TextButler compared with Poke

What Poke does

Poke, from The Interaction Company of California, describes itself as an assistant that lives in your texts. You message it as a contact in Messages, WhatsApp, or Telegram, by text or voice. It sets reminders, starts tasks, and uses connected services such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook, Notion, and GitHub to help at the right time. Recipes set up integrations and automations, and developers can build their own.

Poke runs as a hosted service. The free plan connects your apps, email, and calendar; Pro is $19 a month and Ultra $199 a month, with frontier models, background automations, and higher limits. Its privacy policy says content may be used to train its models unless you choose Maximum Privacy. Its site also announces that Poke is joining Cognition.

What TextButler does

TextButler runs on your Mac as a command line, a guided terminal, and a background service, with no window or menu bar icon. GhostGet, a separate Mac tool, connects it to iMessage, WhatsApp, and Beeper. You turn it on one direct or group conversation at a time; new installations start paused, and new conversations start turned off.

Once a conversation is on, TextButler answers by default only messages that contain the word “butler”, and it waits 5 minutes after you last wrote there. Replies go out from your own account wrapped in a marker, such as 🤖{ On Monday Sam said Friday at 6:30. }, which you can change or clear per conversation. Each conversation keeps its own notes as ordinary files on your Mac. Replies can be written by a local model through Ollama, by Qwen through your own Vercel AI Gateway key, or by your Claude Code, Codex, or Devin subscription through xcb. The reply model works only with that conversation’s notes, optional web search, and proposed messages; it gets no shell and no other files on your Mac.

Does Poke reply to my friends for me?

Poke’s site describes a contact you text, not an assistant that answers other people in your conversations. TextButler does that: it answers in the chats you turn on, from your account, and marks replies with 🤖{ } by default.

Where do my messages go?

Poke runs on its own hosted service and, with your permission, reads connected accounts such as Gmail and Google Calendar. TextButler reads messages on your Mac and keeps each conversation’s notes there. A local model keeps replies on your Mac; a Gateway key or subscription sends the conversation context to that provider.

Which costs less?

Poke has a free plan and paid plans at $19 and $199 a month. TextButler is free and open source; you pay nothing for a local model, Vercel bills Gateway usage, which TextButler stops at $1 a day, or you use a subscription you already have.