Drifty vs Eva

Drifty and Eva 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.

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.

Eva

The home screen organizes work across four tabs — Chat, Images, Music, Docs — so you are not stitching together separate apps to get a grounded assistant plus media playback. Music continues in the background with lock-screen controls while you use the chat or docs tabs, which means the assistant does not interrupt your queue. The ceiling appears fast on older or mid-range hardware: on-device inference is bottlenecked by the ARM64 chip you have, not a server you can upgrade. No API is exposed, so there is no path to building a pipeline around Eva or connecting it to other tooling. The open-source repo has 1 star and 0 open issues at time of curation, meaning community support is effectively nonexistent.

Attribute	Drifty	Eva
Pricing	Paid	Free
Price	$5/month	—
Free trial	No	No
Open source	No	Yes
Has API	No	No
Self-hosted option	No	Yes
Platforms	Mac	Android
Pros	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.	Entire stack — language model, voice, maps, documents, Wikipedia — runs on-device with no network calls, so user data never reaches a third-party server even when the app is actively used. Open-source under a public GitHub repo with a downloadable APK, so you can audit the code, build from source, or self-host the distribution instead of depending on a vendor's continued operation. Background music playback with lock-screen controls persists while you use Chat or Docs tabs, so switching to ask a question does not interrupt the media session. Document-grounded chat runs locally, which means you can feed private files into the assistant without those documents ever leaving the device — a constraint that eliminates most cloud-based RAG tools from contention. No account creation or sign-in required, so there is no identity surface to compromise and no subscription to manage.
Cons	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.	Inference speed is hard-capped by the phone's ARM64 chip — on mid-range or older Android hardware, response latency becomes unusable for anything beyond short queries, and there is no server fallback to compensate. No API, no webhook, no automation surface of any kind: Eva cannot be called from a script, integrated into a workflow, or connected to another tool. Any team that needs Eva's capabilities as a component rather than a standalone app will rebuild the functionality from scratch elsewhere. The repo shows 1 star and 0 contributors beyond the original author at time of curation — when something breaks on a specific Android version or model, there is no community to surface a fix or workaround. The APK targets arm64-v8a only, so devices outside that architecture are unsupported with no documented path to building for other targets.

Bottom line

Drifty is paid while Eva is free; Eva is open source. Choose based on which difference matters most for your workflow.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Drifty and Eva?

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

Is Drifty better than Eva?

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.

Drifty vs Eva: which should I pick?

Pick Drifty if its pricing model, openness, or platform fit matches your constraints; pick Eva 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.