5 AI Apps You Should Use Instead of Meta Muse

If you’re tired of seeing Meta AI spread across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and every other company-run app, Meta has a surprise for you: more AI! Meta Muse is an agent app that can do things on your phone rather than just extracting information for you. The cute and fluffy mascot makes you want to use Muse all the more, and that’s why it’s gaining so much popularity online.

However, as cute as her AI is, Meta’s reputation precedes her. It’s the latest tech giant that comes to mind when thinking about privacy-conscious companies, due to its past privacy lapses. And that’s a valid reason if you want to avoid Muse and look for safer alternatives. Here are some solid agentic AI tools that are not created by Meta.

Claude from Anthropic is serious, as is his workhorse agent, Cowork. It’s designed for professionals who need in-depth knowledge work – consider researching, developing, gathering multiple sources, et al. This is the tool I would choose if I needed to do complex, multi-step knowledge work. For example, I would use it to go through long legal documents (e.g. tech-adjacent international laws) and make sure there are no attribution gaps in the story I’m working on.

Honestly, this only scratches the surface of Claude Cowork. Since it runs on your computer, you can give it access to an entire work folder and ask it to organize hundreds of PDF receipts into folders, name them, and create a spreadsheet based on the details in those files. You can connect it to external databases like HubSpot and Apollo using MCP and extract general information about the businesses you plan to target. Developers can create additional files like installation instructions for their GitHub repository.

This is perfect for such multi-step tasks. You just tell it what you need – without explaining how to do it – and it automatically figures out the required steps. Since it is more business and enterprise oriented, it is not as suited to consumer-level tasks.

Just as ChatGPT is a more general tool than Claude, so is its agent mode called Work. On the desktop app or on the web, slide the button at the top and ChatGPT will go from a simple chatbot to an agent that gets things done, no matter how long the process takes. Its biggest advantage is that it’s much more user-friendly, with direct integrations for DoorDash, Expedia, Canva, Uber, Spotify, and more.

So with everything connected, you can ask Work to pull information from one app and take action in another without leaving the chat interface. As an agent, it can perform multi-step actions both on your computer and on the web, managing everything on its own. ChatGPT recently added another layer of automation with Dots, anthropomorphized agents that can delegate tasks to Work. But to access Dots, you need the $200 Pro plan, while Work is available on the cheaper Go and Plus plans with varying usage limits.

Personally, I choose ChatGPT because it is a better all-around tool than Claude and Gemini for my usage. The same task is completed in fewer steps, although other options on the list may better suit your needs.

The Perplexity computer has always stood out because it gives you the best of all worlds. It is more than an AI agent, as other companies offer, and functions more like an orchestrator. This means it has access to all recent models from Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and others, and delegates subtasks to each based on their strengths. This also means that you are not locked into a single ecosystem and can use any model that is currently working well in the market.

I find Perplexity Computer to be very reliable because even though they set up their multi-step flow for a given task, they always double-check their own work before delivering the final copy to you. Secondly, Perplexity also has its AI web browser called Comet. If you use Computer inside Comet, it can control the browser window, log into the account you gave it access to, or scour the web for a service it can’t communicate with directly, to get what you need.

This is an incredibly powerful AI assistant that is suitable for both work and personal use. However, it hasn’t found traction with consumers because it requires the more expensive $200 package, which could prove very cost-effective for businesses and serious jobs.

Google’s version of agentic AI called Gemini Spark works like every other tool on this list. But being a Google product, it is hyper-optimized for Workspace apps and is deeply integrated to extract information and take action within these services. If you live and breathe Gmail, Google Docs, Sheets, Keep, etc., Spark makes perfect sense because, unlike other tools with external connections to your inbox and cloud storage, Spark is an integral part of that ecosystem.

That said, as a professional tool, Gemini still doesn’t have as comprehensive a list of external app connections as Claude and ChatGPT. That’s its biggest flaw, although it can at least run locally on your computer to perform actions stored on your disk (requires the AI ​​Ultra plan) and browse the web for you in Chrome.

Gemini Spark is a great tool for what it does, but it’s not something you should primarily subscribe to the AI ​​Pro plan for. But if you’re already paying for the Google AI Pro plan, Gemini Spark is a huge plus.

Not everyone needs a professional AI agent to help them get through their day. Sometimes all we need is a little help to make our daily lives a little easier. And surprisingly, the new Siri AI does just the trick. It’s nowhere near as independent and powerful as Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work, but it gets things done.

Siri already has extensive personal context about you thanks to its deep integration on both iPhone and Mac, so it’s hyper-personalized to you from the start, while other AI tools have to learn about you from scratch. That’s why it’s already proven to be a much more natural integration into my daily workflow than Gemini on Android. This helps me take quick actions even in third-party apps, like filling my Blinkit cart with groceries or performing multi-step actions in Notes and Calendar, taking the context of messages.

And when it comes to privacy perception, Siri AI is the opposite of Meta Muse. Apple is generally considered more trustworthy with your data, taking steps to manage your information securely, even when it’s processed in the cloud.

It would be unwise to assume that all Meta Muse alternatives are 100% secure and privacy-friendly – ​​Anthropic and OpenAI continue to point fingers at each other every other day for different types of violations. But Meta has historically proven to be far more notorious than probably all of these tools combined, so I’d much rather choose one of these alternatives than fall for Muse’s cheesy marketing.

Which Meta Muse replacement would you choose? Let us know in the comments below.