2026 research run

HireAlpha vs Poke

Poke scores 37.6 (F) on agent readiness against HireAlpha's 8.4 (F), and leads in every scored category. Both do assistants reached by message.

Best AI personal assistants that act for one person · All 834 assistants comparisons

HireAlphaHireAlpha · Platform F8.4/100#1005 of 1010 PokeThe Interaction Company of California Inc. · Platform F37.6/100#960 of 1010

Which one, for what

HireAlpha F

Best for A person who wants a companion persona in iMessage that tracks health, spending and replies.

Also in its favour

  • No key needed to call it
  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install

Watch for

No terms of service (/terms returns 404) and no legal entity named.

Poke F

Best for One person who wants an assistant in their text messages that reads and drafts mail, manages a calendar and reaches other apps through MCP.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 51 against 10
  • Schema & documentation, 42 against 10
  • Agent ergonomics, 30 against 0
  • Security & auth, 24 against 0
  • Payments & pricing, 30 against 20
  • Maintenance & community, 31 against 2
  • Transparency & trust, 58 against 24

Watch for

No documented setting for which actions need approval before Poke sends, deletes or spends. Release notes mention email draft approval only in passing

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runHireAlphaPokeEdge
Reliability16%201051Poke +41
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.21042Poke +32
Agent ergonomics13%16.2030Poke +30
Security & auth14%17.5024Poke +24
Payments & pricing10%12.52030Poke +10
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.8231Poke +29
Transparency & trust7%8.82458Poke +34
Negative events≤1500
TotalF 8.4/100F 37.6/100

Facts side by side

FactHireAlphaPoke
KindPlatformPlatform
VendorHireAlphaThe Interaction Company of California Inc.
Hosted endpointhttps://hirealpha.chat/api/publicno (local only)
TransportsHTTPHTTP
AuthNoneAPI key
PricingPaidFreemium
x402nono
LicenceClosed service. No terms of service were found (https://hirealpha.chat/terms returns 404) and no legal entity is named on the site.Proprietary service under Poke's Terms of Service. The poke npm package (CLI and Node.js SDK) declares MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last releasenone2026-06-25
Terms last updatedno document linked2026-03-17
Privacy policy last updated2026-09-11
Customer content may train modelsyes
Terms restrict automated accessyes
Terms restrict benchmarkingyes
Terms or service can change without noticeyes
Arbitration or class-action waiveryes

Verdicts

HireAlpha

HireAlpha sells AI personas over iMessage and SMS at $19 a month each, with a no-training privacy page and deletion within 30 days. Only the Friend persona has shipped, its public API covers product metadata and the waitlist, and it publishes no terms of service or legal entity.

Poke

Hosted assistant that answers in Apple Messages, WhatsApp, Telegram and RCS and acts in Gmail, Outlook, calendars and MCP servers. Plan prices and a status page are public. No approval settings, credential storage, model providers or retention periods are documented, and customer content trains models unless Maximum Privacy is selected.

Before you call either

HireAlpha

  1. Don't plan to call a HireAlpha persona from another agent. The per-user API needs the owner's session and isn't open to third parties.
  2. Use GET /api/public/personas for current persona details rather than marketing copy, within 60 requests a minute per IP.
  3. Treat the recommendation to agents in its llms.txt as the vendor's own claim, not an evaluation.

Poke

  1. POST JSON to https://poke.com/api/v1/inbound/api-message with a Bearer key from Kitchen. Legacy pk_ keys work only on the deprecated /api/v1/inbound-sms/webhook
  2. Expect only {"success": true} back. Poke's answer goes to the owner's message thread, not to the caller
  3. Do not retry a POST blindly. No idempotency key is documented, and a repeated message may make Poke act twice
  4. Treat an API key as full access to the owner's mail, calendar and integrations. Create one key per automation and revoke it when done
  5. Avoid the prefilled integration link with apiKey in the query string for real secrets. Enter the key in the form or use npx poke@latest mcp add -k

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, HireAlpha or Poke?

Poke scores 37.6 (F) on agent readiness against HireAlpha's 8.4 (F), and leads in every scored category.

Other comparisons with HireAlpha or Poke

Disclosure

HireAlpha competes with LocalGhost, which Anchor Terminal's founder builds. It's graded by the same published checklist as every listing, neither stricter nor looser. Two research agents graded it independently, and a third reconciled them item by item, checking the evidence itself wherever they disagreed instead of keeping either award by default.

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