Gemini Spark vs Poke (2026)

Gemini Spark

by Google

Poke

by The Interaction Company of California

Pros

• ✓Runs in Google's cloud around the clock, so Tasks, Schedules and Skills keep working while your phone and laptop are off, with up to 15 tasks running at once.
• ✓Works natively across Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Keep, Tasks and Contacts, plus Maps, YouTube and a published list of third-party Connected Apps such as Airtable, Canva, Dropbox and PandaDoc.
• ✓Acts as an MCP client: any custom app can be connected by its MCP server URL in the Gemini web app, and Gemini asks for confirmation before each write action.
• ✓Included in Google AI Pro at $19.99 per month with no separate charge, and Google publishes every tier price and what each tier carries.

Limitations

• ⚠Requires a personal Google Account, so it is unavailable on work or school accounts, and it requires the Keep Activity setting to be on.
• ⚠Not offered in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, Switzerland or Nigeria, and custom MCP app connections are limited to the US and to English.
• ⚠Google labels Spark a beta and an experimental feature in early development, and it asks you to supervise tasks and step in when a website needs you.
• ⚠Cancelling or downgrading below Google AI Pro pauses schedules and turns off skills, and Spark usage counts against the plan's shared Gemini usage limits.

Pros

• ✓First AI agent approved for Apple Messages for Business, on 4 June 2026, giving it native iMessage presence in the default messaging app rather than requiring a separate download.
• ✓Open-ended integration surface: users connect their own Model Context Protocol servers, which Poke then discovers and calls, extended by a community recipe marketplace and a verified server template.
• ✓Fully public, self-serve pricing with a genuinely permanent free tier that needs no credit card, and a documented Maximum Privacy setting that excludes a user's data from model training.

Limitations

• ⚠A personal assistant with no admin console, single sign-on, audit logging or centralized user management, and no published security certifications, so it does not fit organizations with governance requirements.
• ⚠Poke is an MCP client, not an MCP server, so external AI assistants cannot connect into Poke, and the useful integrations depend on users or developers running their own servers.
• ⚠Independent evidence is thin, with a Product Hunt listing carrying only a small number of community reviews and no G2 or Capterra presence, which makes reliability at scale hard to assess.