Yoodli — its Pro plan at $8 a month (annual) includes 10 live AI roleplays a week, the closest thing to real rehearsal. Poised announced it is shutting down October 8, 2026. Judged against Co-Active Coaching's core skills — listening, curiosity, forwarding action — Yoodli wins for pitch prep, Orato wins for mobile reps, and neither hears the whole person the way a human coach does.
Poised's homepage now carries a one-line obituary: "Poised is shutting down on 10/8/2026 – thank you for your support over the last few years!" If you relied on the Mac and Windows app for private, real-time feedback on how you sound in meetings, you have about a month to migrate. I evaluated the two obvious replacements the way I evaluate any AI coaching tool — against the criteria in Co-Active Coaching, the Kimsey-House model that trained a generation of human coaches. Its five core skills — listening at multiple levels, curiosity, intuition, forwarding action while deepening learning, and self-management — make a usable rubric because they describe what actually changes a speaker, not just what measures one.
| Co-Active criterion | Yoodli | Orato |
|---|---|---|
| Listening beyond words (tone, structure, what's missing) | 3/5 — pacing, filler words, word choice; blind to subtext | 3/5 — voice modulation, pauses, structure notes |
| Curiosity (asks questions, doesn't just grade) | 4/5 — live roleplay responds to your answers | 2/5 — notes and lessons, little back-and-forth |
| Forward and deepen (reps plus learning) | 4/5 — 10 roleplays/week on Pro, upload real recordings | 4/5 — bite-sized craft lessons, then scenario reps |
| Whole person (fear, stakes, identity) | 1/5 — no idea why the pitch scares you | 1/5 — same blindness |
| Safe practice space (private reps) | 4/5 — desktop-first, recordings kept | 5/5 — private mobile reps anywhere |
The specifics behind the scores. Yoodli's free tier is now 5 lifetime roleplays — any session over 30 seconds burns one — so treat it as a demo, not a routine. The Pro plan at $8 a month on annual billing (roughly 40% cheaper than paying monthly) unlocks 10 roleplays a week plus live AI roleplay, where the model plays an investor or interviewer and responds to what you actually said. That interactivity is the closest any of these products gets to what Co-Active calls dancing in this moment, and it is why Yoodli wins for pitch preparation: a pitch lives or dies in Q&A, not in the monologue. The Advanced plan at $20 a month on annual billing adds unlimited practice and keeps your recordings out of AI model training, which matters if you are rehearsing an unannounced fundraise. One consumer warning from the fine print: Yoodli offers no refunds after cancellation.
Orato is a mobile app rated 4.8 stars across 35,000-plus speakers, and its App Store listing shows nine supported languages and recently added video recording for presentation practice. Its coaching layer gives feedback on filler words, pauses, pace, clarity and structure, paired with short lessons on craft — how to open a talk, pause with intent, close a pitch. It wins on friction: the reps happen in a hotel room the night before the meeting, no desktop required, and nobody watches you fumble. It loses on interactivity, because it mostly grades monologue rather than pressure-testing you with follow-up questions.
Now the part the scoring table makes visible: both tools flunk the whole-person row, and that row is where pitch problems actually live. A tool can count your filler words; it cannot notice that you rush the traction slide because you are privately unsure the traction is real. In Co-Active terms these products listen at the surface level only — they hear words, not the resistance underneath them. Optimizing their metrics also has a known failure mode: I watched a founder sand every hesitation out of his delivery and arrive polished, flat, and forgettable, because the metric rewarded smoothness over presence. And Poised's shutdown is itself the third lesson — it was a real product with real users and it still died. Export your recordings regularly, and never let a venture-backed app be the only home of your practice history.
What I would actually do this month: take Yoodli Pro at $8 for the weeks around any high-stakes speaking, run two roleplays a week against a deliberately hostile-investor scenario, and spend the money you saved on one session with a human coach who will ask why your voice drops on the ask slide. The reps are automatable now. The reason you need them is not.
Sources: Poised — shutdown notice, Final Round AI — Yoodli pricing 2026 breakdown, Orato — official site.
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