Venice AI alternatives: where each one decrypts your prompt

The Morse teamPublished October 19, 2026Facts checked October 19, 202610 min read

The best Venice AI alternative depends on which part of Venice made you look elsewhere: its strongest privacy modes are Pro-only, its GPT, Claude, and Gemini models run in a mode where Venice says the provider "likely saves your prompt," and your history lives in one browser. As of October 19, 2026, the short list is Morse, Maple, Confer, Proton Lumo, Duck.ai, and local apps such as LM Studio and Ollama, and they differ most on where your prompt is decrypted and who checks that.

We read Venice's pricing page, privacy page, privacy policy, terms, FAQ, docs, and its public model list on October 19, 2026, and then each alternative's own pages the same day. Venice deserves credit up front: it keeps chat history out of its servers, it puts in writing that neither it nor its model providers may train on your content, and it labels every model with a privacy mode so you can see the trade-off before you type.

The short list

As of October 19, 2026. "Proprietary models" means GPT, Claude, or Gemini.

Is Venice AI safe?

Venice protects your privacy in two ways it puts in writing, and a third depends on the mode you pick. Venice says your conversation history "stays on your device" and that it "never stores it on its servers" (Venice). Its terms, last updated June 8, 2026, say Venice "shall not use, and shall require that third-party large language model providers… do not use, any User Content to train" models (Venice).

The third is the mode. Venice sorts every model into one of four privacy modes on its privacy page (Venice):

• Anonymous. Venice proxies your request to "leading frontier model providers" for GPT, Claude, and Gemini. "Your identity is obscured from the provider, but you should assume the provider is storing your content."
• Private, the default. Inference runs on Venice-controlled or zero-retention partner GPUs, and Venice calls it "Trust-based," relying on "Venice and partners honoring contracts."
• TEE, on Pro. The model runs in a hardware enclave operated by NEAR AI Cloud and Phala Network, "verified by remote attestation."
• E2EE, on Pro. Your prompt is encrypted on your device and decrypted only inside a verified enclave, with "no web search or memory."

The rest of the safety picture comes from Venice's privacy policy, effective June 2, 2026 (Venice). Venice says it "will not have access to or store the content of your Prompts or Outputs," though it records actions such as creating or deleting a chat. It also says it uses Google Analytics, that its "analytics, advertising, and security partners" may use cookies and similar technologies "to collect information about your online activities over time and across different services," and that it may disclose personal data to "comply with law enforcement requests and legal process, such as a court order or subpoena." Without an account, Venice collects metadata such as your time zone, browser type, and IP address.

For an open-weight model in E2EE mode on Pro, Venice's design keeps your prompt from Venice itself. For a GPT or Claude model on any plan, Venice's own advice is to assume the provider keeps what you typed.

Why people look for a Venice AI alternative

Most of the reasons are on Venice's own pages.

The frontier models sit in the weakest mode. Venice's public model list, read through its API on October 19, 2026, has 136 text models. 62 of them are labeled "anonymized," including every Claude, GPT, and Gemini model in the list, and 12 support E2EE (Venice). Venice's docs say of Anonymous mode that "Prompt content is still visible to that provider" (Venice). Venice's pricing page lists "Private & uncensored" among Free's features (Venice), but the model list shows that the privacy you get depends on which model you pick.

Verified privacy is an upgrade. "TEE and E2EE models require a Venice Pro subscription" (Venice). On Free, you get Anonymous and Private, both of which rest on contracts and the provider's own policy.

Free is small. Free includes 10 text prompts and 15 image prompts a day, with no monthly credits (Venice). Pro is $18 a month with unlimited text and 100 credits; Pro Plus is $68 with 7,500 credits; Max is $200 with 22,500 credits, "since 100 credits = $1." Credits pay for video, music, frontier models, and API use (Venice).

History stays in one browser. Venice says that from a different device or browser "your previous conversations won't be available because they were never stored centrally" (Venice). Encrypted backups fix that on Pro, but they're managed from the web app only, you can keep at most five, and they "expire after 90 days."

Two Venice pages read differently. The privacy policy says model providers are "prohibited from storing, retaining, or using any of your Prompts or Outputs beyond the time strictly necessary" (Venice). The privacy page says that for Anonymous models, "Provider sees and likely saves your prompt" (Venice). For anything sensitive, the privacy page's per-mode wording is the safer one to plan around.

1. Morse

Morse also chooses privacy per chat, in three modes, and its verified one is paid too: E2EE is on Pro, as Venice's is. Where it differs is what each mode promises, and what happens to the history on your device.

• E2EE, the counterpart to Venice's Pro-only mode. For anything no one should read, start the chat in E2EE. Your browser fetches the enclave's hardware attestation, checks the proof on your device against the software versions pinned in the Morse app, and encrypts your message for that enclave only after every check passes. What crosses our servers is ciphertext we hold no key for, and the reply is decrypted in your browser alone. Each E2EE answer carries a lock that lists the passed checks, with a report to download. E2EE chats come with Pro, at $19 a month. Third-party providers operate the enclaves, and the protection holds as long as the enclave hardware and attestation work as designed.
• Anonymous, the equivalent of Venice's Anonymous models, for GPT, Claude, and Gemini. Our proxy strips your account, email, and IP address, then sends the request under Morse's own account, so the provider answers a message it can't tie to you. It does read the text, and may hold it for a limited time for abuse checks under its own policy, so write as if a stranger could read the words, and leave your name out.
• Private, the counterpart to Venice's default. Open-weight models and xAI's Grok run with providers that keep nothing, under zero data retention agreements Morse has for inference, search, and the rest. When a host confirms zero retention per reply, Morse verifies it and drops any reply that lacks it. New chats open in Private.

