SumizAI vs Duck.ai

What Duck.ai is

What Duck.ai is

Duck.ai is a feature from DuckDuckGo, the search engine known for not tracking its users, that lets you have anonymous conversations with several third-party chat models at once. Instead of building its own model, DuckDuckGo brokers access to other companies' models, stripping out identifying data along the way before a query ever reaches the model provider.

Key features

Free access includes Anthropic's Claude 4.5 Haiku, Meta's Llama 3.3 70B, Mistral Small 3 24B, and OpenAI's GPT-4o mini — users switch between them from a single, simple interface. Metadata that could identify a user, such as an IP address, is removed before a query reaches the model provider, and conversations are not stored or used to train models by DuckDuckGo or by the underlying providers by default. Subscribers on DuckDuckGo's higher tiers (Plus, Pro) get access to more powerful models like GPT-5.4 or Claude Opus 4.8, plus higher usage limits.

Who it's for

Duck.ai appeals to people already using DuckDuckGo's search engine for its privacy stance, who want the same anonymity when talking to AI models, without creating a separate account with every model provider individually.

Use cases

In practice, Duck.ai works well for quickly comparing answers from several different models to the same question without switching between separate provider websites, and for everyday queries where a user wants assurance that the conversation content won't be tied back to their identity.

Pricing and business model

Basic access to Duck.ai is free with a limited model selection, and a paid DuckDuckGo subscription unlocks more powerful, newer models plus higher query limits — the business model mirrors the freemium approach used by the model providers themselves.

Limitations and what to watch for

Duck.ai is a broker, not the owner of the models — the quality and availability of any given model depends on DuckDuckGo's agreements with individual providers and can change over time as the list of available models is updated.

Building trust through the search engine's brand

DuckDuckGo enters the AI assistant market with a privacy reputation built over years in search — a different starting point than new AI startups that have to earn a user's trust from scratch on first contact with the product.

Limitations of free model access

Models available without a subscription can be smaller or older than the flagship versions offered directly by their makers — fine for everyday queries, but for more demanding tasks it's worth comparing answer quality against the paid version of that model at the source.

Model rotation over time

The list of models Duck.ai offers changes with new deals and expiring contracts with providers — a model someone relies on today might disappear from the list in a few months, replaced by a newer version or an entirely different provider.

Anonymity of the conversation versus permanence of an ai notes entry

It's worth separating two different things: the anonymity of a Duck.ai conversation itself (nobody knows it was you) and the permanence of its content as an ai notes entry elsewhere — once a fragment is copied into an external notebook, Duck.ai's anonymization no longer covers that copy, so the security of wherever that ai notes entry ends up depends entirely on the app chosen there.

AI notes from anonymous Duck.ai conversations

Duck.ai offers no built-in archive of lasting notes — anonymity alone doesn't solve the problem of keeping a conversation around, so an answer someone wants to keep as an ai notes entry still has to be copied by hand into a separate notes app once the session ends.

The business model of anonymization as a service

DuckDuckGo has spent years building its brand around not tracking search users, and Duck.ai extends that same promise to AI conversations — the company earns from contextual search ads and subscriptions, not from selling data about users' conversations.

Model choice as an edge over a single provider

Being able to switch between several models from different companies within one interface, with no separate accounts to create, sets Duck.ai apart from apps tied to a single, specific model provider — convenient for comparing answer quality without losing the anonymization layer.

What's worth checking before choosing

Before relying on Duck.ai, check the current list of models available on the free tier, since it changes over time along with DuckDuckGo's agreements with individual providers.

Browser integration and search bar access

Duck.ai is available both as a standalone page and integrated directly into DuckDuckGo's search bar — users can switch from a classic search to a conversation with an AI model without leaving the same browser and without installing an extra app.

Comparison with paying for each provider's subscription separately

Someone paying separately for accounts with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta just to access their models might instead consider a single DuckDuckGo subscription covering several of those models at once — though usually with lower usage limits than a dedicated subscription directly with each provider individually.

Mobile and desktop availability

Duck.ai is available in DuckDuckGo's mobile apps for Android and iOS, as well as desktop apps for macOS and Windows, so a conversation started on a computer can continue on a phone with no extra account setup — though the conversation history stays local to the device, with no persistent cross-platform cloud sync.

