Mother Brain vs Teya

Mother Brain 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.

Mother Brain

Mother Brain provides persistent AI memory with document and codebase indexing, vectorization, and real-time team collaboration on a self-hosted infrastructure. The vendor states the tool is designed for developers who need an AI assistant that retains context across sessions rather than starting cold each time. The self-hosted model means your code and documents never leave your own infrastructure, which matters for teams with compliance requirements. Scraped page content is sparse, so specific throughput limits, supported LLM backends, and integration depth cannot be confirmed from sourced material. Teams evaluating this should request direct documentation on vector store configuration and team permission models before committing.

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	Mother Brain	Teya
Pricing	Paid	Free
Price	$25/year	—
Free trial	No	No
Open source	No	Yes
Has API	No	No
Self-hosted option	Yes	Yes
Platforms	macOS, Windows, Linux	Android 8.0+
Pros	Persistent memory across sessions, so developers stop re-explaining codebase structure to an AI that forgot everything since the last conversation. Self-hosted deployment, which means proprietary source code and documents never leave your own infrastructure — removing a category of compliance risk that cloud-only tools cannot eliminate. Real-time team collaboration on a shared AI context, so multiple developers work from the same indexed knowledge base rather than maintaining separate, diverging chat histories. Document and codebase vectorization built in, so teams avoid the engineering overhead of standing up their own retrieval pipeline just to give an AI assistant persistent context.	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	The sourced vendor page provides no technical documentation on supported LLM backends, indexing capacity ceilings, or API surface — teams that require this detail before procurement cannot complete due diligence from public materials alone, and evaluation stalls. No free tier exists, so teams cannot run a trial against a real codebase before committing; teams that need hands-on validation before budget sign-off will move to a competitor that offers an evaluation path. Real-time collaboration feature set and permission model are undocumented in sourced material — teams managing access controls across multiple contributors cannot confirm whether the tool meets their requirements without direct vendor engagement, which adds procurement lead time.	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

Mother Brain 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 Mother Brain and Teya?

Mother Brain 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 Mother Brain 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.