Claude
claude.ai
Anthropic's assistant, strongest on long documents and careful writing
Free tier
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chatgpt.com
The general assistant most people mean when they say they used AI.
OpenAI's assistant and the default door into this whole category: ask a question, paste a document, generate an image, or have it search the web and return links. Basic chat works signed out, but file uploads, image generation, saved history and the stronger models all sit behind a free account. The free tier quietly moves you to a smaller model once you have leaned on the good one for a while, which is the moment most people meet the ceiling.
Questions
A genuinely usable free tier with paid plans for volume or team features. Free accounts are rate-limited on the best model and get downgraded to a smaller one mid-session without warning.
Yes. ChatGPT sends your input to its own servers to process it. That is fine for public material; for anything containing personal data, use one of the on-device tools instead.
Free accounts are rate-limited on the best model and get downgraded to a smaller one mid-session without warning.
Alternatives
Same category or same task, ordered by how closely they overlap.
claude.ai
Anthropic's assistant, strongest on long documents and careful writing
gemini.google.com
Google's assistant, wired into Search, Gmail, Drive and YouTube
mistral.ai
Mistral's assistant — fast, EU-hosted and free to start with
copilot.microsoft.com
Web-grounded assistant that answers with numbered links you can open
perplexity.ai
Answers a question by searching the web and footnoting every claim
deepseek.com
Open-weight reasoning model you can use free in a chat window