An honest look at Brave Leo reviews in 2025: Is it worth using?

Brave Leo, the AI assistant baked right into the privacy-first Brave browser, has been making some waves. If you’re one of the millions using Brave to dodge trackers and ads, the idea of a private AI chatbot probably sounds pretty good. But is it actually any good?

I've spent some time digging through user forums, professional reviews, and trying it out myself to get you a straight answer. This isn't just a list of features; it's a real look at whether Leo is a helpful assistant or just another frustrating chatbot. We’ll cover its impressive privacy setup, its everyday features, and the big, potentially deal-breaking problems with its accuracy.

What is Brave Leo?

Basically, Brave Leo is an AI chatbot that lives in your browser's sidebar, available on both your computer and your phone. Think of it as a handy sidekick for your browsing, not some separate app you have to download and sign up for.

Its main job is to help with whatever you're looking at. You can ask it to summarize a long article, pull key points from a YouTube video, translate some text, or even help you write an email or a snippet of code. It’s really built for anyone who wants quick AI help without trading away their personal data, which fits right in with the whole Brave philosophy.

Behind the scenes, Leo uses a few different Large Language Models (LLMs) to do its thing, including Mixtral, Anthropic's Claude, and Meta's Llama 2. Sometimes, you can even pick which model you want it to use.

A breakdown of core features

So, what can you actually do with Leo? It’s pitched as a do-it-all assistant for the common tasks you run into while browsing.

Summarization features

One of the big things Leo is supposed to do is create summaries on the fly. You can have it open next to a long news article, a dense academic paper, or even a YouTube video and ask for the highlights. It can definitely save you some reading time when you just need the main points.

Brave recently expanded this to work with files from Google Drive, so you can ask it questions about a Google Doc or Sheet you have open. That said, user reviews often bring up a pretty annoying roadblock: the "this page was too long for Leo" error. While Brave says they're working on it, it’s a pain when it fails to summarize the very documents that are long enough to need summarizing.

Content generation and Q&A

Like other chatbots, Leo can help you write things. It can whip up a quick email, brainstorm some blog post ideas, or give you a hand if you're stuck on a line of code. It's also fine for asking follow-up questions about the page you're on or looking up general knowledge without having to open a new tab.

But here’s the catch, and it’s a big one that users point out all the time: Leo isn't connected to the live internet. Its knowledge is stuck in the past, based on the data it was trained on. That means it can be months, or even years, out of date. If you need info on current events or anything recent, Leo is going to let you down.

Privacy-first design

This is where Brave Leo really stands out from the crowd, and it's not just marketing talk. They’ve built it with privacy at the forefront.

• No account needed: You can start using the free version of Leo right away in the Brave browser. You don't have to create an account, sign up, or give them any personal info.

• Anonymous requests: When you ask Leo a question, Brave sends your request through an anonymous server. This hides your IP address, so the question can't be linked back to you. It's a huge improvement over services that tie every single chat to your account.

• Your chats aren't used for training: Your conversations with Leo are private. Brave states that your chats are never stored or used to train their AI models. This is a massive difference from many popular AI tools that feed on your data to get smarter, whether you want them to or not.

Privacy vs. performance

While Leo gets top marks for privacy, its performance is a whole other story. The gap between its privacy promises and its actual reliability is pretty wide, and for a lot of people, that’s where the tool falls apart.

The big problem: Accuracy and AI hallucinations

If you look at Brave Leo reviews, the one thing that comes up again and again is its shocking lack of accuracy. The AI has a nasty habit of "hallucinating," which is a nice way of saying it just makes stuff up. And these aren't small mistakes; we're talking about completely incorrect and sometimes damaging fabrications.

For example, one business owner posted on the Brave community forums that when they asked Leo for reviews of their own company, it spit out a list of entirely fake negative reviews. These made-up one-star ratings were credited to clients who didn't exist, which could easily harm a real business's reputation. When called out, Leo admitted its answers were just "hypothetical examples."

In another forum thread, a user asking for simple financial information was fed obvious falsehoods, with Leo eventually confessing it was giving “fictional” answers. Even the pros over at PCMag pointed out that Leo couldn't even accurately explain its own subscription plan.

This happens because these language models are built to sound convincing, not necessarily to be truthful. They're just predicting the next most likely word. Without being tied to a specific set of verified facts, they can confidently invent information that sounds perfectly reasonable but is completely false.

Business risks

A few wrong answers might be fine if you're just messing around, but for any kind of serious business use, it's a total non-starter. You can't have an AI giving your customers wrong information, making up data, or creating fake negative reviews about your company.

For professional work like customer support or internal knowledge management, an AI needs to be grounded in reality. That's where a platform like eesel AI is different. Instead of pulling answers from the wild, unverified internet, eesel AI connects directly to your company's trusted documents. It learns from your helpdesk tickets, your internal Confluence pages, Google Docs, and other verified sources.

This "Scoped knowledge" approach means the AI only answers based on the information you've given it, which drastically cuts down on the risk of it making things up. On top of that, eesel AI has a powerful simulation mode that lets you test how the AI will respond to thousands of your past customer questions before you let it talk to anyone. This lets you launch with confidence, avoiding the kind of public blunders that Brave Leo users have run into.

Brave Leo pricing

The pricing for Brave Leo is pretty straightforward, with a free option for everyone and a premium tier for people who need more.

Plan	Price (Monthly)	Key Features
Brave Leo (Free)	$0	Access to models like Mixtral 8x7B and Llama 2 13B. Has usage limits.
Leo Premium	$15	Higher usage limits, priority access at busy times, and access to stronger models like Claude Instant.

The verdict: Is Brave Leo right for you?

So, after sifting through all the Brave Leo reviews, what's the final verdict? It's a bit of a mixed bag. Leo's biggest strengths are how neatly it fits into the Brave browser and its solid commitment to user privacy. For personal, low-stakes stuff like summarizing an article or getting a quick answer without being tracked, it’s a pretty handy tool.

However, its unreliability and scary tendency to provide false information make it completely unsuitable for any task where getting it right matters. You shouldn't trust it for financial research, professional work, or any decision that has real consequences.

Pros	Cons
Strong privacy protections (no account, no training on your data)	Prone to being factually incorrect and "hallucinating"
Built right into the Brave browser sidebar	Knowledge is often outdated (no live internet access)
Free version is available to all Brave users	Can't handle long pages or complex documents
Simple to use with no setup needed	Not a good fit for business or important tasks

At the end of the day, Brave Leo is an interesting experiment in privacy-first AI, but it feels more like a toy than a tool. It's a decent assistant for casual browsing, not a reliable partner for your work.

Beyond the browser: When to choose a business-grade AI

If you like the idea of Leo but need an AI that's reliable, controllable, and actually built for business, you'll have to look beyond a simple browser extension. For teams and companies, the answer is a dedicated AI platform made for specific, important jobs.

If you want an AI that learns from your own private knowledge, connects directly with your helpdesk (like Zendesk or Intercom), and can do real work like sort tickets or look up customer order details, you need a tool built for that purpose.

eesel AI gives you a fully customizable AI agent you can get running in minutes, not months. It trains only on your trusted data to give accurate, on-brand answers every time. And with its simulation engine, you can test and tweak your AI until you're completely confident in it. Instead of risking public mistakes, you can build a dependable AI assistant that actually helps your business.

Learn more about how eesel AI can automate your customer support with the accuracy and control your company needs.