Poke alternatives

People started looking for Poke alternatives for two different reasons, and they lead to different answers. One group wants a backup because of the acquisition. The other tried Poke, liked the idea, and found it was not built for their particular work. This page covers both.

First: is Poke going away?

There is no announcement that it is. What happened is that Cognition acquired Poke's parent company, The Interaction Company of California, in July 2026. Cognition is known for Devin, a developer agent, and its focus has been developer tooling rather than consumer assistants. That makes Poke's long-term direction an open question — not a shutdown notice.

The honest read: if Poke works for you, keep using it. Acquisitions rarely kill a product with 100 million messages behind it quickly. But if you would rather not build a habit on an open question, the options below are real.

If you want the closest like-for-like

Folk is the nearest match for personal use. It is a personal AI in iMessage and Telegram that books tables, tracks flights, and remembers your preferences, running on its own private cloud machine so work continues while you are offline. $20 per month with a free trial.

Cael occupies nearly the same space — iMessage and Telegram, $20 per month, a private per-user browser for working through booking flows and forms, plus long-running monitors for prices and restocks and a memory you can inspect and delete. WhatsApp is in progress rather than shipped, which matters if that is your channel.

If Poke was not focused enough on work

Lindy goes considerably deeper on professional workflow: autonomous inbox triage, replies drafted in your voice, meeting scheduling, call prep, recordings, and a daily brief — much of it driven from iMessage and SMS. It is also the most expensive here, from $49.99 to $199.99 per month after a 7-day trial.

Arlo is the pick when other people are involved. It runs over iMessage and SMS as well as Slack, Teams, and phone calls, and its distinguishing feature is governance — policies, approvals, and an evidence trail for consequential actions.

If you wanted it to nudge you more

Catch is built around being proactive. It reaches you over Slack, email, text, and phone and is designed to raise what needs attention rather than wait to be asked. If the feature you actually wanted from Poke was the unprompted heads-up, this is the product organised around it.

If you prefer to talk

Martin is iOS-first and treats voice as a primary input, covering email, calendar, and delegation across SMS, Slack, and calls. Worth a look if typing to an assistant never felt natural.

If you want it on your own hardware

OpenClaw is free and open source — an agent runtime and message router you run yourself, connecting roughly two dozen channels to an agent that can run shell commands and drive a browser. You supply the server and the model budget, and you own the credential-security problem. For the right person that trade is obviously correct.

Quick comparison

How to switch without regretting it

1. Do not migrate everything at once. Run the new one alongside Poke for a week on real tasks.
2. Test the failure case deliberately. Ask for something that cannot be completed — a booking needing a login you have not connected — and see whether it says so plainly or invents a result.
3. Check what happens to your data on the way out. Whether you can export or delete matters more the second time around.
4. Re-create only the automations you actually missed. Most people find they were using two or three.