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hiy.ai vs Delphi: a head-to-head from the competitor writing it

July 28, 2026 · 5 min read · by the hiy team

We make hiy, so this comparison is written by one of the two products in it. Read everything below knowing that. To keep ourselves honest we've limited the Delphi column to what their own public pages say — checked against delphi.ai/pricing in July 2026 — and if anything here is out of date, tell us and we'll fix it. We've written a broader Delphi alternatives survey before; this one is the direct head-to-head.

The short version

Delphi is the bigger, older, more feature-rich product — voice calling, serious training-word capacity, workflows, a famous roster. hiy is the smaller product with a different center of gravity: every grounded answer carries its source, the twin says "I don't know" instead of improvising, and none of that is gated by plan. Which one fits depends on which of those you'd miss more.

What Delphi's pricing page says, verbatim

As of July 2026, Delphi lists four tiers:

  • Free — your first "Digital Mind," with voice calling and chat, 1M training words, and 40+ languages.
  • Builder, $79/month — 5M training words, 1,000 contacts collected, an analytics dashboard, YouTube and podcast training, 5 recommended products, 5 custom workflows, Slack integration, 2 embedding locations, 1 collaborator.
  • Scaler, $299/month — 12M training words, 10,000 contacts, CRM syncing, a custom domain, 10 embedding locations, 3 collaborators.
  • Immortal, custom pricing — "for celebrities and public figures."

Annual billing saves up to 20%. Taken at face value that's a generous free tier and a deep feature ladder, and we won't pretend otherwise.

Side by side

| | Delphi | hiy | | --- | --- | --- | | Entry paid plan | Builder, $79/mo | Founding Creator, $49/mo | | Free tier | First Digital Mind, voice + chat | A real published twin | | Voice calling | Yes, from the free tier up | Not yet | | Citations on answers | Not listed on their pricing page | Every grounded answer, every plan | | Visitor cost | Per their plans | Visitors always chat free |

The rows we left out are the ones we can't verify from public pages — we won't characterize how Delphi behaves outside its training material, because we haven't audited it and they don't say.

Where Delphi is ahead

Honestly: voice. If your audience should be able to ring your twin and talk to it, Delphi ships that today — on every tier — and hiy doesn't. They're also ahead on raw capacity (training-word ceilings in the millions), on integration surface (workflows, Slack, CRM sync), and on social proof: their roster includes people you've heard of. If you're an established creator whose requirements read like Scaler's feature list, Delphi is the safer pick.

Where hiy is ahead

Our bet is that the category's binding constraint is trust, so the trust mechanics are the product, not a tier:

  • Receipts. A visitor can open the exact passage behind any grounded answer — here's how that works. On every plan, because a citation you pay extra for is a strange kind of proof.
  • A designed "I don't know." Ask a hiy twin something outside its material and it says so, in your tone — then queues the question for you. One answer from you closes the gap permanently.
  • Corrections that win. Change a price or a position once and the fix outranks every older source it contradicts.
  • Identity rules with teeth. You may only twin yourself or a product you own; public twins are reviewed, labeled AI, and carry a report link.
  • Price. Free publishes a real twin. The one paid plan is $49/month at the founding rate — versus $79 for Delphi's entry paid tier.

How to decide

Run the same three tests on both — our live demo is set up so you can run them on us, including the edge case we deliberately left in:

  1. The receipt test. Ask where an answer came from. Can a visitor see the source?
  2. The edge test. Ask something the material doesn't cover. Admission, or improvisation in your name?
  3. The exit test. Can you read everything it knows, correct it, unpublish instantly, and take your data out?

Whichever way those tests point for you, that's your answer. If it's ours, a twin takes about ten minutes to build — and if it's Delphi's, you'll at least have chosen with the receipts in hand.