Crux vs Drifty

Crux and Drifty 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.

Crux

The core loop is agentic: you describe a task, and Crux reads files, runs scripts, writes outputs, and edits code — showing you every change before it lands. The vendor demonstrates this with bank statement analysis that reads a CSV, generates a spending report, and patches a budget tracker in one pass. A global overlay (summoned by a single shortcut) lets it operate on top of any open window, so it can read your screen and answer questions about whatever app is in front of you. The beta label on both Mac and Windows builds is real — treat it accordingly before putting it in a daily critical workflow.

Drifty

The core loop is passive: Drifty records your active app, site, and session title in three-minute blocks, then routes that minimal context through an AI classification engine to label each block. You review a timeline at the end of the day, a weekly heatmap, and a drift alarm that can nudge you mid-session. The privacy architecture is the differentiator — no screen recording, no screenshots, and you choose whether classification runs locally on your Mac, through drifty's managed cloud, or via your own API key. The ceiling appears quickly if you need billable hour exports, client-facing reports, or integrations with invoicing tools — the vendor page describes none of those. Mac-only, no API, no self-hosted option outside the local AI mode.

Attribute	Crux	Drifty
Pricing	Paid	Paid
Price	$10 one-time	$5/month
Free trial	No	No
Open source	No	No
Has API	No	No
Self-hosted option	Yes	No
Platforms	Mac (Apple silicon), Windows	Mac
Pros	Full local execution — files, chat history, and context never leave your machine — so teams with strict data-handling requirements can use an AI agent without routing sensitive documents through a third-party API. Agentic task sequencing reads files, runs scripts, and edits code in a single pass with every change surfaced for review before it commits, which means you catch errors before they propagate rather than untangling them after the fact. Screen-aware overlay mode reads whatever application is currently open and can answer questions or suggest edits in context, eliminating the copy-paste shuttle between a chat window and the tool you're actually working in. Self-hosted desktop architecture means there is no per-seat API bill scaling with usage, so personal and small-team workloads do not incur the compounding costs that cloud-hosted agents accumulate over a month. Workspace sidebar surfaces connected messaging services (WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord) alongside local files, so task context from conversations and from your filesystem sit in the same session without switching tools.	Fully passive capture in three-minute blocks with no timers or manual tags, so the data you review at the end of the day reflects what actually happened rather than how consistently you remembered to log. Three AI routing options — managed cloud, your own API key, or local on-device — so teams with strict data policies can run classification without any activity context leaving the Mac. Session-level detail beyond app names, so the timeline shows what was happening inside each app rather than just which window had focus. Drift alarm fires during detected drift periods, which means you get a mid-session nudge instead of discovering the pattern only when reviewing last week's data. Weekly heatmap and focus rhythm views aggregate daily patterns automatically, so identifying which hours of the week produce the most focused work requires no manual analysis.
Cons	No API is exposed, so Crux cannot be called by another script, scheduled by a cron job, or embedded in a pipeline — any team that needs their agent to run headless or trigger on an event rather than a human shortcut has to choose a different tool entirely. Both Mac and Windows builds carry a beta designation at the time of listing, which means interface changes, file-handling edge cases, and crash recovery are live risks; production workflows that cannot tolerate unscheduled breakage need to wait for a stable release or use an established alternative. The assistant learns context from your local machine only, so the moment a second team member needs the same shared context — the same file history, the same chat memory, the same agent state — there is no sync mechanism described in the vendor's documentation; teams that reach that coordination need will move to a multi-user platform.	No export, API, or integration surface is described anywhere on the vendor page — if a freelancer needs to turn tracked focus time into a client invoice or feed data into a project management tool, Drifty provides no pathway to do that, and they move to a dedicated time tracker like Toggl or Harvest. Local AI mode requires downloading a model that the vendor states consumes approximately 5–7 GB of RAM — on a MacBook with 8 GB, that classification load competes directly with the development or creative work being tracked, making the free tier impractical on lower-spec machines. Mac-only with no web access and no Windows or Linux support means any team member not on a Mac is excluded, ruling Drifty out for cross-platform teams tracking collective focus patterns.

Bottom line

Crux and Drifty are closely matched on pricing model, openness, and API availability — pick by feature set and platform support in the table above.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Crux and Drifty?

Crux is Paid, while Drifty is Paid. Compare pricing, free trial, API, platforms, and pros/cons in the table above on AIDiveForge.

Is Crux better than Drifty?

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.

Crux vs Drifty: which should I pick?

Pick Crux if its pricing model, openness, or platform fit matches your constraints; pick Drifty otherwise. Check free-trial availability on each listing if you want to test before committing.

Comparison data is sourced and verified by the AIDiveForge data pipeline. AIDiveForge is editorially independent.