dots vs Muse: OpenAI's agent or Meta's?

Pick Muse if you want a personal agent for life admin, such as shopping, bills and family plans, and don’t want to pay to try one. Pick dots if you already pay for ChatGPT Pro, or your work runs through Slack, Microsoft Teams and tools you’ve connected to ChatGPT: a dot is built for work and comes with Pro at no extra cost.

Both launched in September 2026, both work on their own cloud computer and keep going when your phone is off, and both message you with things to review. The big differences are price, where you can reach them and who they’re for.

Who each one is for

A dot is OpenAI’s always-on agent inside ChatGPT. It starts from your ChatGPT memory, connects to over 4,000 apps through ChatGPT plugins, and hands work to Codex and ChatGPT Work to research, analyse data, prepare documents and build software (OpenAI). When idle, it researches your connected apps read-only and comes back with work to review.

Muse is Meta’s consumer agent. Meta’s examples are selling a car, lowering a bill, booking travel and turning a recipe into a grocery list (Meta). It connects to email, calendar and Instagram and uses a browser for sites without an integration.

Where you reach them

You can message or call a dot in ChatGPT on web, desktop and mobile, or message it in Slack and Microsoft Teams, with one memory across all of them (channels). Texting it over iMessage or Android RCS is a beta for US Pro users only.

Muse lives in its own app on iPhone, Android and Mac and on the web; chatting with it in WhatsApp is in limited testing (WhatsApp). Muse isn’t the Meta AI chatbot; they’re separate apps.

That’s the main difference on our checklist: a dot counts as living in your chat apps because it’s generally available in Slack, while Muse’s WhatsApp channel is still in testing.

Price and availability

	dots	Muse
Free	No	Yes, up to an unpublished limit; card required
Cheapest way in	ChatGPT Pro, $100 a month	Power, $20 a month, for more usage
Countries	Pro excludes the EEA, the UK and Switzerland	US, Canada, Japan, Singapore, Mexico
Model	GPT-6 Astra	Muse Spark; Muse Wonder on paid plans

For a ChatGPT Pro subscriber, a dot costs nothing extra, and chatting with it doesn’t count toward ChatGPT limits (pricing). For anyone else, Muse is far cheaper to try.

Safety

Muse’s design is more detailed: a separate Sentinel agent approves anything it sends to the internet, it asks before sending email or buying, keeps an audit trail, and pays with one-time card numbers. Early users and press still reported it overstepping permissions (The Guardian).

dots use Custom Rules and Auto-review to gate sensitive actions, and some steps always stay with you. You can open a dot’s computer and take over. Stopping a task doesn’t undo actions it already completed (docs).

Privacy

Both train on your content by default with an opt-out. OpenAI lists “Content is used to train our models” for Pro (pricing), though Business, Enterprise and Edu content isn’t used by default, per DataCamp. Meta uses your Muse interactions to train its models unless you opt out, and says Muse conversations aren’t shared with its ad systems.

The verdict

• Already on ChatGPT Pro, or your team works in Slack or Teams: dots.
• You want help with errands and don’t want to pay yet: Muse.
• You’re in Europe: Muse isn’t available, and dots on Pro excludes the EEA, the UK and Switzerland; only a Business Premium workspace in a supported region gets one. See the best AI assistants.

More background: what dots is, what Muse is and Muse alternatives.