13 Best AI Chatbots in 2024: ChatGPT, Bard & More Tested

2023 was truly a breakthrough year for ChatGPT, which saw the chatbot rise from relative obscurity to a household name. Now, it has tens of millions of monthly users and is an indispensable companion to many workers and businesses. Is it really the best AI chatbot though? In this guide, I’ve tested all of the big players, as well as using some more niche platforms, to help you decide for yourself.

Alongside ChatGPT, an ecosystem of other AI chatbots has emerged over the past 12 months, with applications like Bard and Claude also growing large followings during this time. Crucially, each chatbot has its own, unique selling point – some excel at finding accurate, factual information, coding, and planning, while others are simply built for entertainment purposes.

Whatever you’re looking for, we’ve got the lowdown on the best AI chatbots you can use in 2024. All of them are worth testing out, even if it’s just to expand your understanding of how AI tools work, or so you know about the best ChatGPT alternatives to use when that service periodically goes down.

• What Is an AI Chatbot?
• The Best AI Chatbots: Comparison Table
• The 13 Best AI Chatbots for 2024
• Honorable Mentions & Other AI Tools
• Using AI Chatbots Responsibly

What Is an AI Chatbot?

“AI chatbots” are a relatively new class of software applications or web interfaces that produce human-like conversations, respond to queries, and are capable of assisting with a wide range of tasks (depending on how intelligent they are).

Some AI chatbots are simple, like the helpbots you find on many websites. Conversational AI chatbots like ChatGPT, on the other hand, can help with an eclectic range of complex tasks that would take the average human hours to complete. AI chatbots have already been called upon for legal advice, financial planning, recipe suggestions, website design, and content creation.

This has led to their rapid and widespread usage in workplaces, but their application is much broader than that. Both consumer and business-facing versions are now offered by a range of different companies.

AI chatbots are powered by large language models (LLMs) – algorithms that use machine/deep learning techniques and huge sets of data to get a general grasp on language, so can be considered a form of artificial intelligence.

Prominent examples currently powering chatbots include Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT-4 (and the even newer GPT-4 Turbo).

AI chatbots vary in their abilities and uses based on a variety of factors, including the language model they’re built on top of, their pre-defined functionality, and access to data sources (such as the internet).

The Best AI chatbots: Comparison Table

If you haven’t got time to read the full article, here’s a whistlestop comparison of the 13 top AI chatbots available in 2024:

The Best AI Chatbots in 2024 by Use Case

Here are the best AI chatbots available in 2024. Although there are a few more AI tools out there worth keeping an eye on (and for that, head on to the next section of this article), these 13 stand out as the most important ones to know about as 2024 gets underway – a year during which significant strides are likely to be made in this area.

1. ChatGPT: Best All-Rounder
2. Google Bard: Best ChatGPT Alternative
3. Claude: Best for Large Inputs/Document Review
4. Grok: Best for Entertaining Conversations
5. Writesonic/Chatsonic: Best for Content Creation
6. Llama2.ai: Best Open Source Chatbot
7. Copilot: Best for Best for Chatbot + Web Search
8. Perplexity AI: Best for Research
9. Pi: Best Personal AI
10. Personal AI: Best Personal Assistant
11. Poe: Best Chabot Aggregator
12. YouChat: Best Copilot Alternative
13. Character AI: Great Fun & Generates Images

1. ChatGPT: Best AI Chatbot Overall (and Best for Image Generation)

The chatbot that needs no introduction, ChatGPT is by far the most widely-used chatbot on this list and was the first chatbot featured in this article to garner international attention for its processing capabilities after its November 2022 launch.

Created by Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI, ChatGPT has been powered by the GPT family of large language models throughout its public existence – first by GPT-3, but subsequently by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. GPT-5 is not expected to be released for some time, however.

ChatGPT has a free version that anyone can access with just an email address and a phone number, as well as a $20 per month Plus plan which can access the internet in real time.

There’s now a $25 per user, per month Team plan for small businesses that want to use it at work, as well as ChatGPT Enterprise for large businesses that want to use the API.

ChatGPT’s Plus, Team, and Enterprise customers have access to the internet in real-time, but free users do not.

ChatGPT is most people’s go-to conversational chatbot for a good reason – but that’s also its biggest downside – the site sometimes goes down due to the immense amount of traffic it’s having to deal with, which leads users being presented with immovable error codes.

