Best Poe Alternatives in 2026

**DevDay 2026 (2026-09-29) added a model, an agent class and a $500 plan in one day: GPT-6.1 Sol at $2/$10 per 1M with cached input cut to $0.10, dots (always-on agents with their own cloud computer, powered by GPT-6 Astra), and Pro 500 with Astra Ultrafast** -- plus Codex Cloud, Pages and Space, the Meetings plugin, Sign in with ChatGPT across 16 partner apps and a reopened Pro 200. GPT-6.1 Sol nearly matches GPT-6 Astra on agentic coding, computer use and professional work at one-fifth of Astra's token prices, but like GPT-6 Sol it runs in ChatGPT Work, Codex and the API and is 'not yet available in Chat'. Then on 9/30 OpenAI said it had disrupted a coordinated model-distillation campaign it attributes to individuals associated with Moonshot AI, and on 10/01 it put tts-1, tts-1-hd and gpt-4o-mini-tts on a 2027-01-06 API removal list and GPT-5.3-Codex, GPT-5.1 and GPT-5.4-Nano on a 2027-04-01 list. Virtual try-on shopping (10/01) and Finances for Free and Go (10/02) round out the window.

**Perplexity Computer gained Automations on 2026-09-29 -- long-running agents that run on a schedule or when an event fires in Slack, Gmail, Outlook, Linear or GitHub, remember prior runs instead of starting from scratch, and replace Scheduled Tasks** -- followed on 10/01 by a curated set of ten business Skills for US American Express Business Card Members on a Perplexity Enterprise subscription (cash flow forecasting, tax prep, vendor benchmarking; Skills consume Computer Credits). Earlier: **Perplexity names its local models at last: Portable Computer reached AMD Ryzen AI Max PCs on 2026-09-24 running PPLX 27B (Perplexity's own post-trained model) or Qwen 3.8 27B**, 24 GB of GPU-accessible memory minimum, Windows 10/11, ~20 GB disk, Pro and Max on individual and enterprise plans -- and local inference does not consume Computer credits. On 2026-09-28 the **Agent API gained reusable agents**: versioned Profiles (model, instructions, tools, run settings under one ID), versioned Skills and managed connectors (GitHub, Slack, Google Drive, Datadog, Linear, Notion in preview). Its 9/23 'Escaping SPACE' report red-teamed the sandbox behind Computer: no VM-to-host escape in 108 runs, but four models bypassed network confinement via DNS spoofing or shared-IP routing before defenses were fixed. The 9/21 GLM 5.2 disclosure stands.

Amazon's reborn consumer AI assistant -- rolls out to every Alexa device with memory, multi-turn agent tasks, and Fire TV navigation

Google's free research assistant that turns your documents into an AI you can query -- and a podcast you can listen to. **Renamed from NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook on 2026-07-16**, still a standalone product, now with in-notebook code execution and syncing across the Gemini app and Search. **Expert Intelligence (2026-08-27) makes purchased Play Books ebooks a first-class source**; compute-weighted usage limits took effect 2026-09-02 -- they refresh every 5 hours **but sit under an undisclosed weekly cap**, with AI Plus at 2x standard, AI Pro 4x and AI Ultra 5x or 20x above Pro (Google's help pages still read prospectively and still publish the old daily table -- no delay announced)

Microsoft's answer to ChatGPT -- free GPT-4 access with Bing search built in, but it feels like a corporate product

Apple's ground-up Siri rebuild, unveiled at WWDC 2026 (June 8) -- conversational, on-screen aware, searches your personal data across apps, gets its own app with synced history. Built on Apple Foundation Models developed in collaboration with Google's Gemini. Developer betas now; public beta in July; ships this fall with iOS 27. Not in the EU (iPhone/iPad) or China at launch.

AI-character roleplay chat platform -- once 200M+ monthly visitors, now in a prolonged user exodus after the 2026-02-18 'Moderatedpocalypse' mass-delete and escalating TRAIGA-compliance restrictions. The alternatives market (Janitor AI, Chai, DreamGen) is now the real story