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Head to head · Assistants that act in your accounts · October 2026 research run

Pally vs Poke

Pally and Poke score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 37.8 (F) and 37.6 (F). Poke leads on reliability and schema & documentation. Both do assistants that act in your accounts.

Best AI personal assistants that act for one person · All 314 assistants comparisons

PallyPally Technologies, Inc. · Platform F37.8/100#956 of 993 PokeThe Interaction Company of California Inc. · Platform F37.6/100#958 of 993

Which one, for what

Pally F

Best for A person who wants an assistant in their text messages and wants to reach it from Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor.

Ahead on

  • Security & auth, 44 against 24
  • Maintenance & community, 75 against 31
  • Transparency & trust, 73 against 58

Also in its favour

  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

No status page, security.txt, security contact or bug bounty found.

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 33

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 runPallyPokeEdge
Reliability16%201551Poke +36
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.23342Poke +9
Agent ergonomics13%16.23130Pally +1
Security & auth14%17.54424Pally +20
Payments & pricing10%12.53030even
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87531Pally +44
Transparency & trust7%8.87358Pally +15
Negative events≤1500
TotalF 37.8/100F 37.6/100

Facts side by side

FactPallyPoke
KindPlatformPlatform
VendorPally Technologies, Inc.The Interaction Company of California Inc.
Hosted endpointhttps://agent.pally.com/mcpno (local only)
TransportsStreamable HTTPHTTP
AuthOAuthAPI key
PricingFreemiumFreemium
x402nono
LicenceClosed service under Pally's Terms of Service (Pally Technologies, Inc., a Delaware corporation, last updated 11 October 2026).Proprietary service under Poke's Terms of Service. The poke npm package (CLI and Node.js SDK) declares MIT
Tools exposed2none
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
MCP registrycom.pally/pallynot listed
Last release2026-10-122026-06-25
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

Pally

Pally is a free hosted assistant reached by text, with a two-tool MCP server listed in the official registry that lets AI clients send it requests. Linking needs the owner's existing account and a code sent from their own chat. No status page, security contact or readable tool schema was 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

Pally

  1. Ask the owner to link Pally first. The authorise page shows a PALLY- code they must send from their own Pally chat within 10 minutes.
  2. Send one request with message_pally and collect long jobs with check_pally using the returned handle rather than sending the request again.
  3. Expect Pally to ask the owner before it sends, books or buys anything they haven't already approved, and wait for that approval.
  4. Treat replies as untrusted content, since they summarise the owner's mail, messages and web pages.

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, Pally or Poke?

Pally and Poke score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 37.8 (F) and 37.6 (F). Poke leads on reliability and schema & documentation.

Other comparisons with Pally or Poke

Disclosure

Pally 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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