Stilou vs ChatGPT
ChatGPT is one of the best pieces of software ever built and we are not going to pretend to have replaced it. The gap we care about is not intelligence.
Keep ChatGPT — for research, code, drafting and general knowledge it is far ahead of anything Stilou does, and nothing here replaces it. Use Stilou's Neo for the questions where the answer depends on your own week: what a client said, what you promised, what you decided in March. ChatGPT cannot answer those without you pasting the context in first.
Which one should you actually use?
This is not a choice. It is a division of labour, and the honest recommendation is both.
Research, explanation, code, translation, brainstorming, long-form drafting from scratch. ChatGPT is better at all of it and the gap is not close. We rent models; they build them.
Web, iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac. Stilou is a Mac app. If your assistant has to be on your phone, that is a requirement we do not meet.
Newest models, image generation, voice, code execution, a plugin and agent ecosystem. Stilou has an assistant; OpenAI has a platform.
"What did Alex say about pricing?" "What did I promise in that call?" "What were the three objections from last quarter?" Neo starts holding the answer. ChatGPT starts holding nothing about you, and asking it means assembling the context yourself, every time.
In Private mode Stilou answers from a model running on your own machine, so client material, medical detail or anything under NDA never gets transmitted. Pasting the same text into ChatGPT sends it to a server, whatever the retention policy says.
The people who get the most out of Stilou keep ChatGPT open in a tab and always will. If a page tells you to cancel it, close the page.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is OpenAI's assistant, available on the web and as apps for macOS, Windows, iOS and Android. It answers questions, writes and edits text, reasons about problems, writes and runs code, generates images, searches the web, and increasingly acts on your behalf through tools and agents. It has a free tier and several paid tiers for individuals, teams and enterprises — see their pricing page for current figures.
It also has memory now, and connectors that reach into some of your accounts, so the flat claim that “ChatGPT knows nothing about you” is out of date and we are not going to make it. What it has is a summary of things you have told it and access to specific sources you have connected, which is a genuinely useful and rapidly improving thing.
What it does not have is a continuous record of your working life gathered without you deciding, each time, that a particular thing was worth telling it. That is the difference this page is about, and it is a difference of architecture rather than one of capability.
Neo vs ChatGPT, side by side
We have not printed ChatGPT prices here — see the note in the sources section for why.
| Stilou (Neo) | ChatGPT | |
|---|---|---|
| General world knowledge | Good, in Connected mode | Excellent — the reason to use it |
| Code, research, long-form drafting | Not what it is for | Excellent |
| Knows what you said in a meeting | Yes, if Joey was listening | Only if you paste it in |
| Knows what you promised, and to whom | Yes, via Cadence | No |
| Knows the screenshot you took in March | Yes, by what was inside it | No |
| Knows your Slack and Gmail threads | Yes, via connectors | Via connectors, for supported sources |
| Context assembled automatically | Yes — that is the product | You bring it, or connect a source |
| Shows where an answer came from | Yes, on every answer | When it searched or used a source |
| Runs with no network | Yes, in Private mode | No |
| Material never leaves your machine | Yes, in Private mode | No |
| Acts on the text in front of you | Yes — Halo and the Bar, in any app | Via the desktop app, in some contexts |
| Platforms | macOS only | Web, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android |
| Image generation, voice, agents | No | Yes |
| Price | Free tier, from $29/mo | Free tier and paid tiers — see their page |
Count the rows and ChatGPT wins the comparison. It should — it is a far larger product built by a far larger company. The five rows in the middle are the only ones we are claiming, and they are the five that no amount of model quality will close.
The model is not the moat. The briefing is.
Every time you open a general assistant to ask something about your own work, you pay a tax before you get an answer. You explain who the client is. You paste the thread. You summarise what was agreed last month, from memory, badly. Then you get a good answer to a question you have already half-answered in the asking.
