I tried 4 AI assistants so you don't have to.
Everyone's selling you an "AI employee" right now. Most of them are selling you a dashboard with a chatbot stapled to it.
I've been living inside four of these tools — Town, Lindy, Poke, and Sauna — running my actual inbox, calendar, and projects through them. Not a demo. My real life. Here's what I found.
The short version: these aren't four versions of the same product. They're four different bets on how an AI should fit into your day. Pick the one that matches how you actually work, not the one with the longest feature list.
The four bets
Town — the assistant that watches and learns.
Town gives you a real assistant with its own @town.com email address. You forward it things, CC it, DM it — exactly like a human EA. It learns by watching your inbox instead of making you build anything. (Mine is named Renard, and yes, it's reading this.)
Best at: zero-config background automation. Morning briefings, inbox triage, meeting prep — it just happens.
The catch: Google Workspace only, no custom workflow builder, and the pattern-learning needs a few weeks to get good.
Price: free tier, then $15–$199/mo.
Lindy — the power tool.
Instead of watching you, you tell Lindy what to do in plain English and it builds the agent. One agent can trigger another, so you can wire up genuine end-to-end pipelines across your whole stack. 3,000+ integrations, voice agents, even a virtual desktop it can operate like a person.
Best at: complex, multi-tool automation for teams who'll invest the setup time.
The catch: the credit math. A reply costs ~3 credits, a Slack message ~32, one AI phone call ~265. Budgets vanish fast during automation loops. Steeper learning curve than the marketing admits, and the free tier is gone (7-day trial now).
Price: $49.99–$199/mo, enterprise custom.
Poke — the one that lives in your texts.
Launched March 2026, Poke is the most iMessage-native of the bunch — reportedly the first third-party AI approved inside Apple's Messages for Business. No app to download. You text it and it's just there, in the threads you already use. And it's proactive: it surfaces things before you ask.
Best at: messaging-first people who don't want another app. The proactive push is genuinely different.
The catch: it's early, reviews are thin, and the "recipes" are pre-built — no custom workflows.
Price: free for light use, $10–30/mo for heavier automation.
Sauna — the one that actually remembers you.
Sauna is the outlier. Where Town and Poke are "set and forget" and Lindy is a builder, Sauna is built around persistent memory and deep, executing integrations — plus custom Skills you write and schedule yourself. Less background daemon, more an always-on agent that knows your projects, your people, your context.
Best at: depth. Persistent memory across sessions, real execution (not just read access) across Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Notion and 50+ more, custom Skills, scheduled jobs, iMessage with voice notes, sub-agents running in parallel.
The catch: it needs more direction than Town's watch-and-learn model, there's no visual builder, and it's less proactive than Poke — it waits for your prompt or schedule rather than surfacing things on its own.
Price: free tier + paid plans.
Side-by-side
Feature | Town | Lindy | Poke | Sauna |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Core model | Inbox pattern learner | No-code workflow builder | Proactive messaging agent | Context-rich custom agent |
iMessage native | Via app | Yes (Plus+) | Yes (core) | Yes |
Custom workflows | No | Yes (best-in-class) | Recipes only | Yes (Skills + schedules) |
Persistent memory | Behavioral only | Limited | Limited | Yes (deep, curated) |
Proactive push | Yes (briefs) | Yes (triggers) | Yes (core) | Via schedules |
Voice notes | No | Via phone | No | Yes (iMessage) |
Integrations | 50+ | 3,000+ | ~20 recipes | 50+ (extensible) |
Outlook/365 | No | Yes | Partial | No |
Entry price | Free / $15 | $49.99 | Free / $10–30 | Free tier |
Setup | Very low | Moderate–high | Very low | Low–moderate |
So which one?
Lindy and Poke are great. Just not as great, in my opinion.
Another guide to choosing:
If your life is your inbox and you want it handled with zero setup — Town. It disappears into the background and just runs.
If you're building real automation pipelines and have the patience (and budget) to set them up — Lindy. Just watch the credit burn.
If you live in iMessage and want something proactive that never makes you open an app — Poke. The most interesting newcomer here.
If you want depth — an agent that genuinely remembers you and can be extended — Sauna. Its one gap is proactive push; you trade autonomy for control.
The real takeaway: the "best" AI assistant isn't a feature checklist. It's a fit question. The tools that win are the ones that match the shape of your day — and disappear into it.
What are you running? Reply and tell me — I'm always testing.