ChatGPT provides an answer to a query. Image: Tech.co

At DevDay 2023, OpenAI launched GPTs – custom chatbots that will act and respond in specific ways based on the instructions and knowledge that you give them. It’s pretty easy to learn how to make a GPT, so if you’ve got ChatGPT Plus, we’d advise giving it a go – soon, you might find yourself selling it on the GPT store.

This is only currently available to ChatGPT Plus customers, who can also create images with the DALL-E integration – something which helps ChatGPT remain the best chatbot on the market in 2024.

Using the ChatGPT DALL-E integration. Image: Tech.co

2. Bard: The Best ChatGPT Rival

After ChatGPT was launched by a Microsoft-backed company, it was only a matter of time before Google got in on the action. So, Bard was launched in February 2023, and despite some early hiccups, has proven to be the best ChatGPT alternative.

Like ChatGPT, Bard has been powered by several different LLMs since its release in February 2023. First, it ran on LaMDA – which one former Google employee once said was sentient – before a switch to PaLM 2, which had better coding and mathematical capabilities.

Now, Bard runs on a language model called Gemini Pro, which is even more advanced. We recently compared Bard to ChatGPT in a series of tests, and we found that it performed slightly better when it came to some language and coding tasks, as well as gave more interesting answers.

Bard summarizes some text. Image: Tech.co

Gemini Ultra, on the other hand, is expected to be released soon. If Demis Hassibis is to be believed, then this language model will blow ChatGPT out of the water. 

Bard is completely free to use – all you need is a Google account. Some sources are now suggesting Gemini Ultra will be packaged into a new plan, called Bard Advanced, which will include the capability to build AI chatbots. 

3. Claude: Best for Large Inputs/Document Review

After Bard and ChatGPT, Claude is the most capable chatbot on this list, all things considered. It was created by Anthropic, an AI research and development startup bankrolled by Google and Amazon since it was founded in 2021.

The company’s first skin in the chatbot game was Claude 1.3, but Claude 2 was rolled out shortly after in July 2023. Now, Claude 2.1, Anthropic’s most advanced chatbot yet, is available for users to try out.

Anthropic is pioneering a concept called “constitutional AI” – which is effectively a way to make an LLM safer by ensuring it “gains” values via a constitution provided.

Claude. Image: Tech.co

“Anthropic’s language model Claude currently relies on a constitution curated by Anthropic employees” Antrhopic explains. “This constitution takes inspiration from outside sources like the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as our own firsthand experience interacting with language models to make them more helpful and harmless”.

Claude’s other unique selling point is that it has an enormous 200K context window – the range of text that an LLM can consider at any given moment – which makes it useful for analyzing large documents and other banks of information.

You can use Claude for free, but there’s also a lightweight version called Claude Instant and a more powerful version called Claude Advanced. Find out more in our guide to Claude and Anthropic.

4. Grok: Best for Entertaining Conversations

Grok is Elon Musk’s biggest play in the AI space since he took over Twitter back in November 2022. The multi-billionaire actually co-founded OpenAI back in 2015, and more recently, launched xAI.

Grok’s name comes from the world of 1960s sci-fi and is now used as a term to mean intuitively or empathetically understanding something, or establishing a rapport.

The latest Grok language mode, Grok-1, is reportedly made up of 63.2 billion parameters, which makes it one of the smaller large language models powering competing chatbots. This is a lot smaller than GPT-4 and Claude 2.

However, early benchmarking tests seem to suggest that Grok can actually outperform the models in its class, such as GPT-3.5 and Meta’s Llama 2.

xAI’s Grok system is designed to have a little humor in its responses pic.twitter.com/WqXxlwI6ef

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2023

Grok didn’t take much time to start hitting the headlines after its launch, with many right-wing commentators who’ve found a foothold on Twitter since Musk’s takeover complaining that Grok was “too woke” and “too liberal”.

Grok is only available if you sign up for the chatbot’s early access program, which is currently limited to X Premium+ subscribers. X Premium+ retails at $16 per month or $168 per year on the web, according to X’s help center.

5. Best for Content Creation: Writesonic

If you need a bot to help you with large-scale writing tasks and bulk content creation, then Chatsonic is the best option currently on the market.

There’s a ChatGPT-stye chatbot called Chatsonic included in all Writesonic plans (including the free plan) and it can help with a variety of tasks, including generating articles and blog posts, improving grammar, and bulk content generation. It also has tools that can be used to improve SEO and social media performance.

