The 9 Best Alternatives to ChatGPT – MUO – MakeUseOf
ChatGPT isn’t the only text generator AI in town.
Since its public launch in November 2022, ChatGPT, the mesmerizing AI chatbot by OpenAI, has grown in popularity like wildfire. Social media feeds are filled with incredible things people do with the chatbot. Jobseekers, programmers, high school teachers, content creators, and professionals in almost every field are finding good uses for the tool.
However, when one tool takes center stage, it's easy to lose track of the alternatives that could offer equal or even better value. We've put together nine of the best ChatGPT alternatives you can use right now.
Claude AI is undoubtedly the best alternative to ChatGPT right now. In the fast-moving world of AI, that might change in a few days, weeks, or months, but it is the next best thing in the AI chatbot space at the time of writing. You'll be hard-pressed to find an AI chatbot that gets as close to ChatGPT in creativity, common sense reasoning, and accuracy as Claude AI.
How does it weigh against ChatGPT? Claude AI outshines ChatGPT in four key areas while comfortably holding its own on several key metrics. It has stricter safety measures, larger context length, a more recent knowledge base, and, it seems, better in some creative writing tasks.
One key limitation is that the latest iteration of the Claude AI chatbot running on its Claude 2 language model is only available to US and UK residents. We assume there shouldn't be an uproar if you use a VPN to try out this exciting ChatGPT alternative. Here's a brief guide on how to sign up and start using Claude AI, irrespective of where you reside. Claude AI is a rising star in the AI chatbot space, and with a few more iterations, we predict it might achieve a true peer status with ChatGPT or even eventually outperform it.
Another worthy alternative to ChatGPT is Google's Bard AI. After Claude AI, Bard is probably the most powerful and widely used ChatGPT alternative that doesn't rely on OpenAI's GPT language model. Google's Bard is powered by Google's in-house PaLM 2 large language model. Although Bard's PaLM 2 model is similar to ChatGPT's GPT at the fundamental architectural level, there is a noticeable difference in the practical capabilities of the two language models.
Although Bard is quite powerful in its own right, ChatGPT enjoys the advantage of being powered by a model that has undergone several iterations of improvement. Notwithstanding, Bard has impressive abilities and dozens of useful features. It is a good tool for crafting write-ups like articles and emails and has commendable mathematical abilities. It is also a useful programming aid and quite an effective tool for learning a new language. Because it is connected to the internet, while ChatGPT (without plugins) is not, Bard tends to be more up-to-date on current trends.
To learn more about what you can do with the chatbot, here are some creative ways to use Google's Bard AI. If you are wondering how Bard stacks up against ChatGPT in practical everyday uses, take a look at our in-depth analysis comparing ChatGPT vs. Bard AI.
Bing AI Chat, or Microsoft's AI-powered Bing—however you choose to call it—is one of the best AI chatbots that use OpenAI's GPT-4 technology. It is one of the most powerful GPT-powered chatbots you can get anywhere on the internet. It blends results from the GPT-4 model with Microsoft proprietary technology to produce factual and up-to-date results for millions of Bing users worldwide.
Since Bing AI is tethered to live internet data, unlike ChatGPT, it can get real-time information about trends and events, helping it provide more relevant responses to prompts than your regular ChatGPT.
In addition to using OpenAI's GPT language model, Bing AI Chat also benefits from Microsoft's vast wealth of AI resources, giving it an edge over most of the ChatGPT alternatives in our list. If you want to know how Bing AI fairs against the much more popular ChatGPT, read through our ChatGPT vs. Bing AI comparison.
Like Bing AI, Perplexity AI is an AI-powered search engine and chatbot that synthesizes real-time web data and knowledge from its underlying AI model to provide accurate and comprehensive answers to user queries. Perplexity is one of the most reliable alternatives to ChatGPT because it is powered by OpenAI's GPT technology.
However, unlike other AI chatbots that are simply "powered by GPT" and do nothing unique, Perplexity has a few interesting features you'll find useful, particularly its ability to regularize GPT data with current information it sources from the internet. Perplexity AI is also great at citing sources in its responses and providing links you might need for further research on a topic. Its free plan is powered by the GPT-3.5 language model, while the Pro plan, priced at $20 per month, is powered by the more powerful GPT-4 language model. Here's our detailed breakdown of ChatGPT vs. Perplexity AI chatbots.
Even before ChatGPT went viral, there was OpenAI's GPT Playground, a platform for the public to play with different iterations of OpenAI's GPT AI models. Unfortunately, the tool didn't create as much buzz as ChatGPT has. This is partly because of its technical user interface and lack of consumer-focused publicity.
Ironically, although ChatGPT is getting much of the spotlight, the GPT models available at the Playground are much larger and more powerful than the variants that power ChatGPT. The models you can access at the Playground are undoubtedly one of the most powerful AI language models around.
ChatGPT is like an iteration of the GPT model used at the Playground, but it has been better streamlined and fine-tuned to be more conversational and human-like in its response. These streamlined models can better understand human intent, provide context-specific answers and sustain coherent conversations.
You can picture the Playground as ChatGPT for power users. You can tweak it to do what ChatGPT does and even much more. There are more options and settings to customize the AI model to behave in different ways. You'll also likely notice some differences in the responses from ChatGPT and those you get from the Playground, especially if you tweak the available parameters.
While ChatGPT will refuse to answer questions on some sensitive topics, the Playground model is less likely to refuse to answer questions. If you'd love to get handy with the Playground, here's a guide on how to use the GPT Playground.
