Two people can both say "I have an AI assistant now" and mean genuinely different things. One means a text thread on their own phone that reads their email and nudges them before a meeting. The other means a colleague the whole team can ask for something, in a channel everyone on the team can already see. Poke is built for the first person. Sanaf is built for the second.
This is a fact-checked comparison. Poke's own pricing page and FAQ were read the same week this was written, because Poke moved off its earlier negotiated pricing to published tiers this year, and a comparison built on the old numbers would misdescribe what a prospective user actually signs up for today.
What Poke actually is
Poke is a personal AI assistant built by The Interaction Company of California, acquired by Cognition in July 2026 in a deal reported in the low nine figures. There is no app to open. A user goes to poke.com, gives a phone number, and from then on Poke lives inside whichever messaging app they already use: Apple Messages, WhatsApp or Telegram, texted like a person rather than opened like software. It connects to Gmail or Outlook, reads a calendar, and can reach into tools like Notion, GitHub, Linear and others through a recipe directory, with custom integrations available through MCP for anyone willing to build one.
The pitch is proactive: Poke is meant to notice something needs attention, an email that matters, a meeting with no agenda, and text first rather than wait to be asked. "Poke Recipes" package up a repeatable automation, "Poke Kitchen" is where a developer can build a new one, and "Poke Human" is the most unusual piece of the product: for the tasks an API genuinely cannot reach, calling a restaurant, booking a ride, placing an order, Poke dispatches the request to an actual person who completes it and reports back, billed at cost against the account's credit balance. Poke states plainly that the human operator handling that request "cannot access your chat history, memories, or integrations," seeing only what the specific task requires.
Pricing runs three tiers. Free is $0 a month, no card required, with access to connect email, calendar and other apps. Pro is $19 a month, adding frontier models for harder requests, background automations that run in real time, and higher rate limits. Ultra is $199 a month, the highest rate limits, frontier models on every action, Poke Human included, and pay-as-you-go usage once the plan's credits run out, so a heavy month is never actually blocked. It is a genuinely well-built product for the job it names for itself, running one person's messages, one person's calendar, one person's errands.
What Sanaf is instead
Sanaf is not a text thread on one person's phone. It is one AI employee, hired into a Slack or Microsoft Teams workspace or into its own chat in the console, holding a written job description across thirty-five roles on the roster today, or a role a business defines itself, and working from that description as requests arrive from anyone on the team over days and weeks. Ask it to chase an overdue invoice this morning and follow up on a different account next Tuesday, and both requests land against the same standing job, "own collections," visible to whoever else in the channel needs to see that it happened.
That distinction is the whole comparison. Poke answers to the person who signed up for it, in a thread only that person reads. Sanaf answers to a workspace: the same hire a five-person team and a fifteen-person team both point at their invoicing, their support inbox, and their lead follow-up, with the manager who hired it able to see the work land in the same Slack channel the rest of the team already lives in, not in a private text nobody else can check.
Side by side
| Dimension | Sanaf | Poke |
|---|---|---|
| Who it works for | A team, in a shared workspace | One person, in their own texts |
| Where it lives | Slack, Microsoft Teams, or its own console chat | Apple Messages, WhatsApp or Telegram |
| Unit of work | A job: a standing description of something it owns | A request or a recipe, run in a personal thread |
| Getting started | 35 written jobs on the roster, or a 36th you define | Connect email and calendar, then ask for things |
| Reaching the real world | Drives a browser or an app connection as part of a job | Poke Human dispatches a task to an actual person, at cost |
| Approvals | Per kind of action: do it, ask, or never, with conditions | Not published as a per-action rule; the operator on a Poke Human task sees only that task |
| Trial | Shadow mode: drafts for review, promoted a level at a time | Free tier with no card, full paid tiers on a monthly plan |
| Pricing model | Free to start with $120 of credit and no card, then credits from $20 that never expire, priced on the work | Free, then $19/month Pro or $199/month Ultra, with pay-as-you-go usage past the plan's credits |
| Best for | A business function a team shares and can see get done | An individual who wants their own inbox, calendar and errands handled from their phone |
The pricing comparison, done honestly
Poke's $19 and $199 tiers are personal-productivity pricing, and they are honest about it: one subscription, one person, month after month, with a pay-as-you-go safety valve on Ultra so a heavy week never just stops working. That is a fair way to price a single user's assistant, and cheap next to hiring anyone at all for the same job.
It stops being the right comparison the moment more than one person needs the work done. Poke has no published per-seat model for a team, because it is not built around a team; five people who each want the same kind of help are five separate $19 or $199 subscriptions, five separate threads, and no shared view of what any of them actually did. Sanaf's credit is bought once by the business and spent by whoever in the workspace asks for the work, at $120 free to start and packs from $20 that never expire afterward. A slow month costs nothing extra and a busy month is the next pack, not a second subscription for the second person who needs the same job done.
Where the real difference sits: a thread for one, or a hire the whole team can see
Poke's strength is genuinely personal fit. It lives where one person already texts, reads that one person's email and calendar without anyone else in the loop, and Poke Human means even an errand with no API, a dinner reservation, a phone call, gets handled without the person doing it themselves. For an individual, a founder juggling their own inbox and their own calendar without a team behind them, that is close to the ideal shape for an assistant: quiet, private, and always in the one app they already have open.
Sanaf's strength is that the work is visible to more than the person who asked for it. A job like collections, lead follow-up, or the support inbox is not one person's private thread, it is a function the business runs, and Sanaf sits in the Slack or Teams channel where a manager, a teammate covering for someone on leave, or a new hire trying to understand how the work gets done can all see the same record. The cost of that visibility is that Sanaf is not trying to be a single person's inbox assistant; it is a hire the team shares, not a personal concierge.
Where Poke wins, honestly
Choose Poke if the job really is personal: your own inbox, your own calendar, your own errands, and you want it running in the messaging app already open on your phone rather than a workplace channel. Choose it if Poke Human's real-world dispatch, a restaurant booking, a call made on your behalf, is the actual feature you want, since nothing on Sanaf's roster reaches into the physical world that way. Choose it if a flat personal subscription with a pay-as-you-go ceiling on the top tier fits how one person budgets better than a shared credit balance would.
Where Sanaf wins, honestly
Choose Sanaf if more than one person needs the same work done and needs to see that it happened, a job like invoicing, lead follow-up or support that belongs to the business rather than to whoever happens to be texting about it that day. Choose it if Slack or Microsoft Teams is where the team already works, so the hire sits in a channel instead of a private thread. Choose it if usage is uneven across a team and a credit that never expires, spent by whoever needs the work, fits better than a personal subscription that resets every month whether or not it was used.
Can you use both?
There is real room for both here, and less overlap than the "AI assistant" label on each suggests. A founder using Poke for their own inbox and calendar while Sanaf runs the business's collections and lead follow-up in the team's Slack is not paying twice for the same thing; it is matching each tool to the person it was actually built for. The confusion only starts if a business tries to run a shared function through a personal assistant meant for one person's texts, which is where a team quietly ends up with five subscriptions and no shared record of what got done.
The bottom line
Poke answers "who handles my own inbox, calendar and errands," and answers it well, proactive, private, priced for one person, with a human dispatcher for the tasks no API can reach. Sanaf answers a different question: "who owns this job for the business," with a written role, per-action approval rules, and a credit balance the whole team draws from rather than a subscription tied to one phone number. Neither is wrong for what it is built to do. The honest way to choose is to ask whether the work in front of you belongs to a person or to the business, because that answer decides which of these two is actually the fit.
Explore every job Sanaf can hold, see what starting free actually costs, or get in touch to talk through where the line falls in your own business.