Now, Writesonic has caught up with OpenAI and offers users the ability to create custom chatbots with a tool called “Botsonic”. With Botsonic, you can edit the knowledge base of any bot you’re building by uploading documents, and you even import a bot you’ve made using a GPT language model into Writesonic.

A chat with Writesonic. Image: Tech.co

Writesonic also includes Photosonic, its own AI image generator – but you can also generate images directly in Chatsonic. One of the big upsides to Writesonic’s chatbot feature is that it can access the internet in real time so won’t ever refuse to answer a question because of a knowledge cut-off point. 

Writesonic offers a Team plan for $13 per month, although if you need more than one user/more words, you’ll need to pay a higher price. For instance, a 4-user plan costs $133 per month.

There’s also a Freelancer plan that retails at $16 per month, and an Enterprise plan that costs more than $500+ per month – but you’ll have to contact the company for an exact price.

6. Llama2.ai: Best Open Source Chatbot

Llama 2 is Meta’s biggest contribution to the AI arms race. Unlike Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT-4 language models, Llama 2 is completely open source, which means all of the code is made available for other companies to use as they please.

Llama 2 – the second member “Llama” family of LLMs – was released back in July 2023. Since then, it’s been incorporated into several different systems, thanks to the fact that it’s open source and free to use if you’re developing your own language model or AI system.

For instance, Microsoft Azure users can use Llama 2 to build chatbots and other AI-powered applications, while Perplexity AI – another chabot to make our list – is powered by language models that are built upon Llama 2.

Talking to a chatbot powered by Llama 2. Image: Tech.co

Although Llama 2 is technically a language model and not a chatbot, you can test out a basic chatbot powered by the LLM on a webpage created by Andreessen Horowitz. It performs similarly to GPT-3.5, and its knowledge cut-off date is sometime in 2022, according to the chatbot itself.

The interface above is of course a little more bare than the likes of ChatGPT or Bard, but it’s much more powerful than some of the smaller models included on this list. One interesting feature is the “temperature” adjuster, which will let you edit the randomness of Llama 2’s responses. The chatbot is a useful option to have if ChatGPT is down or you can’t log in to Bard – which can happen at any given moment.

7. Copilot: Best Chatbot + Web Search Combo

Although chatbots are usually adept at answering humans’ queries, sometimes, you have to head back to good ol’ Google to get your hands on the information you’re looking for.

That’s where Copilot – formerly Bing Chat – comes into play. It’s an AI-powered search engine that gives you the best of both worlds.

Copilot – which is also included in several Microsoft tools, including Microsoft Teams – uses the same large language systems that have powered ChatGPT since its launch, but you’ll be connected to the internet and much closer to those trusty search engine results.

Just ensure you don’t bombard it with tonnes of questions at once, as it does deal well with this kind of informational overload and sometimes crashes – at least in our experience.

Asking Copilot a question via the Bing search engine. Image: Tech.co

The best thing about Copilot for Bing is that it’s completely free to use and you don’t even need to make an account to use it. Simply open the Bing search engine in a new tab, click the Bing Chat logo on the right-hand side of the search bar, and then you’ll be all set.

Remember, though, signing in with your Microsoft account will give you the best experience, and allow Copilot to provide you with longer answers.

8. Perplexity AI: Best for Research

Perplexity AI is a relatively young AI startup founded by Andy Konwinski, Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, and Johnny Ho, who are all former Google AI researchers.

There’s a free version available, while Perplexity Pro retails at $20 per month or $200 per year and allows for image uploads.

Initially, Perplexity AI was powered by the LLMs behind rival chatbots ChatGPT and Claude. However, at the the end of November 2023, they released two LLMs of their own, pplx-7b-online and pplx-70b-online – which have 7 and 70 billion parameters respectively.

These two LLMs are built on top of the mistral-7b LLM from Mistral and and llama2-70b LLM from Meta, the latter of which appeared just above in this list.

Unlike ChatGPT, Perplexity AI’s language models are grounded in web search data and therefore have no knowledge cut-off. You can, for example, search “What happened on January 1, 2024?” and get a coherent answer from Perplexity AI.

Asking Copilot a question via the Bing search engine. Image: Tech.co

This key difference between Perplexity AI and many other widely-used chatbots like Bard is that it always cites all of its sources used in any answer it gives, so users can make a judgment for themselves on whether the information is accurate, taking into account the source that it’s from. Images are also provided, sourced from the web. 

