Gemini alternatives, and what Google keeps after you switch

The Morse teamPublished November 9, 2026Facts checked November 9, 202611 min read

The best Gemini alternatives in November 2026 are Morse, ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral's Vibe (formerly Le Chat), Duck.ai, Proton's Lumo, and Google's own Gemma 4 run on your computer, and the right one depends on why you're leaving Google's assistant: chats tied to your Google Account, human reviewers who keep some chats for up to three years, a training default you have to switch off, or Gemini replacing Assistant on your phone. Of the apps on this list, only Morse lets you keep using Gemini itself, with no Google Account behind the chat.

We read Google's Gemini Apps Privacy Hub (its notice last updated October 13, 2026, its questions October 26), its help pages on activity, signing in, connected apps, and downloading your data, the Google AI plans page, Gmail's smart features page, and Google's Assistant notice on November 9, 2026, then each alternative's own pricing and privacy pages the same day. Google deserves credit here. It puts a number on nearly every retention period, and it lets you use Gemini on the web without signing in at all.

The short list

As of November 9, 2026. Every cell comes from the company's own page, linked in its section below.

Why do people switch from Gemini?

People give five reasons, each checked here against Google's own pages. Is Gemini private covers the settings behind them in depth.

• It lives in your Google Account. "If you're 18 or over, Keep Activity is on by default," and saved activity is auto-deleted after 18 months unless you pick 3 or 36 months or no auto-delete (Google). With it off, chats are still "saved with your account for up to 72 hours," and only Device assistance, Gemini Notebook, Messages, Phone, and WhatsApp stay connected. So stopping the training also ends your saved history.
• People read some chats. "A subset of chats are reviewed by human reviewers (including Google's trained service providers)," and "Reviewed chats are retained for up to three years" (Google). Google's own advice is "Please don't enter confidential information that you wouldn't want a reviewer to see."
• It reaches into the rest of Google. With Personal Intelligence, Gemini can connect to Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Photos, Contacts, Wallet, and YouTube, and Google says that data helps "improve Google services, including training generative AI models, for everyone." Photos can be used to infer "relationships to people in your photos" (Google).
• It replaced Assistant. Google's Assistant team wrote that "Starting on September 3rd, Google Assistant on your mobile device is being discontinued," and that afterwards "you will no longer be able to use or switch back to Google Assistant on your phone, tablet, or paired devices" (Google Assistant Community). Our guide on turning off Gemini on Android covers every switch.
• It's in Gmail too. Gemini's summaries and drafts in Gmail fall under a setting called Smart features in Google Workspace, which Google says is off by default only in the European Economic Area, Japan, Switzerland, and the UK (Google). Here's how to turn off Gemini in Gmail.

Ads aren't on the list. The Privacy Hub says "Your Gemini Apps chats are not being used to show you ads." Shopping is the exception. Carts and Google Pay purchases made from Gemini go to Google Wallet and Google Pay activity, used "including for personalization and ads (depending on your settings)" (Google).

Does switching away from Gemini delete what Google kept?

No. Opening another app changes where your next chat goes, and nothing else. Here's what Google holds after you leave, read on Google's pages on November 9, 2026, and what you can do about each item before you go.

None of this shows up in two of the top results for this search, eWeek's list (May 14, 2026) and eesel's (edited October 14, 2026), which compare features and say nothing about Keep Activity, reviewed chats, or what Google keeps after a switch. Every step for clearing your activity is in how to delete Gemini history.

Is there a Gemini alternative without a Google account?

Yes. Gemini itself works signed out on the web, with fewer features, as we cover in is Gemini private.

Among the alternatives, Lumo's Free plan starts "without even creating a Proton account," ChatGPT works signed out with its training choice saved in your browser, a message from Morse's home page opens a guest chat that's kept in the tab's memory and never saved, and a local model needs no account anywhere.

Can you use Google's models without the Gemini app?

Yes, in three ways. Google's open Gemma 4 family comes in E2B and E4B sizes for "mobile and IoT devices" and 12B, 26B, and 31B sizes for "personal computers" (Google DeepMind). Duck.ai offers Gemma 4 31B among its free models. And Morse offers Gemini itself in Anonymous mode, described below. No other app on this list offers Gemini.

1. Morse: Gemini without your Google Account behind it

Every reason above comes back to the account. Gemini is part of your Google Account, so what you ask sits beside your mail, photos, and purchases, under Google's retention clocks and review rules. Morse is a web app with over 30 models, open and closed, Gemini among them, and it keeps your chat history in your browser instead of on our servers.

• Anonymous, to keep using Gemini without Google knowing it's you. Pick Gemini, and our proxy removes your account, email, and IP address and sends the message under Morse's own account. Google still sees what you wrote, without knowing it's you, and may keep it for a limited time to check for abuse, under its own policy. There's no Keep Activity setting and no 18-month history in your Google Account. Morse strips who you are but not what you write, so leave your name and other identifying details out of the message.
• Private, the default, for questions you'd rather no host kept. Open-weight models like DeepSeek, Kimi, and GLM, plus xAI's Grok, answer under the zero data retention agreements Morse has with its inference, search, and other providers. Where a provider confirms zero retention on each reply, Morse checks it and refuses a reply that doesn't.
• E2EE, for anything you wouldn't tell any assistant. Your browser checks the secure enclave's hardware attestation before anything leaves your device, then encrypts the message so only that enclave can read it, and our servers relay ciphertext they can't read. The enclaves are run by third-party providers, not by Morse, and the guarantee rests on the enclave hardware and attestation working as designed. E2EE runs open-weight models, without web search or image generation. More in how end-to-end encrypted AI chat works.

