Brave Leo Review, Pricing & Alternatives (2026)

Brave Software, founded in 2015 by Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla, makes a Chromium-based browser that blocks ads and trackers by default. Brave launched Leo in 2023 as a privacy-first AI assistant built into the browser on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. Brave says its browser has more than 100 million monthly users, and Leo is available to all of them without signing in. Brave also runs its own independent search index, Brave Search, whose AI answers are separate from Leo but share the same privacy approach. Leo is aimed at everyday users who want AI help while browsing without handing data to a big tech company.

Leo sits in a sidebar and can work with what you are viewing. It summarizes web pages and YouTube videos with transcripts, answers questions about an article, explains concepts, translates pages, drafts emails and posts, rewrites text you select, and analyzes PDFs, Google Docs and spreadsheets open in a tab. Tab Focus Mode, an opt-in feature, lets Leo work across several open tabs at once, for example to compare products. Leo can also use Brave Search results to answer questions about current events. On mobile it works with voice input. Brave has been adding agentic browsing features that let Leo take actions on pages, with user confirmation and in an isolated profile.

Privacy is Leo's main difference from other assistants. Brave says it hosts all models, including Anthropic's Claude models, on its own infrastructure, so prompts are not shared with model creators. Conversations are not stored or logged after a response is generated, IP addresses are not retained, and chats are never used for training. Chat history lives only in local storage on your device and can be cleared or disabled. Leo Premium subscriptions use unlinkable tokens, so Brave cannot connect your payment details to your usage. Users can switch models at any time, and Bring Your Own Model lets advanced users connect Leo to a local model through Ollama or a third-party API.

Leo is free with reasonable rate limits and a set of open models, including Qwen, Llama, Nemotron and GLM models, plus Claude Haiku. An Automatic mode picks a model for each request. Leo Premium costs $14.99 a month and adds higher rate limits and more capable models, which Brave's October 2026 help page lists as including Claude Sonnet and Opus, DeepSeek, Mistral Large, Grok, Kimi and larger Qwen models. One Premium subscription covers up to five devices across desktop and Android. Bring Your Own Model is free to use, with any costs paid to your own provider. Brave changes its model lineup regularly, so the current list appears inside Leo.

Leo's strengths are strong privacy, no account requirement, page and video summaries in context, and model choice including local models. Its weaknesses are that it only works inside Brave, free-tier models are smaller, and its features are lighter than standalone assistants with memory, projects and file libraries. Perplexity's Comet and ChatGPT Atlas are AI-first browsers with deeper agentic browsing. Microsoft Copilot in Edge offers similar sidebar help tied to a Microsoft account. Opera's Aria is another free browser assistant, and Perplexity is stronger for cited research. Choose Leo if you want AI help while browsing without logs or a login.