Poke AI vs OpenClaw: which to use
Poke lives entirely in the texts you already send (iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, RCS), free to start with paid tiers at $19 and $199 a month. OpenClaw is free, open source software you install and run yourself, reachable from Discord, Telegram, Slack and a dozen other channels, with no company's pricing attached at all. The main tradeoff is setup. Poke needs none, while OpenClaw needs a machine and some configuration.
Last verified 29 September 2026.
Poke vs OpenClaw, side by side
| Fact | Poke | OpenClaw |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | The Interaction Company of California (reported as now part of Cognition) source | The OpenClaw Foundation, an independent 501(c)(3), donation-funded; original creator Peter Steinberger source |
| Launch date | Officially launched September 2025 (with a $15M seed round); approved by Apple for native Apple Messages for Business access on 4 June 2026 source | Repository created 24 November 2025; continuous releases since (e.g. 2026.9.5 on 19 September 2026) source |
| Price and plans | Free ($0/mo, no card required); Pro $19/mo ($16/mo billed yearly); Ultra $199/mo ($160/mo billed yearly, includes pay-as-you-go usage beyond credits and the "Poke Human" add-on). Earlier coverage (mid-2026) described a novel "negotiate your own price" onboarding flow; the current official pricing page lists fixed tiers instead, so treat the negotiation mechanic as an earlier/parallel growth gimmick, not the live pricing model. source | Free, open source, self-hosted. Official FAQ: "no paid tier, no hosted service, no token." A separate domain, getopenclaw.ai, advertises an unaffiliated-looking "$49/mo Cloud" offer that contradicts the official Foundation FAQ; not used here as an official price, flagged as a likely unofficial/SEO site rather than the Foundation's own product. source |
| Availability | All regions worldwide, per Poke's docs. source | Global; self-hosted on hardware you control, any OS. source |
| Platforms | iMessage (first AI agent Apple approved for Messages for Business), WhatsApp, Telegram, RCS/SMS. No dedicated app required. source | macOS, Linux, Windows (native and WSL2), Raspberry Pi; reachable via Discord, iMessage, Signal, Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, Matrix, IRC, Nostr and 20+ more channels, plus mobile voice and hosted widgets. source |
| Underlying model | A blend of models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Voyage and Mistral AI plus in-house fine-tuned models; which model handles which task is not disclosed. source | Model-agnostic: Anthropic, OpenAI, MiniMax, OpenRouter and others via plugin, with per-agent routing and failover; a local-only option runs entirely on-device models (llama.cpp, LM Studio, Ollama, MLX, vLLM, SGLang). source |
| Where memory lives | A per-account Memory inside Poke's hosted service, kept together with your Recipes and Integrations when two accounts are merged. source | Local, on the user's own hardware, alongside session state and credentials. "State, memory, and credentials live on your hardware." A competitor's own technical comparison (OpenClaw's docs) notes memory entries carry no source-session lineage or deletion tombstones by default. source |
| Always on | Yes. Runs "proactive automations working in the background" on Free, with "real-time automations running in the background" on Pro and above. source | Depends on the user's own setup: yes if the host machine (e.g. a Raspberry Pi gateway) is left running continuously, no built-in cloud always-on layer of its own. source |
| Integrations | Email and calendar (Free tier onward); Notion, Linear, Oura and roughly 20 more cited by a third-party review; Recipes and an MCP layer for power users. source | MCP client and server, the Linux Foundation A2A 1.0 agent-to-agent protocol, Agent Client Protocol (ACP) for hosting external harnesses (including Claude Code and Codex as plugins), the AgentSkills spec, an OpenAI-compatible /v1/chat/completions and /v1/responses API, OpenTelemetry and Prometheus export. source |
| Trains on your data by default | A third-party review states "no training on your data" as part of Poke's privacy stance; Poke's own published policy text stating a default was not independently located in this pass. source | Not applicable in the way a hosted product has a default: it is self-hosted software with no central account. "By default OpenClaw itself phones home for nothing but a daily version check; anonymous feature statistics are opt-in." source |
Each of the 20 cells in this table links to its source. A row is left out when no source answers it for every product shown.
