Duck AI vs Teya

Duck 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.

Duck AI

Duck.ai is DuckDuckGo's browser-based chat interface that routes your prompts to leading AI models without requiring sign-up or storing your conversation history, per the vendor's stated privacy model. The free tier gives you access to a set of base models; advanced models with higher usage headroom are a paid-only feature tied to a DuckDuckGo subscription. There is no API, no self-hosted option, and no way to connect it to your own tooling — it is a chat window and nothing more. For a quick question, anonymous research, or a productivity task you do not want tied to an identity, it works cleanly. When you need to automate, integrate, or run more than a handful of advanced queries a day, you hit its ceiling fast.

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	Duck AI	Teya
Pricing	Paid	Free
Price	$9.99/month or $99.99/year for advanced models	—
Free trial	7 days	No
Open source	No	Yes
Has API	No	No
Self-hosted option	No	Yes
Platforms	Web	Android 8.0+
Pros	No account or sign-up required, so you can query any supported model without leaving an identity footprint — which matters when the research itself is the thing you do not want logged. Access to multiple AI models from a single interface, so you can compare outputs without maintaining separate accounts or API keys for each provider. Free tier with no usage friction for base models, so occasional users get real AI access without a billing commitment. DuckDuckGo's stated no-logging privacy model, so queries you run here are not fed back into a training pipeline or tied to a browsing profile the way they would be on most mainstream AI chat products.	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 API means any team that needs to call a model programmatically — to power a feature, automate a task, or process data in bulk — cannot use Duck.ai at all. There is no workaround short of switching to a provider that offers API access. Advanced models are a paid-only feature with no standalone purchase path — they require a DuckDuckGo subscription, so teams evaluating Duck.ai specifically for model access are buying into a broader product they may not want. No persistent context or session history means every conversation starts cold. Users running multi-step research or iterative drafting have to manually paste prior context back in each time, which breaks any workflow longer than a single exchange. No self-hosted or local option means privacy-sensitive organizations that cannot route queries through a third-party server — regulated industries, legal teams, enterprise security requirements — have no deployment path here. Teams with those constraints move to self-hosted open-source models.	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

Duck AI is paid while Teya is free; Teya is open source. Choose based on which difference matters most for your workflow.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Duck AI and Teya?

Duck 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 Duck 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.

Duck AI vs Teya: which should I pick?

Pick Duck AI if its pricing model, openness, or platform fit matches your constraints; pick Teya 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.