Maple vs Confer: keys, attestation, apps, and price, with Morse alongside

The Morse teamPublished October 19, 2026Facts checked October 19, 20269 min read

Maple AI and Confer make the same core promise: open-weight models run inside hardware enclaves, your app checks the enclave before it sends anything, and the company can't read what you wrote. As of October 19, 2026, they differ on how your encryption key is made (Confer derives it from a passkey, Maple's enclaves manage it for you), on apps (Maple runs on six platforms, Confer on the web and iOS), and on price (Maple Pro is $20 a month; Confer's App Store listing gives Confer Membership as $34.99, with no period). Choose Maple for native apps everywhere, a named model list, an API, and open-source code; choose Confer for passkey-derived keys and a transparency log; and look at Morse if you also want GPT, Claude, and Gemini, or history kept only on your device.

We read Maple's site, proof page, pricing, privacy notice, model library, blog, and GitHub repository, and Confer's privacy policy, terms, blog, App Store listing, and GitHub organization, all on October 19, 2026. Both companies publish technical write-ups of how their designs work, and Maple spells out the limits of what its check proves, so we quote them directly below.

At a glance

As of October 19, 2026. Each Maple and Confer cell links to that company's own page.

How do Maple and Confer handle your encryption keys?

Differently: Confer builds its keys on passkeys, and Maple's enclaves manage them for you. Moxie Marlinspike's December 29, 2025 post explains that the WebAuthn PRF extension lets the client derive a 32-byte secret from your passkey, and "The root key material is derived from your passkey secret, which we (the provider) never have access to" (Confer). Your platform syncs the passkey across your devices, so a tap and Face ID or Touch ID unlocks your chats on a new one. Confer's privacy policy, updated October 2026, says "The encryption keys are generated and stored on your device" (Confer).

The trade-off is platform support. In Confer's own table, PRF works in recent Chrome, Safari, and Firefox on macOS, in Safari on iOS, and in Chrome on Android, while Windows 11 and Linux need a password manager to act as the authenticator (Confer). Sign-up is through Google Sign-In, with Apple Sign-In as an option (Confer).

Maple keeps key management out of your way on purpose. Its CEO, Mark Suman, wrote in January 2026: "No seed phrases. No complex key management. Just log in like any other app," and "Your personal encryption key is managed automatically. Behind the scenes, secure enclaves handle everything" (Maple). Maple's getting-started guide says it uses "secure enclaves to manage your private key encryption" (Maple). Maple also offers a sign-up with no email at all: you get an Account ID, set a password, and pay for a year in Bitcoin, and "If you lose it, the account is gone, and we can't recover it" (Maple).

Who verifies the enclave, and against what?

Your own app does, in both. Maple's app asks the enclave for an attestation document at the start of every session and checks four things: a fresh random nonce, a certificate chain ending at Amazon's published Nitro root, a valid signature, and an image fingerprint (PCR0) that Maple approved. "If any check fails, no encrypted session is created and nothing is sent" (Maple).

Maple's proof page is unusually frank about what that doesn't prove. The model runs in its own enclave, and "You do not attest the model's enclave directly": Maple's enclave checks it for you, the way certificate chains work on the web. "A fingerprint match means Maple approved that software, not that it was built from the public source," so rebuilding the image is how you tie the two together. In a browser, "the code that runs the check is served by Maple each time the page loads," and Maple points people who care to its desktop app or to building Maple Proxy from source (Maple).

Confer's client checks the inference server inside the encrypted handshake itself. The enclave's attestation quote rides inside a Noise handshake; the client verifies the hardware signature, confirms the quote's public key matches the one in the handshake, and checks the measurements against a release in Confer's transparency log (Confer). Confer extends the measurement over the whole root filesystem with dm-verity, so "any change to any file changes the attestation," and session keys give forward secrecy. Since September 2026, the inference proxy your client verifies also checks the confidential workers the model uses to run code and edit files before sending them anything (Confer).

We found no independent audit on either company's pages. Maple says outright that it hasn't been audited yet and is working toward SOC 2 (Maple).

Which apps and models do you get?

Maple wins on reach. It has apps for iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows, and Linux, plus the web (Maple), and Pro adds an OpenAI-compatible API through Maple Proxy (Maple). Its model library, reviewed October 5, 2026, lists seven models in the picker: GLM 5.3, GLM-5.3 Flash, Kimi K3, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, GPT-OSS 120B, Gemma 4 31B, and Llama 3.3 70B (Maple).

Confer lists the web and iOS. Its iPhone app requires iOS 26 and also runs on Macs with an M1 chip or later on macOS 26 (App Store). Confer says it's "built on top of open weight models" (Confer) but doesn't name them on its public pages. Confer has added encrypted memory that the client manages, with the server storing "opaque blobs" (Confer), encrypted folders, connectors, and folder files, and the code-running workers above.

