UPDF vs Poke (Interaction Co.)

UPDF's feature set is document-shaped. On iOS you get text and image editing (font, color, size, rotate), 14 markup tools, PDF-to-Word/Excel/PowerPoint/image conversion, scanning plus OCR into searchable text, page organization (insert, extract, split, rotate, delete), digital signatures, form fill and creation, and compression. The AI layer sits on top: chat with a PDF, whole-document translation, summarization, an AI Agent that generates bookmarks and summaries, Semantic Search that goes beyond keyword matching, and PDF-to-mind-map. Recent builds have been maintenance-oriented — 2.5.9, 2.5.8 and 2.5.7 were fixes and stability, while 2.5.6 added free rotation of images and text, document splitting for double-sided batch printing, and PDF/A controls.

Poke's feature set is task-shaped and lives in your messages. It manages Gmail and Outlook (search, draft, send, labels, inbox organization), schedules calendar events and checks availability from a text, sets reminders by text or voice message, searches the web with verified sources, generates tables and charts from data or images, and produces LaTeX-formatted PDFs. Recipes let you build and share integrations and automations; Poke Kitchen targets developers with custom integrations; background automations run proactively on your schedule. Ultra adds website building at yourname.poke.com and Poke Human — real people handling reservations, phone calls and ordering. It was the first verified AI product on Apple Messages (June 2026), now also on WhatsApp, Telegram and RCS, with @poke.com email addresses since June 2026.

Both are freemium, but they monetize different things. UPDF's cost structure has a trap worth flagging: the app is freemium, UPDF Pro unlocks the document toolkit, and the AI Assistant — summarization, translation, PDF chat — is a separate paid subscription. Full functionality therefore means stacking two subscriptions, which the vendor's own positioning acknowledges by listing it under 'not for.' Decide up front whether you need the AI layer or just editing, conversion and signing, because that determines your real annual spend.

Poke is also freemium with an Ultra tier that gates the premium capabilities: frontier intelligence for every action, website creation at yourname.poke.com, and Poke Human for real-world tasks like reservations and phone calls (launched June 2026, included in Ultra). The free tier covers the core text-thread assistant behavior — email, calendar, reminders, web search, tables and charts. Whether the PDF generation and editing feature needs a paid tier isn't stated in the data, so check before assuming. Note the ownership change: Interaction joined Cognition (makers of Devin) in July 2026, and Poke works as before with future improvements from Cognition's models — no pricing change announced alongside it.