Three apps people compare us to, and where Corteks is actually different

We get compared to the same three apps often enough that it seemed more useful to write the comparison ourselves than to let it happen in someone else's replies. This is not a neutral ranking. It is our own post, on our own blog, about a category we are trying to sell into. Read it with that in mind, and we have tried to make it hold up anyway.

Three real apps, priced and described as of today, and then us, disclosed plainly as the newest and least proven of the four.

ThirdVoice: AI to calm anxiety and spirals

ThirdVoice is built as an AI companion for the moment a spiral is happening: mood tracking tied to your phone's health data, guided breathing exercises, and pattern recognition across your emotional history. Plus is $11 a month or $107.99 a year. Pro is $19.99 a month or $199.99 a year.

The job it is doing is calming you down while it is happening. That is a real and different job from filing a thought away and reading it back later. If what you want in the moment is something to talk you down, ThirdVoice is built for exactly that in a way Corteks is not trying to be. Corteks does not intervene in a spiral. It captures what you were thinking during one, and tells you on Sunday that you had one.

Napkin: your ideas shape your mind

Napkin is for quotes and ideas you deliberately choose to keep, organized into curated flows that link related concepts together and resurface them over time. It integrates with Readwise, works offline, and is iPhone only. Pricing runs two tiers, $30 or $40 a year depending on which you pick.

The difference is upstream of the app entirely. Napkin is built around things you have already decided are worth saving. Corteks is built around the assumption that you have not decided yet, and should not have to at the moment of capture. If you already know what is worth keeping and just want somewhere good to keep it, Napkin is doing that job well and Corteks is solving a problem you do not have.

Day One Gold: journaling with AI added on top

Day One is the established journaling app, and Gold is its premium AI tier at $74.99 a year, sitting above Silver at $49.99. Gold adds Daily Chat, a guided back-and-forth conversation you can turn into an entry, plus reflection prompts, entry summaries, title suggestions, and image generation.

It is the closest price to Corteks of the three, and the closest shape too, since both end up producing a written reflection. The difference is what has to happen before the AI does anything. Day One's AI reflects on an entry you sat down and wrote. Corteks never asks you to write an entry. You say the thought once, in passing, and the filing and the reflection both happen without you doing anything else. Day One added AI to journaling. Corteks was built around not journaling in the first place.

Corteks: capture with no filing, a reading every Sunday

Say a thought out loud, type it, or screenshot it, and it is saved in about four seconds with no title, folder, or tag to choose. The AI reads it, titles it, summarizes it, files it into a category, and connects it to what you have thought before. Every Sunday it writes a short reading about your own week: what you kept circling, what you seem to be avoiding, a question worth answering. You can ask it anything about everything you have ever captured. $9.99 a month or $79.99 a year, with a free trial that starts with no card and nothing charged.

Here is the honest part. Corteks is in private beta, iOS only, and we are letting people in a handful at a time. We do not have years of reviews or a large user base to point at the way the three apps above do. What we have is a specific, different bet: that the moment you have a thought is the worst possible moment to ask you to file it, and that the value is not in any single capture but in what a pattern across a hundred of them looks like read back to you. If that is the shape of thing you are looking for and you do not mind being early, this is where it exists right now.