Get an audit

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

Orbits vs Poke

Poke scores 37.6 (F) on agent readiness against Orbits's 15.6 (F), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Orbits leads on maintenance & community. Both do assistants reached by message.

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

OrbitsNemus AI, Inc. · Platform F15.6/100#997 of 1010 PokeThe Interaction Company of California Inc. · Platform F37.6/100#960 of 1010

Which one, for what

Orbits F

Best for Families who want one shared assistant for calendars, lists, meals, chores and household email.

Ahead on

  • Maintenance & community, 54 against 31

Watch for

No public agent API, as llms.txt states.

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 15
  • Schema & documentation, 42 against 10
  • Agent ergonomics, 30 against 0
  • Security & auth, 24 against 0
  • Payments & pricing, 30 against 20
  • Transparency & trust, 58 against 43

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 runOrbitsPokeEdge
Reliability16%201551Poke +36
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%8.85431Orbits +23
Transparency & trust7%8.84358Poke +15
Negative events≤1500
TotalF 15.6/100F 37.6/100

Facts side by side

FactOrbitsPoke
KindPlatformPlatform
VendorNemus AI, Inc.The Interaction Company of California Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
TransportsHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyAPI key
PricingPaidFreemium
x402nono
LicenceClosed service under the Orbits Terms of Service (Nemus AI, Inc.).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 release2026-10-132026-06-25
Terms last updated2026-03-17
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

Orbits

Orbits is a family household app whose assistant, Bit, runs shared calendars, lists and meals, reads household email and places restaurant calls after approval, with iOS releases every week or two. No outside agent can call it, prices appear only as App Store in-app purchases, and no status page, security contact or named subprocessors were found.

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

Orbits

  1. Don't plan to call Orbits from another agent. llms.txt says no public agent API is offered.
  2. Tell the owner the assistant needs an Orbits subscription bought in the app, and that any trial appears only at purchase.

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, Orbits or Poke?

Poke scores 37.6 (F) on agent readiness against Orbits's 15.6 (F), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Orbits leads on maintenance & community.

Other comparisons with Orbits or Poke

Disclosure

Orbits 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.

Machine-readable

For companies

Do agents find, use and choose your tools?

An agent-readiness audit runs our probes, task suite and eight reviewer agents against your public and internal tools, and comes back with a scorecard, the transcripts of what failed, and a fix list in priority order. From $2,500, re-run included. We never take payment to move a rank. We do help companies earn one.

Get an auditSee a sample report