EMMA vs ChatGPT
The smartest rented AI, or one you own.
ChatGPT is the smartest AI most people have used, and on raw horsepower a model on your own computer won't match it. That's the honest trade. What you get for it with EMMA: nothing you say leaves your machine, nobody trains on your life, there's no monthly bill, and she can't be taken away or changed under you.
Side by side
| EMMA | ChatGPT | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A private AI companion that lives on your computer: one ongoing relationship rather than a list of chats. | OpenAI's AI assistant, used in the browser and its apps. |
| Price | £149 once, VAT included. A 60-day free trial with everything unlocked first; when it ends nothing is deleted. | A free tier with limits, and monthly subscriptions (Plus is $20 a month). |
| Source code | Closed. The privacy is something you test (unplug her; read her audit log), not something you read the code for. | Closed. |
| Runs on | Windows, Linux (.deb / AppImage) and macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel). The Mac build is behind the other two right now: it's on 1.11.6, and the current version follows soon. Thinks with Ollama, or llama.cpp, LM Studio, vLLM or anything that speaks the OpenAI API. | OpenAI's servers; you need an account and an internet connection. |
| Where your conversations live | On your machine, encrypted at rest (AES-256), key in your OS keyring. No account, no server. | OpenAI's servers. For personal accounts, conversations help train its models by default until you switch off Improve the model for everyone. |
| Remembers you between chats | Yes, by design: facts about you, your history, people in your life and your goals, carried across years and across model swaps. You can see every fact, and forget any of it. | Yes: saved memories and reference to past chats, stored with OpenAI. |
| Works on your computer for you | Yes: files, apps, commands, the browser, the screen. Gated by a safety dial (full / ask first / locked) and folders she may never touch. | Agent Mode, on paid plans. |
| Seeing and undoing what it did | Per-action undo, a panic stop, and a tamper-evident log of every action she has ever taken. | Settings for memory and data controls. |
| Voice | She speaks, and she hears you, both on your machine. | Yes. |
| Also | Dream Mode (she goes over your day overnight), Her Studio (record video and podcasts), your phone on the home Wi-Fi, "Is this a scam?", offline Wikipedia, English / German / Dutch. | The most capable models, image and video generation, deep research. |
Where ChatGPT is the better choice
- It's smarter. The biggest cloud models beat anything a home computer can run today. For the hardest questions, that matters.
- No hardware needed: any phone or old laptop will do.
- Image and video generation, and research across the web at scale.
Where EMMA is different
- Nothing leaves your computer. No account, no server, nobody training on your conversations. Pull the network cable and she keeps working.
- Owned, not rented. £149 once, after a 60-day trial. No subscription, and an update never changes her without your say.
- She works on your own machine: your files, your apps, your screen, with a safety dial, undo and an audit log of every action.
- Her memory is yours to see and move: every fact visible and forgettable, encrypted at rest, carried to a new computer as one file.
Or use both
Plenty of people keep both: ChatGPT for throwaway questions, EMMA for anything personal they'd rather not hand to a server.
Where the ChatGPT column comes from
- How your data is used to improve model performance (OpenAI)
- OpenAI help: keep history on but disable model training
- ChatGPT pricing
Try her yourself
Sixty days, everything unlocked, no card, no account. When the trial ends nothing is deleted.