In every mode, Morse doesn't train AI on your content, sell your data, or show ads, and runs no advertising trackers or third-party analytics, so there's no training default to find and no ad profile to build (privacy policy). Our servers don't keep your messages or log what you write, so there's no three-year copy on our side, and because we don't store chats, we usually have very little to give authorities. Your history locks when you sign out and takes two keys to open: one that never leaves your device and one our server gives you when you sign in. Clearing your browser or deleting your account deletes your chats, and we can't recover them, so keep a copy of anything you need.

Sign-in is a code sent to your email, so you don't need a Google Account. Free is $0 with no card: 15 messages a day with GPT-6 Luna, Claude Haiku 5.5, GLM 5.3 Flash, and more, 3 images a day in Studio, and web search. Pro, $19 a month or $17 billed yearly, adds E2EE chats, unfiltered models, memory across chats, and unlimited Pro image models, Nano Banana 2 Lite among them; Studio images are stored in your browser, encrypted, like your chats. Max is $49 a month. Choose Morse if you want Gemini, GPT, and Claude without a Google Account, with no training and history that stays on your device.

2. ChatGPT

ChatGPT fixes Gemini's trade between training and history. On Free, Plus, and Pro, "data sharing is enabled by default," but you can turn off Improve the model for everyone "and keep your chat history"; OpenAI adds that turning it off "does not delete or hide saved chats" (OpenAI). Signed out, the same choice is saved in your browser. As of November 9, 2026, Go is $8 a month and "may include ads," Plus is $20, and Pro starts at $100 (OpenAI). Your chats still sit in an OpenAI account; we compare the two in ChatGPT vs Gemini privacy. Choose ChatGPT if you want to opt out of training without losing your history.

3. Claude

Claude suits people who want a firm line on ads and short deletion windows. Anthropic says deleted chats leave its back-end storage "within 30 days"; with its Model Improvement setting on, it "may retain your data in a de-identified format for up to 5 years" for training; and flagged chats are kept "up to 2 years" (Anthropic). On February 4, 2026, Anthropic wrote that "Claude will remain ad-free" (Anthropic). Pro is $20 a month, or $17 billed as $200 a year, and Max starts at $100 (Claude). Claude vs Gemini privacy sets the two side by side. Choose Claude if you want an assistant whose maker has promised no ads and publishes how long it keeps each kind of chat.

4. Mistral Vibe, formerly Le Chat

Mistral renamed Le Chat to Vibe on August 12, 2026, and says "Your account, plan, conversations, and saved content all move with you" (Mistral). Training is on by default, as on Gemini: "Input and output data are used by default to train our artificial intelligence models," unless you opt out, and Enterprise customers are opted out by default (Mistral). Pro is $14.99 a month, and $5.99 for verified students (Mistral). Is Le Chat private covers its settings. Choose Vibe if you want Mistral's own models instead of Google's and you'll switch training off yourself.

5. Duck.ai

Duck.ai's terms, last updated October 1, 2026, say "All metadata that contains personal information (for example, your IP address) is removed," that providers agree to "not using Prompts and Outputs to develop or improve their models," and that they delete what they get "at most within 30 days, with limited exceptions for safety and legal compliance." Your recent chats are "saved locally on your device" (DuckDuckGo). Its free models are Claude Haiku 5.5, Mistral Small 4, GPT-6 Luna, GPT-5.4 mini, gpt-oss-120b, and Gemma 4 31B; paid plans add Claude Sonnet 5.5, Claude Opus 5.5, and larger GPT models, and no Gemini (DuckDuckGo). Choose Duck.ai if you want free GPT, Claude, and Gemma with your IP address removed.

6. Proton Lumo

Lumo is the pick for people leaving Google's hold on their history. Proton says "Lumo doesn't use your chats to train the AI models," that "After Lumo processes your query and generates a response, the data is erased," and that saved chats are "stored on your device and synced to Proton servers using zero-access encryption." Its models are Qwen 3.5, GLM 5.3, Apertus 1.5, and two image models, run "exclusively on servers Proton controls" (Proton). Plus is $9.99 a month, billed $119.88 a year (Proton). We compare it with Duck.ai and Brave Leo in Duck.ai vs Lumo vs Brave Leo. Choose Lumo if you already use Proton Mail or Drive and want your AI chats with the same company.

7. Gemma 4 on your own computer

A local model takes every company out of the chat. Ollama lists Gemma 4 downloads from 4.6 GB for the E2B size to about 20 GB for 31B, run with ollama run gemma4 (Ollama). The same page lists cloud tags too, which run on Ollama's servers, so pick a size without "cloud" in its name if you want it to stay on your machine. The trade is speed. Answers come as fast as your own hardware allows, and the 31B size needs about 20 GB of disk space. Local AI vs cloud AI covers what to expect. Choose Gemma locally if you have a recent computer and want nothing to leave it.

How we compared them

We read every page linked above on November 9, 2026 and took each company at its written word. We didn't test answer quality, speed, or refusals, and we didn't run Gemma ourselves. Where a page didn't state something, such as whether Duck.ai's free models need an account, we left it out.

Choose Gemini or Morse

• Choose Gemini if you want it working inside Gmail, Drive, Photos, and your Android phone, you're fine with Keep Activity's defaults or with losing your history to switch them off, and the AI plans' storage is worth the price to you.
• Choose Morse if you want to keep Gemini, GPT, and Claude without a Google Account, with no training and no ads on any plan, open-weight models on hosts that agreed to keep nothing, E2EE that your own browser verifies, and history stored encrypted on your device.

Send a first message from the Morse home page without an account, or start free with no card. E2EE chats come with Pro, at $19 a month.

Morse publishes this comparison. We've tried to keep it fair; if something's wrong or out of date, email hello@trymorse.ai.

Gemini is a trademark of Google LLC. Morse is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google LLC.