Do I sound super-obvious when I say that the AI landscape is sizzling hot right now, or just very obvious? Either way, you know what’s up. At this stage, everyone’s absolutely crazy about what’s going on in AI and all the possibilities it unlocks.
But what if you’re not particularly as crazy about the main player in this game – ChatGPT by OpenAI? In this post, I’m going to show you the best ChatGPT alternatives for a range of specific tasks you might want to do.
Let’s get the list started. First, a quick summary:
Tool | Highlights | Price |
---|---|---|
Claude | great for general queries, code | free, $18 / mo. |
Gemini | research, image gen, super fast | free, $19.99 / mo. |
Le Chat | good for general queries, own models | free, $14.99 / mo. |
DeepSeek | great for reasoning | free |
Grok AI | reasoning, research, general queries, images | free, $40 / mo. |
Perplexity | great for research | free, $20 / mo. |
Wix ADI | website building | free, $17.00 / mo. |
Cursor | great for code and development | free, $20 / mo. |
Jasper AI | writing | $39 / mo. |
Surfer AI | writing, text analysis | $79 / mo. |
Best ChatGPT alternatives for general questions and tasks
Claude

Claude is built by a company called Anthropic. It’s designed to be helpful, honest, and safe. Sounds boring, but it works.
It stands out for a couple of things: it can handle longer inputs than ChatGPT. Think long reports, legal docs, etc. You can paste in thousands of words, and it keeps track without losing the thread.
Another reason is that people simply like the responses better. They are believed to be more creative and more natural sounding.
Claude also browses the web, though it’s not its first instinct. That’s by design. It gives answers based on what it was trained on first, not what’s trending. It’s not the tool for news updates, but it’s great for writing, analysis, and planning.
Where it shines?
- Claude handles longer input text, up to 200k tokens – around 150k words – making it better for big documents and long conversations.
- Its writing feels more natural and expressive, making it great for brainstorming, storytelling, and content with personality.
- In many situations, Claude avoids guessing. At least it happens more often than with ChatGPT.
Google Gemini

Well, of course Google will want a piece of the AI pie as well. Luckily for them, though, they kind of know how to build a solid product.
Gemini ties into Google Search and YouTube, and can aggregate responses in a way that they are closely tied to what’s out there on the web.
It also runs on Google’s own model, not OpenAI’s. That means the answers feel different. Sometimes sharper. Sometimes weirdly robotic. You be the judge.
You get to use a couple of models. Chief of them being Gemini 2.0 Flash, which is actually the fastest model of them all available today. 1 There’s also Gemini Deep Research and the Gemini 2.5 Pro.
Where it shines?
- In many cases, Gemini does great with creative tasks, such as writing or image generation. For some people, Gemini delivers better texts than ChatGPT if you want to use it for content generation.
- It has very good accuracy on academic queries.
- Offers nice integration with other Google products.
Le Chat

Le Chat is built by Mistral, a French company that doesn’t make a big show of itself. It’s fast, clean, and serious about getting things done.
Le Chat connects to the internet, so it can give you responses based on what’s out there. It doesn’t guess when it can just go find the answer.
You can also upload files, write code, summarize long pages, and even generate images. The Canvas feature is particularly interesting. It lets you collaborate with Mistral on a shared output when working on a bigger task – like an action plan or strategy.
The models behind it are Mistral’s own. They’re open-weight, fast, and built to run efficiently. That means less waiting and more doing. I also kinda like the design. It stands out from the rest.
Where it shines?
- Le Chat responds faster than ChatGPT, up to 1,000 words per second.
- Le Chat handles French, English, German, Spanish, and Italian well, so it’s a solid choice for European users and teams.
- Lets you use web search, do document analysis, and collaborate with the model on larger tasks.
Best alternatives for reasoning
DeepSeek

DeepSeek has made a huge splash a while ago when they released their R1 model. It’s been a huge breakthrough, since it was trained for a lot cheaper and initially delivered its goodies to users for free.
It’s built by a Chinese company and the servers are hosted in China as well. You decide what you think about this – particularly in relation to data safety. It does its own thing compared to ChatGPT. You also don’t have to sign up or pay to try it. That makes it easy for anyone to jump in and start testing what it can do.
As I mentioned, the R1 model was trained with fewer resources than most big-name models. Most tools this strong burn through huge amounts of power and data. DeepSeek didn’t.
Another interesting move: DeepSeek lets you see why it gives certain answers. It doesn’t just drop facts but shows the entire reasoning process. This can help you understand what’s going on behind the scenes, and even stop the AI in its tracks if it’s going the wrong direction.
There’s one thing to watch out for, though. Some users have found that DeepSeek avoids certain topics. It may skip answers if a question touches on things considered sensitive in China.
Where it shines?
- DeepSeek solves logic-heavy problems step by step, making it (in many cases) better for math, code, and science than ChatGPT.
- You can run it locally or on modest hosted hardware. This solves the China issue.
- It shows its reasoning – how it gets to answers, making it easier to debug, and learn from.
Grok AI

