Council AI vs Council (usecouncil.app)
Another name collision worth clearing up: Council AI is council-ai.app; Council at usecouncil.app is a separate product. usecouncil.app positions itself as an "Integrated Decision Environment" that assigns personas to models — one is the Risk Manager, one the Creative Strategist, one the Fact Checker — and runs a three-phase Federated Consensus Protocol of blind assessment, cross-examination, then synthesis. The architecture is thoughtful. The practical gap is the lineup: its published model roster centres on GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro, which are several generations behind the current frontier. Council AI runs 39+ current models including GPT-5.6, Claude Opus 5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and Grok 4.5. Pick usecouncil.app if the persona-and-DAG workflow is what you want. Pick Council AI if you want today's frontier models doing the reasoning.
| Feature | Council AI | Council (usecouncil.app) |
|---|---|---|
| Model recency | Current frontier (GPT-5.6, Opus 5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Grok 4.5) | Published roster centres on GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 1.5 Pro |
| Model count | 39+ across 9 labs | Small curated roster |
| Persona assignment | Not a first-class feature | Core to the product |
| Workflow chaining (DAG) | Not offered | "The Stack" chains models into a DAG |
| Blind assessment stage | Anonymized during synthesis | Explicit Phase 1 blind assessment |
| Personal RAG library | Yes — Ultra tier | Not offered |
| MCP server | Yes — Ultra tier | Not offered |
Model recency materially affects answer quality for your work.
You want a DAG of models feeding each other, not one fan-out.
You want a named Risk Manager persona attacking the plan.
You want the council callable from Cursor or Claude Code.
usecouncil.app does not publish a straightforward public price for its consensus tiers at the time of writing. Council AI is transparently priced: Plus $19.99/mo, Pro $39.99/mo, Ultra $99.99/mo, roughly 17% off annually, with a paid 3-day trial ($1 / $2 / $5) on annual plans and a published refund policy. Every tier runs the full model lineup; Ultra adds the personal RAG library and MCP server.
No. They are unrelated products with similar names. Council AI is council-ai.app. Council at usecouncil.app is a separate persona-driven decision tool. Do not merge their pricing, model lineups, or capabilities.
A council's ceiling is set by its members. Cross-checking three models from 2024 against each other will reliably reproduce 2024-era blind spots — they can agree and still be wrong together. Running current frontier models from different labs raises both the individual answer quality and the value of agreement between them.
Not as a first-class feature. Council's diversity comes from running genuinely different models rather than assigning roles to one. If explicit persona orchestration is central to your workflow, usecouncil.app is built around it and Council is not.
Council AI, on the Ultra tier, via its hosted MCP server at mcp.council-ai.app. usecouncil.app does not currently publish an MCP endpoint.