ChatGPT
chatgpt.com
The general assistant most people mean when they say they used AI
claude.ai
Anthropic's assistant, strongest on long documents and careful writing.
Anthropic's chat assistant. Its distinguishing trait is a very large context window, so you can paste an entire contract, transcript or source file and ask about the whole thing rather than a summary of it. It renders working HTML, React and diagrams inline as Artifacts, which makes it useful for building a small thing rather than only describing one. An account is required before the first message, and usage resets on a rolling window rather than a daily counter.
Questions
A genuinely usable free tier with paid plans for volume or team features. Free usage is capped per rolling window, and the cap tightens at busy times of day.
Yes. Claude 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 usage is capped per rolling window, and the cap tightens at busy times of day.
Alternatives
Same category or same task, ordered by how closely they overlap.
chatgpt.com
The general assistant most people mean when they say they used AI
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
deepseek.com
Open-weight reasoning model you can use free in a chat window
copilot.microsoft.com
Web-grounded assistant that answers with numbered links you can open
ideogram.ai
Image generator that renders readable text inside the picture