The 13 best AI Assistants AI tools

My top ai assistants pick — editor score 9.2/10. The default AI assistant for good reason: the broadest set of capabilities, on the most platforms, from a low paid entry price.

The pick for heavy writing and coding work, trading ChatGPT's multimedia breadth for depth where text and code matter.

The natural choice if you live in Google's apps: the widest reach into Workspace and Android, at the lowest paid price.

The simplest way to run AI with no limits and no data leaving your machine; you trade the newest models' top-end quality for privacy and a $0 bill.

The easiest free assistant to reach on a Windows PC, and the obvious pick if you already pay for Microsoft 365; on its own it trails ChatGPT and Claude.

The easiest way to use Claude and GPT models without an account or a data trail, at the cost of the extras the big assistants offer.

Kimi packs more agent work, from research reports to slides, sites and code, into one membership than most rivals, but its privacy policy keeps your data in China.

The best free chatbot with no paywall at all and the cheapest strong API; keep anything sensitive out of it, because your data goes to China and is trained on by default.

A capable free assistant with real desktop apps and open-weight models behind it, let down by Alibaba publishing neither usage limits nor subscription prices.

The most capable agent for turning one prompt into a finished deliverable, but credit pricing makes the cost of any single task hard to know in advance.

The best value for people who already pay for X or Cursor, since $30 covers Grok, Grok Bot and both subscriptions, though the shared weekly pool makes heavy use hard to plan.

The easiest free assistant to reach if you already live in WhatsApp or Instagram, but its use of chats for training and ads makes it a poor home for anything private.

Still the biggest place to roleplay with AI characters, but a pending bankruptcy sale and chats used for training make it a hard one to pay a year ahead for.