Grok AI comes from xAI, the same crew orbiting Elon Musk. It’s certainly not trying to be just another ChatGPT clone, especially considering that Musk is right now not very fond of OpenAI.
Grok does a lot of stuff really well, but for me, I’ve been impressed with its ability to break down complex projects and help reason through a range of possible solutions to what you need.
What’s also super-helpful is that you can use Grok’s real-time hook into Twitter/X and get the absolute newest information from there. You can ask it to look at, say, “X most recent tweets about TOPIC,” and it will do it.
Grok can also look at pictures, understand them, and even turn a sketch or diagram into working code. The vibe is different, depending on how you set it. It’s not trying to sound like a customer service bot for sure.
Where it shines?
- It pulls real-time data from X, making it better for breaking news and research updates.
- Grok handles math, science, and sometimes code with cleaner, faster results.
- It explains its reasoning step by step, so you see how it thinks.
Best alternatives for research
The list so far (above) already includes some great ChatGPT alternatives for research.
Gemini and Grok are both great at that.
Both have additional toggles to enable their “Deep Search/Research” abilities, which will give you generally much better and deeper results:


Probably the only player still missing in the research game when it comes to AI chats is:
Perplexity

Perplexity AI isn’t your typical chatbot for sure. Right from its inception, it’s acted more like a knowledgeable guide, blending AI with real-time web search to provide up-to-date answers.
Unlike ChatGPT, which can give you a mix of responses based on its own data and web search, Perplexity pulls only current information from the web.
When you ask Perplexity a question, it always shows you the sources it used. This transparency allows you to verify the information. Perplexity also offers a Pro Search feature, enabling deeper exploration of topics.
One thing to keep in mind, though, is that Perplexity is terrible at maintaining context. You ask one question, then a follow-up question, and Perplexity has already forgotten what your primary question was.
Where it shines?
- Perplexity pulls real-time web results by default, so answers reflect the latest info without needing a special prompt.
- Every answer comes with clear citations, making it easier to fact-check and trust what you’re reading.
- It organizes findings into readable, summarized chunks without drowning in details.
Best for website building and development
ChatGPT can do an awesome job of helping you build a website, especially with its coding abilities, but there are other more specialized tools out there:
Wix AI Website Builder

Let’s start with something beginner-friendly. For people with little website design experience, the Wix AI website builder could be a more appropriate alternative than ChatGPT.
Wix has been on the website builder market for years now, and it’s been mostly known for its drag-and-drop tools for site building. However, their new AI builder takes it up a notch and lets you have a site built after answering a handful of questions about your project.
It’s a truly no-code, low-effort experience on your part. Wix will analyze your needs and match you with one of the templates and custom design solutions it has. Just keep in mind that it doesn’t have a huge level of flexibility, especially with the AI builder.
Afterwards, however, once your site is set up, you can still jump in and start modifying it using Wix’s normal interface.
👉 More on how to build a website with Wix here.
Cursor

Cursor has been all that people talk about when it comes to AI development lately.
Long story short, it’s an AI-powered code assistant and code editor. It’s all built on VS Code, with added AI assistant tools.
It has access to all the popular documentation of the web’s most popular frameworks and programming languages, and it can reference them on the spot. You can basically ask it to build you SOMETHING, and it will walk you through the process and give you a working (more or less) prototype at the end.
Great stuff if you want to grow your web dev muscle and try using AI as your assistant.
Best for content creation
The following set of AI tools is built a bit differently than what has come before. Most of them rely on other companies’ models to deliver their features.
For example, while some tool might be better than ChatGPT at a given task, there can still be an OpenAI model working behind the curtains to do the work. What the following tools bring to the picture is a more optimized wrapper around popular AI models to make them more optimized for certain tasks.
Jasper AI

Jasper doesn’t waste time trying to be everything. It’s built to write. Well, okay, they now brand themselves as an AI tools suite for marketers, but it actually all revolves around writing.
You tell it what you need: a blog, a product page, an email, and it will give you something usable quite fast. You can also define your brand voice, which should help. Feed it your tone guide or some past posts, and it picks up the voice.
Jasper can also help you build full workflows for content, build campaigns and more. It provides a range of templates for different content types, too.
Also worth mentioning is that it can create texts in 80+ languages.
Surfer AI

Surfer AI is part of a bigger suite of tools called Surfer SEO. Most web marketers will recognize this one. It’s been one of the main content-optimization tools out there. And now they have an AI component, because of course.
Surfer boasts that you can give it a keyword, and it will give you a full article in under 20 minutes. And not a throwaway blog post, but something built to rank, at least according to them.
Surfer actually studies the web, scans real-time search data, and builds content around what ranks right now. It says it sorts through 300k words to shape a single article.
It can also work with multilingual content. The list of languages isn’t huge, but all the main markets are there.
It’s a bit expensive all things considered, but it’s probably as close as possible to a one-click solution among ChatGPT alternatives for content work.
Conclusion
Here is your confirmation that ChatGPT is not the only player in the game! From Google Gemini’s advanced chatbot capabilities to Wix ADI’s web development prowess, you can see that the alternatives are as diverse as they are impressive.
For example, you could brainstorm ideas with Grok, then bring in Gemini to write you some headlines, and finally take it all to Wix to build a site.
Either way, I hope you’ve found your next AI tool on this list!
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