ChatGPT
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.
Google's chat assistant, whose real advantage is reach: once you enable the connections it can answer from your own Gmail threads, Drive files and Maps history, and summarise a YouTube video from its link. Deep Research will spend several minutes assembling a sourced report instead of replying immediately. It needs a Google account, and the integrations that make it distinctive are exactly the ones that need access to your data.
Questions
A genuinely usable free tier with paid plans for volume or team features. Requires a Google account, and the strongest model is rate-limited on the free plan.
Yes. Gemini 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.
Requires a Google account, and the strongest model is rate-limited on the free plan.
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
claude.ai
Anthropic's assistant, strongest on long documents and careful writing
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