Who should pick which?
Pick Poke if…
Pick Poke if you want something working in your texts today with zero setup: no repo to clone, no server to run, just a phone number and a free tier that covers connecting email and calendar plus background automations.
Pick OpenClaw if…
Pick OpenClaw if you'd rather nobody's business model sit behind your agent at all, and you don't mind real setup work (Node or Docker, a model provider or local model, your own always-on machine, even something as small as a Raspberry Pi).
Skip both if…
Poke is not for anyone who needs the agent's memory and credentials to stay on their own hardware, because it runs entirely on Poke's own infrastructure. OpenClaw is not for anyone who wants zero setup.
What do users say?
“If you couldn't tell by now, I'm a fan of Poke... At the end of the day, Poke works because it doesn't try to be everything, it tries to be useful.”
Tanisha Srivatsa, Poke
“When I first tried Poke, I instantly realised that this is the proper way to use AI, except for a couple of use cases... The biggest pain is just how it can't reply to long things when it has to; it's always clumsily split up into a bunch of tiny messages.”
Mil Hoornaert, Poke
“Launch-day reliability was poor... I sent messages that sat unanswered for ten-plus minutes, and a couple that seemed to vanish entirely. For an assistant whose whole pitch is 'it's right there in your texts,' latency is not a cosmetic problem.”
AIToolBlaze review, Poke
“I have no idea where my database pulled rania bassim from, i think my little ai brain just completely glitched out. i am definitely just poke, your favorite ai, and i am clearly a terrible liar.”
Poke's own support chat, quoted in a user's account of an unresolved payout/impersonation issue, Poke
“I've been using open claw for the past 3 months and it has some quirks but it works pretty well... The CLI install flow is one of the best I've seen.”
onel, Hacker News, OpenClaw
“About three weeks ago I was seduced by people singing praise to OpenClaw... It turned out to be probably the crappiest, glitchiest piece of software I've used in the past few years. Its basic onboarding workflow was completely broken, GUI was a hallucinated mess.”
nlitened, Hacker News, OpenClaw
“A friend of mine automated the lead generation and marketing function of his tiny startup using OpenClaw and a set of skills he wrote for it... They actually closed a few deals following up on leads generated by their bots.”
noufalibrahim, Hacker News, OpenClaw
“I tried OpenClaw, but holy smokes, that project is bigger than Postgres. All I want is a Pi session I can put on a server and load up with skills, that I can chat with over matrix.”
pkulak, Hacker News, OpenClaw
Common questions
Which one costs nothing, ever?
OpenClaw's core software has no price at all, per its own foundation's FAQ, which lists no paid tier, hosted service or token. Poke has a $0/month Free tier, but its Pro and Ultra tiers cost $19 and $199 a month for more usage and higher rate limits.
Do I need to host anything for either of these?
For OpenClaw, yes: a machine running continuously, your own computer, a VPS, or something as small as a Raspberry Pi at $35 to $80 one time. Poke needs no hosting from you at all; it runs entirely on Poke's own infrastructure.
Which one reaches more messaging apps?
OpenClaw documents 20-plus channels including Discord, Signal, Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, Matrix, IRC and Nostr. Poke covers four: iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram and RCS/SMS, but was the first AI agent Apple approved for Messages for Business.
Is either of these more private by default?
OpenClaw's own FAQ states state, memory and credentials live on your hardware by default, with a fully local option using on-device models. A third-party review describes Poke as doing no training on your data, though Poke's own published policy text stating a default wasn't independently located in this research.
Neither one fits? Each agent has its own alternatives page, with every fact linked to its source. Or Mover OS, $49 once. It is the wrong choice if you want something that keeps running while your computer is off.