If you’re looking for free AI tools, you’ve come to the right place! All of the tools in this article have a free plan or free trial. You don’t have to provide a credit card to sign up, so you can test them out and see what they can do for you with no risk.
The best AI assistants tools
- ChatGPT
- Grok
- Claude
- Gemini
ChatGPT.
Everyone’s familiar with ChatGPT by now. All of us make use of it every day for a variety of different personal and work-related tasks.
It remains my AI assistant of choice, although the other options on this list are much more viable alternatives now than they were when ChatGPT initially came out.
One of the perks that I use the most is uploading and analyzing files. On the job, I typically just drag and drop PDFs, spreadsheets, screenshots—name it—into ChatGPT and ask it to sum up, analyze, or extract information. Just last week, I dragged and dropped a screenshot of a funnel analysis in Google Analytics, and it gave me some really actionable insights into where we were losing people. Pretty irresistible stuff.
I also employed it to process a whole group of spreadsheets for this article. I imported the raw survey data and received back distinct trends, major takeaways, and even suggestions for the most appropriate chart types to display them. It literally saved me hours.
ChatGPT is also free to use, but the basic plan has limited access to newer models. The Plus tier, now $20/month, opens full access to pro features and speed.
Grok.
Although Grok may be utilized as a standalone AI assistant, you’ll most likely see its presence in action on X (formerly Twitter).
I’m not totally convinced the Grok integration improves X as a place, because now fifty percent of any post I read includes users tagging Grok to verify the truth of the original author. It’s likely to be a net positive—it keeps people more accountable to what actually is true—but I also feel it’s disrupted the organic flow of discussion on Elon’s social media giant.
Grok is an über-intelligent model, and I appreciate the fact that it’s essentially uncensored. There are several reasoning modes, such as ‘Think’, which allows the model additional time to compute and provide a more polished response, and ‘Deep Search’, which browses the web with a configuration that appears to be RAG-style.
This lack of censorship is also extended to its great image generation which allows it to be my go-to when I’m looking to generate images of famous people, companies, or just to churn out a quality meme.
Grok is free to try with limited usage, but to get increased usage limits and access to the latest models, you have to have one of X’s paid options: Basic, Premium, or Premium+.
Claude.
Claude has been the go-to coding AI assistant for some time now. A few of the other items on this list are beginning to catch up, but I still believe that it’s safe to say most programmers swear by Claude. I’m not a professional programmer, but I like to dabble—and when I do, Claude tends to be my go-to.
It’s especially good at writing clean, well-documented code, and even better at explaining what that code does in plain English. In my experience, Claude’s code tends to be more reliable too. I’ve had fewer issues with hallucinated variables or broken logic compared to when I’ve used ChatGPT.
I also like the way Claude speaks. It’s more collaborative—like it’s figuring out the solution with me, rather than simply vomiting up answers that I need to wrangle into form.
Claude is open-source, with a Pro plan at $20/month for additional features and usage, and a Max plan for $100/month and up for greater
Gemini.
Gemini is Google’s AI assistant, and as of the writing of this article, it is presently leading the LLM Arena leaderboard—a leaderboard based on millions of blind tests in which users pick their favorite AI reply.
One of the primary motivations I have for using Gemini is its ridiculously huge context window. A context window is how much text an AI can keep in mind and operate with at a time, so the larger it is, the more text you can provide and question it about. The newest Gemini models have over 1 million tokens of context, meaning I can input a long research paper and ask all sorts of follow-up questions without it skipping a beat.
My other favorite feature is Gemini’s audio summary. From it, I can upload a document and receive a podcast-style five-minute audio summary narrated by AI voices. It’s my go-to for consuming lengthy documents on my daily commute.
The free plan comes with standard AI features, while the paid Pro and Ultra plans open more sophisticated models, creative options, and more storage. Prices begin at $19.99/month for Pro and $124.99/month for Ultra.