Unlike the other options on our list, Poe by Quora is less of an AI chatbot and more of an AI platform. Poe gives you access to some of the most established AI chatbots and large language models currently available online. The platform has everything from Google's PaLM, Meta's Llama, and Anthropic's Claude to several iterations of OpenAI's GPT large language models.
How good is Poe? Well, let's say the biggest allure of using Poe is its array of choices. You could say Poe is as good as a combination of the chatbots available on the platform. Although you might not get the same quality of service as you'd get when using the individual chatbots directly on their original provider's platform, you'll love Poe's flexibility. Things get much better if you take up Poe's $20 monthly subscription, which is cost-effective considering the number of AI models at your disposal. In comparison, the same amount gives you access to a ChatGPT Plus subscription for a month.
YouChat, like most ChatGPT alternatives on our list, is powered by OpenAI's GPT-3.5 AI model. This gives it similar capabilities as the free-tier ChatGPT. It has a sleek, colorful interface and is neatly interwoven into You.com's search engine.
As a result, YouChat can act as a search engine that gives you a list of links to indexed web pages relevant to your query. Or, you can get the typical ChatGPT-styled conversational responses for questions. If you are looking for a search engine and a chatbot like ChatGPT rolled into one product, then YouChat is an excellent option.
Although YouChat uses OpenAI's GPT models, just like Perplexity AI and Bing AI, it uses proprietary technology to augment the results provided by the underlying GPT model to provide users with up-to-date information, breaking free of the limitations of GPT's 2021 knowledge cut-off date.
Besides a few limitations, YouChat is a simple and powerful ChatGPT alternative that deserves the exposure.
The underlying technology behind ChatGPT (first GPT 3.5, since updated to GPT-4) is the same technology that powers Chatsonic, making it almost as interesting as ChatGPT. Chatsonic goes a step further and builds on the abilities of ChatGPT while fixing some of ChatGPT's limitations.
If you ask the regular ChatGPT (without ChatGPT plugins) who won the 2022 World Cup, it wouldn't know. You'd expect a powerful AI model like ChatGPT to answer such a straightforward question in a heartbeat. However, because ChatGPT's knowledge base has a cut-off date of 2021, the AI model can't answer questions about anything that happened after 2021.
Without a ChatGPT Plus account, you can't access data from the internet in real-time using ChatGPT. This means it can't access the World Wide Web to retrieve information about recent events or events that aren't included in its training data.
Just like some chatbots on this list, this is where Chatsonic outperforms ChatGPT. Chatsonic can access the internet and can pull information from Google's Knowledge Graph to create improved answers that are up-to-date and more consistent with recent events. We asked Chatsonic who won the 2022 World Cup and who got the best player award—it didn't disappoint.
Also, Unlike ChatGPT, you can generate images directly from the Chatsonic chat interface. Although OpenAI has DALL-E, a powerful AI image generator, the tool is a separate product not integrated into the ChatGPT chatbot. On the other hand, Chatsonic can create digital art from prompts right from the Chatsonic chat interface. It uses both Stable Diffusion and OpenAI's DALL-E APIs to generate AI art.
Although ChatGPT has a simple and intuitive user interface, a few features could improve the user experience. Chatsonic adds some of those. If you're tired of the back-and-forth typing, Chatsonic can use voice commands and, if needed, get responses via voice, as you'd do with Siri and Google Assistant. On the other hand, you'll need third-party tools to use voice commands with ChatGPT. Chatsonic also has a feature to help you share, edit and download your conversations with the AI chatbot.
However, Chatsonic is not all rosy. Although you'll get freemium access when you sign up, unlike ChatGPT, Chatsonic is mostly a paid service. You get allocated tokens, and once you're out of tokens, you'll have to stick with the barebones on offer. Also, compared to ChatGPT, Chatsonic isn't great with computer codes.
We asked ChatGPT to solve different problems in PHP, JavaScript, and HTML. ChatGPT responses were significantly more "complete" and properly formatted in all instances. You'll find ChatGPT responses to be more detailed and longer than Chatsonic's. In several cases, Chatsonic tends to summarize its responses. That might work for some people, but we didn't find it useful when we needed a long-form response. However, those limitations aside, Chatsonic is exciting and one of the best ChatGPT alternatives.
Character.AI is precisely what it says in the name—a character-theme AI chatbot that lets you simulate interaction with popular celebrities, historical figures, or movie characters. From political figures like Donald Trump to movie characters like Iron Man's Tony Stark, Character AI has a large and interesting selection of characters to interact with on the platform.
We tried out a conversation with Tony Stark about getting an Iron Man-style suit, and it was interesting, immersive, and logical. Character AI impressively reflects the tone and mannerisms of the characters on offer.
Although Character AI is primarily character-themed, you can still get a ChatGPT-style prompt and response interaction using the "Character Assistant" feature on the platform. Although generally impressive, don't expect ChatGPT-quality responses. That said, Character AI is worth trying out.
Capitalizing on public interest and hunger for generative AI, startups and tech giants are scrambling to bring ChatGPT-inspired products to the market. Everyone is trying to outdo each other in this high-stakes technology arms race. The goal is simple–developing and releasing the most capable AI systems, or at least for now–chatbots.
As companies keep throwing money and muscles at the problem, more capable ChatGPT alternatives will emerge. While things continue to evolve, have fun with the ones we've penned on our list.
Maxwell is a technology enthusiast who spends most of his time testing productivity software and exploring the new generation of AI chatbots. His coverage of AI has garnered over 1 million reads and counting. With a quirky sense of humor and a passionate love for all things tech, Maxwell leverages his 8+ years of experience in tech writing to simplify complex concepts for both novices and experts alike. He has a soft spot for cutting-edge AI tools, remains a dedicated Android user, and tinkers with PHP and Python code in his free time.