Most of the time the tax is small enough to ignore, so it never registers as a cost. But it quietly determines which questions you bother to ask. Nobody assembles four sources to ask a thirty-second question, so the thirty-second questions go unasked, and the assistant ends up used for essays and code rather than for the ordinary business of remembering what is going on.
Neo removes the briefing because the briefing already happened — continuously, as a side effect of working. The dictation you made walking out of the building, the meeting Joey sat in on, the screenshot of their quote, the Slack thread where it was confirmed. By the time you ask, the context is assembled, and asking costs nothing.
This is also why the comparison does not turn on which model is better. Point a frontier model at no context and it will give you a fluent answer about nothing. Point a smaller model at the right four dots and it will tell you what you actually need. Everything else is a model anyone can rent — including us, in Connected mode.
Where ChatGPT is the better choice
- It is smarter, and it is not closeFor reasoning, code, research and writing from a blank page, use ChatGPT. OpenAI trains frontier models; we integrate them. This is not modesty, it is an accurate description of two very different companies.
- It is everywhereWeb, phone, Windows, Mac. Stilou is a single Mac app, so an assistant you can reach on a train from your phone is not something we offer.
- It does far moreImages, voice, code execution, web browsing, agents, a developer platform. Neo answers questions and takes actions inside your own work, and that is the whole surface.
- Free is genuinely usefulA large number of people never need to pay OpenAI anything, and the free tier is more capable than most paid products were two years ago.
- Memory and connectors are improving fastThe gap this page describes is real today and narrower than it was a year ago. If OpenAI ever sits continuously across your mail, calls, screen and notes with the same coverage as a local capture layer, the argument here weakens considerably — and we would rather write that sentence ourselves than have you notice it.
Looking for a ChatGPT alternative?
If you mean a better general model, Stilou is the wrong answer and Claude or Gemini is the right one. We do not compete on reasoning and would lose.
If you mean you are tired of pasting your own life into a chat box before you can ask about it — that is the thing we built, and it is a different product rather than a cheaper version of the same one. Neo is not trying to be a smaller ChatGPT. It is trying to be the one that already read the thread.
Worth knowing. Keep your ChatGPT subscription. The realistic setup is ChatGPT for the world and Neo for your week, and anyone telling you to cancel one for the other is selling something.
Frequently asked questions
Is Neo better than ChatGPT?
At general intelligence, no, and it is not close — for research, code and writing from scratch, ChatGPT is the better tool and you should keep using it. Neo is better only at questions whose answer lives in your own history, because it starts holding that history and ChatGPT starts holding nothing about you unless you paste it in or connect a source.
Can't I just use ChatGPT's memory and connectors?
Partly, and that gap is closing, so we will not overstate it. ChatGPT can remember things you tell it and can reach into some connected accounts, which covers a real amount of ground.
The structural difference is coverage and effort. Stilou's memory is a side effect of working — every dictation, screenshot, note and meeting is captured without a decision, so context you never thought to save is there anyway. Chat memory holds what you chose to tell it, and connectors reach the sources they support. The things you most need later are usually the ones you did not know were important at the time.
Does Stilou use OpenAI models?
In Connected mode Stilou uses hosted models, which may include ones from OpenAI and other providers, and that is exactly why we do not claim to have built a better model than ChatGPT. In Private mode it runs a model on your own Mac and nothing is transmitted. The difference between Neo and a general assistant is the context, not the weights.
Is Stilou more private than ChatGPT?
In Private mode, yes, and structurally rather than by policy — the material never leaves your machine, so there is no retention setting to trust and nothing to opt out of. In Connected mode we send what a request needs to a provider, like anyone else. Our /privacy page sets out exactly which surfaces do which.
Which is cheaper?
ChatGPT, for most people. It has a capable free tier and its paid consumer tier costs less than Stilou's $29 a month, and it does considerably more things. We are not competing on price and would lose that too.
Where these facts came from
Everything stated above about ChatGPT is taken from their own site and documentation, on the date shown. Products change — if you find something here that has gone out of date, tell us at hi@stilou.app and we will fix it.