As you can see, the interface is pretty plain and uncluttered, and there’s also a “Discovery” tab which will let you browse some trending stories and topics if you’re looking to explore the chatbot’s full potential. There’s also a Playground if you’d like a closer look at how the LLM functions.

9. Pi: Best Personal AI

Pi is a chatbot launched by Inflection AI back in May of 2023. It’s designed to be a companion-style AI chatbot or “Personal AI” that can be used for lighthearted chatter, talking through problems, and generally being supportive.

Pi – which is completely free to use – has a welcoming interface, and like Perplexity AI, there’s a “Discovery” tab. However, instead of being a direct route to trending topics, it’s instead a list of “conversation starters” you can use to prompt your conversations with Pi.

The large language model powering Pi is made up of over 30 billion parameters, which means it’s a lot smaller than ChatGPT, Bard, and even Grok – but it just isn’t built for the same purpose.

Conversing with Pi. Image: Tech.co

Pi is a good Personal AI or Character AI alternative. It’s a little more general use than the build-it-yourself business/brand-focused chatbot offered by Personal AI, however, so don’t expect the same capabilities.

What Pi is really great for is pleasant conversations and talking through your problems. It’s never going to replace the likes of ChatGPT in work settings, but it looks well on its way to carving out its own, distinct niche.

10. Personal AI: Best Personal Assistant

Personal AI is what it says on the tin – a personal AI assistant. The Human Labs Inc. creation has a relatively small language model – only 120M parameters in size – but it’s designed for a truly different – and more specific – purpose than generic giants like Bard and ChatGPT.

When you log in to Personal AI for the first time, it’ll ask you if you want to create a person for your professional life, personal life, or an “author”. You’ll need to upgrade to a different plan to create a personal AI for work, but the personal option is free.

You’ll then be able to choose if the AI should mirror you, or someone else, and also edit its designated traits and communication styles.

You can then add information about your past work history, your interests, and various other aspects of your life – quite a bit like a social media profile. When we started to use it, it remembered things I’d put into my prompts regarding wanting to open a Bee sanctuary:

Asking Personal AI to help with career planning. Image: Tech.co

As we’ve covered, Personal AI is free to use. However, there’s also a Premium plan that costs $400 per year, as well as a larger plan for enterprises which includes a “personal voice clone” – but you’ll have to contact the company to find out more about the pricing.

Personal AI is quite easy to use, but if you want it to be truly effective, you’ll have to upload a lot of information about yourself during setup. If you’re happy to spend some time doing that, though, it’ll be much more helpful for personal development than a more general-use tool like ChatGPT or Claude.

11. Poe: Best Chabot Aggregator

Poe isn’t actually a chatbot itself – it’s a new AI platform that will allow you to access lots of other chatbots within a single, digital hub. If you’re someone who likes to have lots of choices – and you’re interested in using lots of different chatbots – then this might just be the platform for you.

Despite its unique position in the market, Poe still provides its own chatbot, called Assistant, which you can use alongside all of the other apps and tools included within its platform.

There’s a free version of Poe that’s available on the web, as well as iOS and Android devices via their respective app stores. However, the free plan won’t let you access every chatbot on the market – bots running advanced LLMs like GPT-4 and Claude 2 are hidden behind a paywall.

The first paid Poe plan costs $19.99 per month – but if you sign up for an annual plan, it’ll only cost $16.67 per month or around $190 per year.

12. YouChat: Best Copilot Alternative

YouChat works similarly to Bing Chat and Perplexity AI, combining the functions of a traditional search engine and an AI chatbot.

When you start typing into the chat bar, for example, you’ll get auto-fill suggestions like you do when you’re using Google.

However, you’ll still be provided with a ChatGPT-style answer, and it’ll be sourced so you can click through to the websites it drew the information from. This makes it a good alternative for people who aren’t quite sold on Perplexity AI and Copilot.

Asking YouChat about a trip to Spain. Image: Tech.co

You can use YouChat powered by GPT-3 without making an account, but if you sign in, you’ll be able to use GPT-4 and other premium “modes” for free. There’s now a “research” mode available, which YouChat says “provides analysis and topic explorations, with extensive citations and the ability to display information in an organized table.

