Alma by Olivares.AI vs Teya

Alma by Olivares.AI and Teya are both personal assistants tracked by AIDiveForge. Below is a side-by-side comparison of pricing, capabilities, platforms, and ownership — sourced from each tool's live website and verified before publishing.

Alma by Olivares.AI

Alma, built by Olivares.AI, addresses that amnesia by pairing an AI assistant with persistent episodic memory that carries learned patterns, project context, and style preferences across sessions. The core workflow bundles text, image, video, and music generation under a single budget, so multi-modal creative projects don't require juggling five separate tool subscriptions. Background agents handle scheduled tasks — monitoring, reports, research — without you staying at the keyboard. The integration story extends to developer tools like Cursor, VSCode, and any MCP-compatible client, letting teams share a memory layer across their existing stack. Where it gets harder: teams needing on-premise data control find no self-hosted path, and the free tier gates most memory and agent features behind paid access.

Teya

Teya is an open-source, Android-based home agent that listens, holds context across conversations, and acts across apps — running on a spare phone mounted on a wall. There is no cloud subscription, no hosted API, and no vendor to call when it stops working: you own the stack. The README describes skills, a memory layer, and the ability to coordinate family schedules rather than just execute one-off commands. That self-contained architecture is also the ceiling — setup requires Android build tooling, and any skill that doesn't exist yet is yours to write. Families comfortable with a Gradle build and a spare Android device will find this fits a gap no commercial product fills; families who are not will hit a wall before the first reminder fires.

Attribute	Alma by Olivares.AI	Teya
Pricing	Paid	Free
Price	$14/mo	—
Free trial	14 days	No
Open source	No	Yes
Has API	Yes	No
Self-hosted option	No	Yes
Platforms	Web app, VSCode extension, MCP server, REST API	Android 8.0+
Released	2025	—
Pros	Persistent episodic memory carries project context, learned patterns, and style preferences across sessions, so you stop re-explaining your workflow every time you open a new chat. Multi-modal generation (image, video, music) under a unified budget, which means creative projects don't require maintaining separate subscriptions and billing accounts for each medium. Background agents execute scheduled research, monitoring, and reporting tasks autonomously, so recurring work runs without you initiating each cycle manually. MCP-compatible API exposes the memory layer to Cursor, VSCode, and other developer tools, which means persistent context moves with you across your existing stack instead of staying siloed in a chat interface. BYOK integration lets developers route through their own API keys, so teams with high volume can cap costs at the provider level rather than absorbing per-seat markup.	Persistent household memory across conversations, so the agent knows that Tuesday means football pickup without being re-briefed every week — which is the specific failure mode of every commercial smart speaker. Fully self-hosted on a spare Android phone with no cloud dependency, which means household calendar data does not leave your network and the agent does not stop working when a vendor's pricing changes. Apache-2.0 licensed with a configurable model layer per THIRD_PARTY_MODELS.md, so swapping the underlying LLM is a configuration change rather than a platform migration. Skills architecture described in the repo allows the agent's capabilities to grow, so a household that starts with reminders can extend to home-control tasks without replacing the platform. Zero infrastructure cost beyond the Android device, so there is no monthly bill eroding the case for keeping it running long-term.
Cons	No self-hosted deployment option exists — teams subject to data residency requirements or internal compliance mandates cannot keep data on their own infrastructure, and this is the condition under which they switch to an open-source alternative like Open WebUI or a self-managed LangChain stack. Advanced memory features and autonomous agent scheduling are gated behind paid tiers, so free-tier users hit the feature ceiling before they can evaluate whether the memory system actually fits their production workflow. The memory and style-learning system requires sustained use across multiple sessions to accumulate useful context — teams expecting useful personalization from day one will find the first few sessions feel like any other stateless assistant.	Setup requires Android build tooling and Gradle configuration — there is no APK download or one-tap install described in the README. Any household member who is not the person who built it cannot recover from a broken state, which means a single point of failure sits between the family and their morning reminders. Any capability the agent does not already have requires writing a new skill, which means extending Teya for a genuinely new use case — say, integrating a specific calendar API or a home-automation system — puts you in the position of maintaining a fork. When that maintenance burden compounds across two or three extensions, teams move to a platform with a plugin marketplace rather than a skills directory they authored themselves. No API surface is available, per the project page, which means Teya cannot be called programmatically from other household tools or automation scripts. Households that want bidirectional integration with an existing Home Assistant setup or a third-party calendar service hit a dead end and either build a custom bridge or switch to a platform that exposes an API.

Bottom line

Alma by Olivares.AI is paid while Teya is free; Teya is open source; only Alma by Olivares.AI exposes a public API. Choose based on which difference matters most for your workflow.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Alma by Olivares.AI and Teya?

Alma by Olivares.AI is Paid, while Teya is Free and open source. Compare pricing, free trial, API, platforms, and pros/cons in the table above on AIDiveForge.

Is Alma by Olivares.AI better than Teya?

It depends on your workflow. Use the side-by-side attributes (pricing, open source, API, self-hosted, platforms) to decide. AIDiveForge does not rank a universal winner — we publish verified facts so you can choose.