7 Best ChatGPT Alternatives & Competitors (My Experience)

James Njoya
16 min readNov 13, 2024

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In guide I’ll walk yout through the top ChatGPT alternatives for marketing teams, content writers, web searching, SEO teams and common users. Read on.

ChatGPT is one of the most popular generative AI tools and for a good reason. It’s user-friendly and can handle various tasks you throw at it — including content generation, creating data tables, and code.

However, after using the AI chatbot for a while, I noticed some limitations that prompted me to explore other options.

One of the issues is that ChatGPT’s versatility is also its weakness. While it can handle almost anything, it lacks the precision of specialized AI tools.

For example, when generating content, ChatGPT is a blank slate without templates or a guided experience to help you refine prompts and get quality output.

Specialized tools like Jasper offer a more streamlined approach with templates for various use cases including CTAs, product descriptions, and more.

In this guide, we’ll explore the best ChatGPT alternatives and show you where each one excels. But first, let’s learn a little bit more about where ChatGPT falls short and why you would want to consider other AI tools.

ChatGPT Limitations and Why Look for Alternatives

ChatGPT is one of the top generative AI chatbots, but it’s not without its weaknesses.

1️⃣ Inconsistent Brand Voice

ChatGPT is a general-purpose AI chatbot. And like most of the jack-of-all-trades generative AI tools it struggles to maintain a consistent brand voice in its output.

That’s because it pulls from a broad dataset designed to handle a wide range of queries, but this versatility limits its ability to capture the nuances of a brand’s tone, language, and style.

By default, ChatGPT produces generic responses that lack the emotional resonance and distinctiveness that every brand strives to nail in their messaging and content.

Most brands have established guidelines for tone, word choice, phrasing, and cultural nuances. While you can provide instructions to adopt a specific tone — such as casual or formal — it reverts to a generic tone once you start a new thread.

This inconsistency makes it challenging to create cohesive brand messaging across multiple outputs.

If you want a tool that consistently generates on-brand content without needing heavily customized prompts, you’ll have to use a custom-trained GPT.

However, fine-tuning AI models for brand-specific output is complex and often beyond the reach of most freelancers or small marketing teams due to the expertise and costs involved.

2️⃣ Cumbersome Content Creation Workflow

Another limitation is that ChatGPT’s interface isn’t built for content creation.

Its chat-based interface lacks essential tools like rich text formatting, real-time collaboration, and document structuring. This makes it difficult to produce and refine longer content directly within the platform.

If you plan to use ChatGPT for content generation, you’ll often need to copy and paste the output into a separate tool like Google Docs for further basic editing.

This workflow is inefficient and results in formatting issues. Tables and structured data, for instance, lose their structure when you paste them from ChatGPT to Google Docs.

3️⃣ No Built-in SEO Features

ChatGPT doesn’t have content optimization tools to help you produce ready-to-rank content.

It doesn’t provide suggestions on how well your content is optimized for your target keyword or suggest semantically related keywords to include. You will need external SEO tools for that.

In contrast, tools like Surfer AI and Frase provide real-time optimization suggestions, helping you improve content as you write.They offer keyword density analysis, semantic keyword suggestions, and real-time SEO scoring, ensuring that your content is both well-written and optimized for search performance.

Best ChatGPT Alternatives to Use.

Now let’s get into the nitty-gritty of the best ChatGPT alternatives, and see where each thrives.

  1. Jasper — Best AI tool for Marketing
  2. Sufer AI — Best for Creating SEO content
  3. Gemini — Best for Quick Google Searches
  4. Claude — Best Alternative for Creative Writing
  5. Microsoft Copilot — Best for Seamless Integration with Microsoft Products
  6. WriteSonic — Best for Fast Content Creation and Marketing
  7. Grammarly — Best for Grammar-checking
  8. Perplexity — Best for Answering Questions with Source-backed Information
  9. GitHub Copilot — Best for Integrated Coding Suggestions
  10. Code Rabit — Best for Collaboration in Coding Projects

#1: Jasper AI

Best ChatGPT Alternative for Marketing Teams.

Jasper AI website

Jasper is one of the few AI writing assistants pivoted to creating marketing materials and campaigns. It offers a more guided approach helping you generate relevant and onbrand content fast.

Meanwhile, ChatGPT is a blank slate. It generates generic output and you need to heavily customize your prompt and even follow up to get better output.

On the other hand, Jasper AI equips you with ready-made templates based on successful copywriting frameworks, like AIDA and PAS.

For starters you don’t need to spend time structuring your prompt to produce the most relevant output. Simply select a template and let Jasper help you generate content that follows effective marketing strategies.

Jasper also allows you to upload essential company information — such as your brand voice, strategy, audience, competitors, and product details. This enables it to produce content that’s not only relevant but also consistent with your brand’s messaging. The AI learns your brand voice and helps you produce content that sounds as if it was written by you or someone from your organization.

Jasper AI Features

  • Company Knowledge Hub: Feed Jasper your brand information for more relevant outputs that nail your brand voice and help better position your brand.
  • Prompt Library: Access 500+ templates for various use cases like email copy, ads, social media content and more.
  • Document Collaboration: Allows you to share documents with anyone in your workspace for easier collaboration.
  • Plagiarism Checker: Offers built in tools to check your content for originality.
  • Image Generation: Enables you to create visuals alongside your written content to streamline the production of marketing materials, making it easier to develop complete campaigns faster.
  • Browser extension: Use Jasper directly in tools like Google Docs and email platforms via its browser extension, allowing you to generate and refine content within familiar applications.

Jasper AI Pricing

Jasper pricing page
  • Creator: $49 per user per month
  • Pro: $69 per user per month
  • Business: custom pricing

Jasper AI Pros and Cons

Below are the pros and cons of Jasper AI.

