AI Chatbots
General-purpose assistants for writing, analysis, coding and everyday questions.
6 tools
- ChatGPTThe most widely used assistant, with image generation and a large plugin ecosystem.Official: chatgpt.comfrom $20/mo
- ClaudeAssistant known for long-context reasoning and writing that needs less editing.Official: claude.aifrom $20/mo
- GeminiGoogle's assistant, tightly integrated with Search, Gmail and Workspace.Official: gemini.google.comfrom $20/mo
- PerplexityAnswer engine that cites its sources instead of listing links.Official: perplexity.aifrom $20/mo
- You.comAI search that lets you pick which model answers.Official: you.comfrom $15/mo
- FlowGPTCommunity library of shared prompts, free to browse and use.Official: flowgpt.comFree tier available
General-purpose assistants are where most people meet AI for the first time, and the category has consolidated fast: a handful of frontier models, each wrapped in a chat interface, competing on much the same ground. The differences that actually affect your day are rarely the ones in the marketing — benchmark scores move constantly and matter less than how much you can paste in at once, whether it can look things up, and what happens to your data.
What to look at when choosing
Context window is the limit you will hit first
This is how much text the model can hold at once — the whole conversation plus anything you paste. Hit the ceiling and it silently forgets the beginning, which is far more disruptive than a couple of points on a benchmark. If you work with long documents, codebases or transcripts, this single number decides whether a tool is usable for you at all.
Whether it can search changes what it is good for
A model without search answers from training data with a cutoff date, and will state outdated things with complete confidence. One that searches can cite sources you can check. Neither is better in general — search adds latency and can drag in low-quality pages — but for anything time-sensitive the difference is decisive.
Read the data policy before you paste work material
Consumer tiers often train on your conversations by default; business and API tiers usually do not. If you are pasting client documents, unreleased code or anything under an NDA, this is the setting that matters and it is not always where you expect it. Check it once, deliberately, rather than assuming.
When you probably do not need one
If your task is narrow and repetitive — translating the same kind of text, extracting fields from invoices, transcribing audio — a purpose-built tool usually does it more reliably and much more cheaply than a general assistant, and it will not wander off-task. General chat earns its keep on open-ended work where you cannot specify the steps in advance.