Bottom line

Duck.ai is anonymized access to several chat models from different companies in one interface, with no lasting conversation archive. Anyone who wants worthwhile answers from such conversations to land automatically as ai notes in a searchable archive should consider a tool built around that workflow.

Comparison with SumizAI

Duck.ai and SumizAI differ in purpose — Duck.ai is an anonymized gateway to multiple models with no notes archive, while SumizAI is a notebook where answers worth keeping automatically become ai notes as Markdown files in a vault you own, with the model connected through your own API key to one of seven providers, including Anthropic and OpenAI, both also available through Duck.ai. Anyone who wants an anonymous comparison of several models at once will pick Duck.ai; anyone who wants these notes from those conversations to build a lasting archive will find SumizAI the better-fitting tool.

That is our reading of the record. For AlternativeTo's own wording, see its page for Duck.ai — the facts above were read on 2026-08-16.

Duck.ai in depth

A search company's answer to the chatbot question

Duck.ai is DuckDuckGo's chat interface to large language models that DuckDuckGo does not own and did not train. The company behind it spent well over a decade arguing that a search engine does not have to build a dossier on its users in order to be useful, and Duck.ai is that same argument transplanted into a newer product category. Instead of training a model, DuckDuckGo positioned itself as a broker: you type into its interface, it forwards the request to Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral or a hosting partner, and the model provider never learns who sent it. The AlternativeTo entry compresses this into a single line about private conversations with third-party models anonymised through DuckDuckGo's own infrastructure, and that really is the whole product.

The consequence is a deliberately thin application. There is no account to create, nothing to install if you use the browser version, no advertising inside the interface and no analytics trailing you from one session to the next. What remains is a model picker, a text box and a conversation. For a sizeable group of people that turns out to be precisely the product they were looking for, which explains the 98 likes and the 4.4-out-of-5 average across eleven ratings on the AlternativeTo listing, plus an app-store average recorded there at 4.85 — strong numbers for a tool whose main selling point is a list of things it refuses to do.

Which models you get, and why the list keeps moving

The free tier is not a single model but a rotating shortlist of small and mid-sized ones. DuckDuckGo's own help pages currently name Anthropic's Claude 4.5 Haiku, Mistral Small 4, OpenAI's GPT-5.4 nano and GPT-5.4 mini, and two open-weight models — gpt-oss-120b and Gemma 4 31B — served by the confidential-computing host Tinfoil.sh. The AlternativeTo entry, written against an earlier snapshot, lists Llama 4 Scout, Mistral Small 3 24B, GPT-4o mini and GPT-5 mini instead. Neither source is wrong; the roster is simply swapped as vendors ship new checkpoints, and anyone evaluating Duck.ai should treat the specific model names as this month's configuration rather than a contract.

Paid access sits inside DuckDuckGo's subscription bundle rather than being sold as a standalone chatbot plan. The Plus tier adds the full-size frontier models — GPT-5.4 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 — on top of everything in the free list. The Pro tier goes further with Claude Opus 4.8, and DuckDuckGo describes it as running at higher reasoning effort than Plus with roughly double the usage allowance. The AlternativeTo entry puts a figure of ten dollars a month against the paid tier; DuckDuckGo's help documentation itself does not quote a price on the pages describing Duck.ai, so the exact amount is worth confirming at checkout, particularly since the subscription also bundles unrelated services such as a VPN.

Usage limits exist on every tier but are not published as a message count. DuckDuckGo says only that Pro subscribers get twice the allowance of Plus, which tells you the ratio and nothing about the base. In practice this is the sharpest difference between Duck.ai and a first-party subscription: with ChatGPT or Claude you at least know roughly what you have bought, whereas here you find the ceiling by hitting it.

Where the conversations live

This is the part of the design worth understanding before you commit any real work to it. Recent chats are stored locally on the device, not on DuckDuckGo's servers and not on the model provider's. That has an obvious upside — there is no cloud archive of your prompts to leak, subpoena or repurpose as training data — and an equally obvious cost. Your history does not follow you from laptop to phone. Clearing browser storage takes it with you. The Fire Button, DuckDuckGo's one-tap data purge, wipes chats along with everything else, which is convenient right up to the moment you wanted to keep something. Individual conversations can be deleted on their own, and up to five can be pinned so they stay reachable at the top of the list, but pinning is a bookmark, not a backup.

