Duck.ai vs HuggingChat

Duck.ai

• People who want to use mainstream AI models without an account
• Privacy-minded users who do not want chats used for model training
• DuckDuckGo browser users who want an assistant built in

HuggingChat

• Trying many open source models from one chat window
• Hugging Face users who want to run Hub jobs and build Spaces from a chat
• Teams that want to self-host the same chat interface

Duck.ai

• Free use has a daily limit, and the most advanced Claude and GPT models are reserved for Plus and Pro subscribers.
• Advanced models cannot be bought on their own: the subscription bundles them with DuckDuckGo's VPN and identity services.
• The subscription is sold only to residents of the US, UK, EU and Canada, and its VPN and identity features work only in the DuckDuckGo browser.
• There is no standalone app: outside a web browser, Duck.ai is built into the DuckDuckGo browser for iOS, Android, Mac and Windows.

HuggingChat

• It runs in a browser only and needs a Hugging Face account. No mobile app is listed, and the GitHub repository of the earlier macOS app was archived on Dec 5, 2025.
• Free accounts get $0.10 of monthly inference credits, subject to change, and Hugging Face does not say how many messages that covers.
• There is no HuggingChat-only plan: more usage comes from Hugging Face PRO at $9 per month, which bundles storage and Spaces benefits, and from buying extra credits.
• Only open source models are offered, and requests run on third-party inference providers that apply their own security and data-handling policies.

Duck.ai

Anonymized chats

Metadata such as your IP address is removed before a prompt reaches the model provider, so requests appear to come from DuckDuckGo rather than from you.

Choice of models

Free models come from Anthropic, Mistral AI and OpenAI, plus two open models hosted by Tinfoil. Subscribers add more advanced Claude and GPT models.

Chat history kept on your device

Recent chats are saved locally by default, up to 5 can be pinned, and the Fire Button deletes the rest. Optional Sync & Backup stores chats end-to-end encrypted.

Image creation

Select New Image, describe what you want, then refine the result with follow-up prompts. A daily limit applies, with higher limits for subscribers.

Voice chat and dictation

Speak with an OpenAI voice model over an encrypted relay, or dictate a prompt for up to 5 minutes per session. Audio is not kept after the session ends.

Image and PDF uploads

Some models accept image and PDF uploads, with PDF limits of 15 pages on Free, 35 on Plus and 50 on Pro. Spreadsheets are not supported.

HuggingChat

Omni model router

Omni chooses a model for each message: image inputs go to a vision model, requests with MCP tools switched on go to a tools-capable model, and everything else follows a default route.

Catalog of open models

Instead of Omni you can chat with a specific model. The list showed 133 models when checked, including DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, Kimi, Gemma and Llama releases.

MCP tools and web search

Models can call tools on MCP servers. Web Search (Exa) and a Hugging Face server are preconfigured, and you can add your own servers from the chat input or the settings.

ML Intern

An experimental mode that plans and runs machine-learning work on the Hugging Face Hub, such as finetuning or evaluating a model, within a compute budget you set for each conversation.

Image and voice input

Models that support vision accept image uploads, and the published production configuration turns on speech transcription with OpenAI's whisper-large-v3-turbo model.

Open source and self-hostable

The app runs on Chat UI, an Apache-2.0 SvelteKit project that can be run locally, with Docker or with Helm against any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, including Ollama and llama.cpp.

Duck.ai

• Free$0

  Six free chat models, image creation and voice chat within a daily limit, with PDF uploads of up to 15 pages.

• Plus$9.99

  per month, or $99.99 per year, plus tax if applicable

  Adds GPT-5.6 Terra and Claude Sonnet 4.6, higher daily and weekly limits and 35-page PDF uploads, plus DuckDuckGo's VPN and identity services.

• Pro$19.99

  per month, or $199.99 per year, plus tax if applicable

  Everything in Plus, with Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.6 Sol, higher reasoning effort, 2x the Plus usage limits and 50-page PDF uploads.

HuggingChat

• Free$0

  A free Hugging Face account with $0.10 of monthly inference credits, subject to change. HuggingChat shows an upgrade prompt once the message limit is reached.

• PRO$9

  per month

  Hugging Face PRO, not a HuggingChat-only plan: $2.00 of monthly credits (20x the free amount), pay-as-you-go beyond that, plus PRO storage and Spaces benefits.

• Team$20

  per user / month

  Hugging Face organization plan with $2.00 of monthly credits per seat, shared by members. HuggingChat usage can be billed to the organization.

• Enterprise$50

  per user / month, with annual commitments

  Everything in Team plus SCIM provisioning, the highest rate limits and managed billing. Bought through Hugging Face's sales team.

Duck.ai

• Annual discount

  About 17% off with yearly billing

  Plus is $99.99 a year against $9.99 a month, and Pro is $199.99 a year against $19.99 a month, a saving of about 17% over twelve monthly payments.

HuggingChat

No public discounts listed.