Pace vs ORB

Choosing between Pace and ORB?

ORB runs fully on-device, and it's closed source under a No license yet license. It calls itself "Fully on-device voice agent — hears, sees, operates your Mac.".

Where Pace differs: Pace uses a heavier qwen3-30b-a3b reasoner with a tier picker and trust surfaces. ORB is leaner and more single-purpose. Note: ORB has no license file yet, so it's effectively all-rights-reserved.

The full breakdown is below — what ORB is genuinely good at, its stack, and the honest line on where Pace diverges, including where Pace is behind. For the whole field in one place, see every macOS voice agent compared.

ORB

github.com/settylokesh/ORB

Fully on-device voice agent — hears, sees, operates your Mac. — settylokesh

STT · Moonshine (ONNX Runtime) Reasoner · Gemma 4 E4B (4-bit, MLX) TTS · Local Screen · yes

What it's good at

  • Structured JSON action plans emitted by the VLM — explicit plan-then-execute loop.
  • ONNX Runtime + MLX dual runtime — Moonshine for ASR, MLX for the VLM.
  • Glow border around the screen to signal listening / planning / executing phases.

Where Pace differs

Pace uses a heavier qwen3-30b-a3b reasoner with a tier picker and trust surfaces. ORB is leaner and more single-purpose. Note: ORB has no license file yet, so it's effectively all-rights-reserved.

Rechecked June 2026.
If ORB shipped something I missed or got cheaper since, email me and I'll update this page.

Pace is $29 once, fully on-device, and free to try on Apple Intelligence.

Get Pace

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