Where does your chat history live?

On each company's servers, encrypted, so it follows you between devices. Confer's privacy policy says "Your message history is stored encrypted on our servers, but only you hold the keys to decrypt it" (Confer). Maple says your chat history "is stored encrypted" (Maple), and its guide says chats "are synced automatically between devices" (Maple).

How much do Maple and Confer cost?

Maple publishes its prices, and Confer lists one. As of October 19, 2026, Maple Free is $0 and includes end-to-end encryption but not web search; Pro is $20 a month with every model, uploads in the apps, voice, and API access; Max is $100 with 10 times Pro's usage; and Team is $30 per user (Maple). Confer's App Store listing shows the app as free with one in-app purchase, Confer Membership, at $34.99, without a billing period (App Store).

Is Maple or Confer open source?

Both publish the code that matters most for the enclave check, in different amounts. Maple's GitHub monorepo, under the MIT license, holds its web, desktop, and mobile apps, the proxy, and the OpenSecret backend with its Nitro enclave tooling (GitHub). Confer publishes its proxy and enclave images, built with Nix and mkosi so anyone can reproduce the measurements (Confer); its GitHub organization lists three repositories, the inference image, the proxy, and the worker image (GitHub), and no client app.

What does Confer's work with Meta mean?

On March 17, 2026, Marlinspike wrote that "As Confer continues to operate as an independent entity, I will also work to integrate Confer's privacy technology so that it underpins Meta AI" (Confer). He gave the reason in the same post: Confer runs open-weight models, and some users "have missed the frontier capabilities from proprietary models." He compared it with his earlier work bringing the Signal Protocol to WhatsApp. The post gives no timeline.

Morse as the third column

Maple and Confer both answer one question well, whether the operator can read a prompt you send to an open-weight model. Two things fall outside that answer. Neither runs GPT, Claude, or Gemini, which is the gap Confer's own Meta post names. And both keep your history on their servers, encrypted, so they can sync it. Morse covers the same ground for open-weight models and is built around those two gaps as well.

• E2EE, the same enclave idea, checked in your browser. Before a word leaves your device, the browser asks the enclave for its hardware attestation, verifies the proof itself, and fails the check if the software inside differs from the version pinned in the Morse app. Only then is the message sealed for that one enclave; our servers pass along text they have no key for, and the answer is opened on your device. Open the lock on any E2EE reply to see the checks that passed, or download the full report. Third-party providers run the enclaves, and like Maple's and Confer's, the protection depends on the enclave hardware and attestation working as designed. E2EE comes with Pro, at $19 a month.
• Anonymous, for the frontier models Maple and Confer don't run. GPT, Claude, and Gemini get your message through our proxy with your account, email, and IP address removed, sent under Morse's own account, so the provider answers without knowing it's you. It still reads the text and may hold it for a limited time for abuse checks under its own policy, so keep names out of the prompt.
• Private, for everyday open-weight chats and web search. DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, and xAI's Grok run on hosts that agreed to keep nothing, and where a host confirms zero retention per reply, Morse verifies that and rejects any reply without it. New chats start here.

History works the other way from Maple and Confer. Morse keeps no copy on its servers, which don't store messages or log their content; your chats sit in your browser's storage, encrypted, and lock when you sign out. Opening them needs a key held only on your device plus one our server hands you at sign-in, so someone with a copy of the browser files still can't read them. With no server copy there's nothing to sync, so a chat stays in the browser where you had it, and clearing that browser erases it for good: save anything you'll want later. We don't train models on what you write, sell your data, or run ads. Our explainer on how end-to-end encrypted AI chat works walks through each browser check, and for how other apps stack up, see whether AI chats are private and our Venice AI alternatives.

Choose Maple, Confer, or Morse

• Choose Maple if you want native apps on every desktop and phone, a published model list, an API, MIT-licensed code you can rebuild, or an account with no email paid in Bitcoin.
• Choose Confer if you want keys derived from your own passkey, a client that checks releases against a public transparency log, and code-running workers inside enclaves, and you're on the web or Apple devices.
• Choose Morse if you want enclave chats your own browser checks, from $19 a month, GPT, Claude, and Gemini under Morse's account instead of yours, and a chat history kept only in your browser, not on a server.

Sign up free, or send one message from the Morse home page as a guest. On Pro, pick E2EE for a chat to see the checks for yourself.

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

Maple is a trademark of Maple Privacy Labs Inc. Morse is not affiliated with or endorsed by Maple Privacy Labs Inc.

Confer is a trademark of Confer Enterprises, Inc. Morse is not affiliated with or endorsed by Confer Enterprises, Inc.