PocketPal AI vs Private LLM
Price, platforms and features side by side. The table says where each price was read and when.
PocketPal AI
Open-source app for running AI models offline on phones and tablets
Free plan · from $0.99 one-time
Private LLM
Offline AI chat app for iPhone, iPad and Mac with a one-time price
From $4.99 one-time
Where they differ
- PocketPal AI starts at $0.99 per premium Pal, one-time (US App Store in-app purchase). Private LLM starts at $4.99 one-time (US App Store).
- PocketPal AI has a free plan. Private LLM does not.
- Only PocketPal AI lists an Android app.
- Only Private LLM lists a macOS app.
- PocketPal AI is open source, according to its own site.
- Private LLM can be bought with a one-time purchase.
In commoniOSWorks offlineLocal-firstAI featuresChat assistant
At a glance
| PocketPal AI | Private LLM | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free plan | Paid |
| Starts at | $0.99 per premium Pal, one-time (US App Store in-app purchase) | $4.99 one-time (US App Store) |
| Free plan | The app is free, ad-free and open source, with no subscription or paid tier for the AI itself. Only premium Pals from the PalsHub marketplace cost money. | None |
| Free trial | None listed | None listed |
| macOS | ||
| iOS | ||
| Android | ||
| Made by | Gooya UG (haftungsbeschränkt) | Numen Technologies Limited |
| Price read from | apps.apple.com | apps.apple.com |
| Checked | Oct 9, 2026 | Oct 9, 2026 |
Who each one suits
PocketPal AI
- Running open models privately on an iPhone, iPad or Android phone
- Trying many GGUF models from Hugging Face on a mobile device
- Checking how fast a particular phone runs local models
Private LLM
- Apple users who want AI chat that never leaves the device
- People who prefer a single purchase to a monthly subscription
- Building Siri and Shortcuts workflows around a local model
Worth knowing
PocketPal AI
- It is built for phones and tablets only; the App Store listing marks it as not verified for macOS.
- Which models run, and how fast, depends on the device's memory and chip, so each model's quantization has to be chosen to fit.
- The built-in tools are limited to a calculator, date and time, and HTML rendering.
- Premium Pals are paid extras, and prices differ between the App Store, Google Play and the PalsHub website, which charges in euros.
Private LLM
- It cannot read documents or files, and it has no internet access for live information.
- Models cannot be loaded from Hugging Face; only those the developer has quantized are offered, and they are text-only.
- Larger models need recent hardware: the vendor recommends an iPhone 15 Pro or newer and an Apple Silicon Mac.
- The Android version is an early beta offered as a direct APK download, not through Google Play.
Key features
PocketPal AI
- On-device chat with GGUF models
- Runs open models such as Gemma, Qwen, Phi and Llama through llama.cpp on the phone's CPU, GPU or, on Qualcomm chips, NPU. Nothing is sent to a server.
- Hugging Face downloads
- Search, bookmark and download GGUF models from the Hugging Face Hub inside the app, picking a quantization that fits the device. Gated models work with your own access token.
- Pals and PalsHub
- A Pal is an assistant with its own default model, system prompt and personality, in Assistant or Roleplay form. PalsHub lists Pals made by other people, both free and paid.
- On-device text-to-speech
- Replies can be read aloud by neural voice engines such as Kokoro that run on the phone, so speech needs no cloud service either.
- Built-in tools
- Capable Pals can call tools in the middle of a conversation: a calculator, the current date and time, and rendering of HTML that the model writes.
- Benchmarking and leaderboard
- Measures tokens per second and memory use for a model on your device. Results can optionally be submitted to the public AI Phone Leaderboard.
Private LLM
- On-device chat with open models
- Runs open-source models such as Llama 3.3, Qwen3, Gemma 3, Phi 4 and DeepSeek R1 Distill on the device. The site's catalog lists 142 models, filterable by device, memory and use case.
- No account and no cloud
- Prompts are processed on the device and nothing is sent to a server. The app needs no login and, according to the vendor, collects no personal data.
- Siri and Shortcuts
- Two app intents work with Siri and the Shortcuts app, and x-callback-url support lets other apps pass text in and get the model's reply back.
- Writing tools across macOS
- On a Mac, select text in any app and right-click to rewrite, summarize or correct it on-device. This works in English and major Western European languages.
- In-house quantization
- Models are compressed by the developer with OmniQuant and GPTQ, which the vendor says keeps output closer to the original model than the round-to-nearest method used by llama.cpp and MLX apps.
- System prompts and sampling settings
- The system prompt can be customized to shape how a model responds, and sampling temperature and Top-P can be changed from their defaults; those changes apply after the app restarts.
Plans
PocketPal AI
Free$0
The full app: offline chat with GGUF models, Hugging Face downloads, text-to-speech, your own Pals, built-in tools and benchmarking.
Premium Pals$0.99 to $2.99
per Pal, one-time in-app purchase (US App Store)
Optional community-made assistants from PalsHub. Google Play's US listing shows $1.39 to $2.79 per item, and the PalsHub website prices paid Pals from €1.49.
Private LLM
Private LLM$4.99
one-time purchase
One purchase covers iPhone, iPad and Mac with every model in the catalog, and can be shared with up to six people through Family Sharing.
Ways to pay less
PocketPal AI
No public discounts listed.
Private LLM
- Lifetime license
One purchase for every Apple device
Private LLM is bought once with no subscription. The purchase unlocks the iPhone, iPad and Mac versions and extends to a Family Sharing group of up to six people.
