Dia vs Brave in 2026

Dia and Brave both run on Chromium, both install Chrome Web Store extensions, and both have an AI assistant built in. They start from opposite ends. Dia is built around its assistant. Brave is built around blocking, and its assistant, Leo, was added without undoing that. In our ratings Dia scores 5 for AI features and 3 for privacy; Brave scores 4 for AI features and 5 for privacy.

Two assistants

Dia's assistant is the centre of the browser. You chat with the current page, @-mention other tabs to compare them, ask about your browsing history, and save prompts as Skills to rerun with a slash command. Paid plans add a daily Morning Brief and connections to Slack, Google Workspace and Atlassian's tools. Atlassian has owned Dia's maker, The Browser Company, since September 2025, and the work integrations show where Dia is heading.

Leo sits in Brave's sidebar and covers the core jobs: summarising pages, answering questions and working across several open tabs at once. It runs models from Anthropic, Meta and Mistral, and you can bring your own. Leo needs no account, and Brave says it does not keep your chats or use them for training. In October 2026 Brave added end-to-end encrypted chats for one open-weight model, processed on confidential-computing hardware that Brave says it cannot read. Brave is also testing an agent that browses for you, but only in its Nightly test build and in a separate profile.

Privacy and blocking

This is the widest gap. Brave's Shields block ads, trackers and fingerprinting scripts by default, dismiss cookie banners and strip targeted ads from YouTube. Brave also offers private windows routed through Tor and a paid VPN. Dia blocks trackers but has no fingerprinting protection in our feature table, and its AI works by sending page content through its servers to providers such as Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, which it says are contractually barred from training on it. Dia stores chats and history encrypted on your device, but by default it also uses some content to improve the product unless you switch that off.

Brave's security team has published research since 2025 showing that hidden text on a web page can hijack an AI browser's assistant, a technique called indirect prompt injection, and wrote in June 2026 that it remains a fundamental problem. Dia says it designs on the assumption that injections will happen: a chat starts with no access to other tabs, the assistant asks before taking actions with real-world effects, and it will not take irreversible ones.

Price and platforms

Leo is free, and Leo Premium adds higher limits and more models for $14.99 a month. Dia's AI is now paid for new Mac users: a 14-day trial, then Better Answers at $10 a month or Better Days at $100 a month. Without a plan, Dia is a browser with no AI. Existing users kept their free access, and the Windows version had no paid plans at the time of writing.

Brave runs on all five major platforms and syncs between them. Dia runs on Mac and, since October 2026, Windows 11, with no phone app. Brave scores 5 for extensions against Dia's 3, and 4 for customizability against Dia's 3. Dia wins on ease of use, 4 to 3, partly because Brave's Shields occasionally break a site. Both score 4 for speed.

Which should you choose?

Choose Dia if the assistant is the reason you want a new browser, you work on a Mac or Windows PC, and you want AI connected to your work tools. Expect to pay for it.

Choose Brave if you want ads and trackers blocked with nothing to install, a free assistant that is careful with your data, and the same browser on your phone. Its AI is less ambitious than Dia's, but it covers the everyday jobs.