The privacy claim itself has two layers. DuckDuckGo strips identifying metadata before passing prompts on, so the model provider sees traffic from DuckDuckGo rather than from you, and DuckDuckGo states that it does not store prompts or use them for training. That is a policy commitment rather than something a user can verify from outside, and at least one commenter on the AlternativeTo entry says exactly that — scepticism about whether the company's practice matches its marketing. It is a fair objection to record. The architectural point still stands: local-only history means there is materially less data sitting anywhere to be mishandled in the first place.

Platforms, and how it reaches you

The web app at duck.ai works in any browser, which is the path most people take. Beyond that, Duck.ai is folded into DuckDuckGo's own browser on macOS via the Mac App Store, on Windows via the Microsoft Store, and on iPhone, iPad and Android phones and tablets through the respective app stores. Inside those browsers it appears twice: as a standalone chat surface and as an AI button attached to search results, so a query can be escalated from a list of links into a conversation. Both entry points can be switched off in settings for people who would rather their search results stay a search results page — an option that says something about the audience DuckDuckGo expects. Interface language coverage runs to more than twenty-five languages, inherited from the browser rather than built specially for the chat.

Who praises it, who complains, and about what

The recurring compliment in user feedback is breadth without administrative overhead: several models from competing labs reachable behind one interface, with no sign-up, no separate billing relationships and no phone-number verification. People who want to see how Claude and a GPT model each handle the same prompt find that comparison unusually cheap here. The mobile experience also draws praise as a lighter substitute for the official ChatGPT app.

The complaints are consistent and structural. Duck.ai is feature-poor next to dedicated chat platforms, and one specific gap comes up by name: you cannot rename a conversation, which makes a long list of chats hard to navigate. There are no projects, no shared workspaces, no persistent custom instructions carried across sessions — the sort of scaffolding that turns a chatbot into a working tool. That is the trade DuckDuckGo made. Statelessness on the server is what makes the privacy story work, and statelessness on the server is exactly what stops the product from remembering how you like to work.

Realistic verdict

Duck.ai suits someone who queries models occasionally, values not being logged more than being remembered, and wants to sample several vendors before choosing one. It is a poor fit for anyone building long-running workflows, needing an API, relying on chat history as a knowledge base, or wanting the file handling and tooling that first-party subscriptions provide. The licence is proprietary and the model is freemium, so the free tier is genuinely usable and the ceiling arrives without warning. AlternativeTo lists 146 competing products against it, which is an honest signal of how crowded this space has become. If your interest in an AI chat tool is mostly about summarising documents and drafting text rather than about the chat surface itself, a purpose-built summarisation tool such as SumizAI may fit that narrower job more directly than a general-purpose chat front end.

Product page: duck.ai

What SumizAI is

A note-taking application built around a conversation with an AI model. You ask a question, the answer streams back, and the answers worth keeping become Markdown notes — filed into a vault that is a folder on your own disk.

A vault is a directory holding base.md, a generated table of contents up to six levels deep, and a notes/ folder with one .md file per note. Before a note is written it is checked against the ones already there, so the fourth note about the same idea gets merged instead of added. Links between notes are ordinary Markdown links to files that exist.

The model is never ours: you bring your own API key to one of seven providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, a local Ollama or your own server — and pay that provider directly. A question sends the table of contents plus at most five relevant notes within a 24,000-character budget, and the app shows you which five it used.

Every answer kept this way becomes one of these ai notes, ready to search again months later without hunting back through old chats.

Side by side

Where they differ

• Duck.ai is a place to have the conversation. SumizAI is not a chatbot — the conversation is the input, not the product. What comes out of it is a .md file with a title, a place in base.md and a duplicate check against the notes already in the vault. If you only want to talk to a model, you do not need SumizAI.
• Duck.ai is freemium: there is a free tier and a paid one, and the line between them is the thing to read before committing. SumizAI has one plan at a dollar a month, so there is no feature held back for a higher tier — and an unpaid account still opens and exports every vault it already has.
• AlternativeTo's description of Duck.ai does not mention Markdown, so check what format your notes end up in before you fill it up. SumizAI writes standard .md files to a folder you picked, and an unpaid account can still export all of them.

Which one to pick