13. Character AI: Great fun & generates images

Character AI is a chatbot platform that lets users chat with different characters/personas, rather than just a plain old chatbot.

In October 2023, the company had around 4 million active users spending an average of two hours a day on the platform, while the site’s subreddit has 893,000 members.

If you want to use Character AI, you’ll have to make an account. And, while it’s fun, we wouldn’t trust the information coming out of it as much as we would with Bard or ChatGPT (although that’s not saying much).

Asking Napoleon Bonaparte a question with Character AI. Image: Tech.co

There have been questions raised previously about whether Character AI is safe, and what the company does with the data created by conversations with users.

Honorable Mentions & Other AI tools

Of course, the 11 chatbots that we’ve featured in this article aren’t the only chatbots out there. Some companies have built AI chatbots straight into their apps, like Snapchat did in February of last year with “My AI”. Snapchat also has an AI image generation tool built into their app.

Although we’d say Chatsonic edges it as the best content creation tool, Jasper AI is worth having a look at if that’s your use case.  It’s very powerful, used by a significant number of businesses, and is just as useful as Writesonic (Chatsonic).

The only problem with Jasper is the price – the cheapest plan costs $39 per set, per month. Writesonic, which made our list above, costs just $13 per month for the small team plan and will be a better option for a lot of smaller businesses.

OpenAI playground, on the other hand, is a free, experimental tool that’s free to use and made available by ChatGPT creators OpenAI. You can switch between different language models easily, and adjust other settings that you can’t normally change while using ChatGPT. All in all, we’d recommend the OpenAI Playground to anyone interested in learning a little more about how ChatGPT works in a hands-on kind of way.

OpenAI Playground. Image: Tech.co

Like Character AI, Replika AI is a “companion” chatbot – rather than assisting with day-to-day tasks, it allows users to interact with human-generated AI personas. It was created by a company called Luka and has actually been available to the general public for over five years.

The big difference is that using Replika involves building an AI persona that fits into the more traditional, “companion”-style model. It can be built to almost “mirror” a user and even has therapeutic benefits. Character AI, on the other hand, lets users interact with chatbots that respond “in character”. However, it’s just not as advanced (or as fun) as Character AI, which is why it didn’t make our shortlist.

Other AI tools

Although ChatGPT and Bard can paraphrase text well, Quillbot is worth a look if you need an AI companion for your written work that can paraphrase sentences, generate citations, and check your grammar. Quillbot has been around a lot longer than ChatGPT has and is used by millions of businesses worldwide (but remember, it’s not a chatbot!).

If you’re looking for an image generator and you’re not planning to pay for ChatGPT Plus, then look no further than MidJourney, which is widely considered to be among the best AI image generators currently available. You don’t need any graphic design software to use Midjourney, but you will have to sign up to Discord to use the service.

The Midjourney interface. Image: Tech.co

If you need an AI content detection tool, on the other hand, things are going to get a little more difficult. No AI content detection tool is 100% accurate and their results should be taken with a pinch of salt – Even OpenAI’s text classifier was so inaccurate they had to shut it down.

However, Originality.ai’s test results seem pretty impressive, and it’s considered more accurate than the likes of GPTZero and Duplichecker.

Using AI Responsibly

AI chatbots have an near-endless list of use cases and are undoubtedly very useful. But as is the case with any powerful yet freely available technology – not least one that helps workers save significant amounts of time during their working day – it’s important to be aware of the risks and ethical considerations, and use it responsibly.

Chatbots aren’t governed by any specific regulation – governments are only just getting around to exploring ways to manage AI development more broadly – and they’re made by a wide range of companies with different attitudes to the user relationship.

For instance, most chatbots have different policies that govern how they can use your data, as a user. These policies dictate how long companies like Google and OpenAI can store your data for, and whether they can use it for training purposes. Some chatbots, like ChatGPT, will let you turn your chat history on or off, which subsequently impacts whether your data will be stored. Claude, Character AI, and Grok all have different data privacy policies and terms of service.

This means it’s incredibly important to seek permission from your manager or supervisor before using AI at work. Some companies have banned their works from using ChatGPT over privacy fears, and if you’re dealing with sensitive information, from customer data to source codes, then you don’t want to breach your own company’s rules and regulations.

Of course, it’s also good to be upfront about whether you’re using AI for your own sake, considering 68.5% of business leaders we spoke to as part of a recent Tech.co survey think employees should be using AI without permission.