Like Venice, Morse leaves your history in your browser, and Morse encrypts that copy: it's encrypted at rest, it locks at sign-out, and opening it takes a key stored only on your device plus a second one our server issues when you sign in, so copied browser files are unreadable on their own. We don't train AI on what you write, sell data, or show ads, and the site carries no advertising trackers or third-party analytics, both of which Venice's privacy policy describes. With no chat archive on our side, Morse usually has very little to give authorities. The flip side is that a cleared browser takes your chats with it and we can't restore them, so save a copy of anything worth keeping.

On paid plans, Morse's unfiltered models answer what other apps refuse, from dark fiction to straight medical and legal answers. Plans are Free, Pro at $19 a month ($17 billed yearly) with 250 frontier credits, and Max at $49 ($44 billed yearly) with 5,500 credits. Morse is a web app at trymorse.ai, and it bundles over 30 models alongside Characters and Studio for images. More on how the enclave check works in our guide to end-to-end encrypted AI chat.

2. Maple

Maple, from Maple Privacy Labs Inc., runs open-weight models in an AWS Nitro Enclave and lets you check it. Before its app sends anything, it asks the enclave for an attestation document and checks a fresh nonce, Amazon's certificate chain, the signature, and an image fingerprint Maple approved; "If any check fails, no encrypted session is created and nothing is sent" (Maple). Maple is candid about the limits: you attest Maple's enclave, which checks the model's, and in a browser "the code that runs the check is served by Maple each time the page loads."

Maple's code is on GitHub under the MIT license (GitHub), it has apps for iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows, and Linux (Maple), and it offers a sign-up with no email, paid for a year in Bitcoin (Maple). Its Research picker has seven open-weight models, including GLM 5.3, Kimi K3, and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, as of a catalog review on October 5, 2026 (Maple). There's no GPT or Claude. Free includes end-to-end encryption but not web search; Pro is $20 a month and Max $100 (Maple). Maple says it hasn't been audited yet and is working toward SOC 2 (Maple).

3. Confer

Confer, built by Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike, derives your encryption keys from a passkey through the WebAuthn PRF extension, so the root key "is derived from your passkey secret, which we (the provider) never have access to" (Confer). Prompts go into a confidential VM over Noise Pipes, and your client checks the attestation against releases published to an append-only transparency log (Confer).

Confer runs on the web and iOS, and its iPhone app runs on Apple silicon Macs with macOS 26 (App Store). It's built on open-weight models it doesn't name on its public pages, and in March 2026 Marlinspike wrote that he will work to bring Confer's privacy technology to Meta AI while Confer stays independent (Confer). Its App Store listing prices Confer Membership at $34.99 and doesn't say for what period.

4. Proton Lumo

Proton's Lumo encrypts your message all the way through Proton's internal systems, but the model reads it in the clear. Proton says so itself: "we need to provide the LLM with cleartext messages," and the LLM server "forgets the request as soon as the response is generated" (Proton). Saved history is zero-access encrypted, so Proton can't read it. As of October 19, 2026, Lumo runs Qwen 3.5, GLM 5.3, Apertus 1.5, and two image models on servers Proton controls, and doesn't train on your chats except with consent for anonymized Apertus feedback (Proton). Lumo Plus is $12.99 a month, or $9.99 billed yearly (Proton).

5. Duck.ai

Duck.ai works like Venice's Anonymous mode. DuckDuckGo removes "all metadata that contains personal information (for example, your IP address)" before sending prompts to providers, which agree not to train on them and to delete them "at most within 30 days, with limited exceptions for safety and legal compliance" (DuckDuckGo, last updated October 1, 2026). Recent chats are saved on your device, or in encrypted Sync & Backup that DuckDuckGo can't decrypt. Free models include Claude 4.5 Haiku and GPT-6 Luna, plus gpt-oss-120b and Gemma 4 31B "hosted by Tinfoil.sh"; a subscription adds larger GPT and Claude models (DuckDuckGo).

6. LM Studio and Ollama

If nothing may leave your computer, run the model on it. LM Studio says "Nothing you enter into LM Studio when chatting with LLMs leaves your device," though model search, downloads, and updates need the network (LM Studio). Ollama says "We don't see your prompts or data when you run locally," and its cloud models are a separate, opt-in path (Ollama). The cost is hardware and weaker models than the cloud offers; our guide to using AI privately covers what a laptop can run.

How we compared them

We read every page linked above on October 19, 2026, including Venice's model list through its public API, and took each company at its written word. We didn't run lab tests of any app.

Choose Venice or Morse

• Choose Venice if you want video and music generation, native iOS and Android apps, an API, or crypto payments, or if you'll pay for Pro to get TEE mode with web search and memory.
• Choose Morse if you want end-to-end encryption your browser verifies, from $19 a month, GPT, Claude, and Gemini with your identity stripped in the same account, and history that stays encrypted on your device with no advertising trackers on the site.

To see the difference yourself, start free and, on Pro, open the lock on your first E2EE reply, or send a message from the home page without an account.

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

Venice is a trademark of Venice.ai. Morse is not affiliated with or endorsed by Venice.ai.