Pros

✅ Browser extension for Chrome, Edge and Brave

✅ Collaboration and user management features

✅ Native Grammarly support

✅ Custom workflows and templates

✅ Multiple AI models

✅ AI chatbot

Cons

❌ Struggles with complex topics

❌ Customer support could be better

#2: Surfer AI

Best ChatGPT alternative for SEO teams.

Surfer AI website

Surfer AI is an addon from SurferSEO that enables you to generate ready-to-rank SEO content. Unlike ChatGPT, which requires manual effort to make content SEO-friendly, Surfer AI offers a targeted, data-driven approach from the start.

Essentially, how it works is that the AI tool analyzes the SERPs for your target keyword and generates an entire article based on the top-ranking pages. In fact, according to their website they claim to analyze over 300,000 words of web content before generating a single article.

Once you’ve generated an article, you can use the Content Editor which suggests specific keywords, headings, and structural improvements to refine your content for search engines. In contrast, ChatGPT offers no such guidance to help you optimize your content for search engines.

Surfer AI Features

  • Content Editor: Guides you on how to structure content, including headings, word count, and keyword density based on top ranking content pieces, ensuring your content is SEO-friendly.
  • Content Audit: Provides recommendations to improve existing content by comparing it against competitors. It suggests updates to keywords, backlinks, and technical SEO aspects to help boost rankings​.
  • Outline Generator: Enables you to create an article brief and structure based on top-ranking competitors, including headings and suggested keyword placements.
  • AI Content Detector and Humanizer: Helps you identify AI-generated content and makes it read more natural by rephrasing sentences and sections that sound robotic and redundant.
  • Content Paraphrasing: The paraphrasing tool lets you easily reword sections of your article,helping you avoid plagiarism issues while maintaining content flow and clarity​

Surfer AI Pricing

Surfer AI pros and cons

Surfer AI starts at $13.30 per article (or per AI credit). But you can save by purchasing credits in bulk. For example, you can buy 10 credits which brings the cost down to $11.97 per article.

Surfer AI Pros and Cons

Pros

✅ SEO-optimized content creation

✅ Comprehensive workflow

✅ Customize voice, tone, and competitors to include into your research

✅ Content editor integration

✅ AI detection and humanization

✅ Generate long form content

Cons

❌ Requires an active Surfer SEO subscription

❌ Not ideal for short form content

  • Google Gemini

Best for seamless integration with Google Workspace.

Gemini is an AI assistant that helps you quickly find information from Google. Using it feels like an extension of Google Search but one that gives you answers instantly without needing to click through to external links.

Unlike ChatGPT, Gemini search can retrieve images from the web.

I did a simple experiment and realized that ChatGPT only provides sources to find the images or simply generates an AI version of the image.

But it’s not about finding images from the web that makes Gemini a compelling AI alternative to ChatGPT. It’s about how well it integrates well with Google products, including Google Docs, Gmail, Sheet, Drive, Meet and Chrome browser — apps that most of us use on a daily basis.

For instance, in Gmail, Gemini can help you write emails or summarize long threads. In Drive, it can summarize files for quick access. During video meetings in Meet, Gemini can take notes and even transcribe discussions.

Sure you can configure some of these tools in ChatGPT but it’ll be nowhere as integrated as Gemini. If you’re a huge Google Workspace user, Gemini feels like a natural extension of your workflow which can boost your productivity immensely.

Google Gemini Features

  • Multimodal Capabilities: Gemini can process and generate text, code, images, audio, and video. Given its versatility the AI chatbot allows you to perform a wider range of tasks, from writing creative content to analyzing complex visual data.
  • Code generation and debugging: Using the Gemini Code Assist you can generate code for your project, get guidance yo debug your code, and receive inline suggestions as you code. The AI code assistant integrates with your IDE such as VS Code for a seamless coding experience.
  • Content generation: You can generate content, such as stories, poems, scripts, articles, and images.
  • Language translation: With Gemini you can translate text into more than 40 different languages worldwide.
  • Video Meeting transcription: Gemini can transcribe your video meetings, capturing important points and discussions.

Google Gemini Pricing

Gemini is free to use for basic features, but to access advanced capabilities, such as AI-powered transcribing and note-taking in Google Meet, you need to subscribe to Gemini Advance which costs $20/month.

Google Gemini Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

✅ Seamless integration with Google services

❌ Struggles with complex tasks

✅ Multilingual support

❌ Many of its features require a paid plan

✅ Multi modal capabilities

✅ Easy-to-use interface

✅ Free plan

✅ Image generation in all its plans

  • Claude AI

Best for creativity and natural interaction.

Claude is one of the huge competitors to ChatGPT. Developed by Anthropic, Claude is trained using Constitutional AI — a framework that emphasizes ethical principles like transparency, safety, and accuracy.

Functionality-wise, both Claude and ChatGPT excel in similar areas, such as content generation, summarization, code generation, and providing conversational responses.

However, Claude’s responses tend to be warmer, empathetic and more personable. It delivers answers that feel more human and relatable, especially in creative tasks or customer-facing interactions. On the other hand ChatGPT can sometimes feel robotic and generic. You need to specify the tone and style when prompting it.

Additionally, during my comparison to ChatGPT, I also found Claude to be a little better in code generation. Unlike ChatGPT, which simply generates code for you to test in your development environment, Claude gives you a preview of what the code snippet can do before deciding on using it.

You can make realtime adjustments by prompting it and previewing the code on the same interface.

Claude AI Features

  • Multilingual processing: Allows you to translate your output into multiple languages including French, Hindi, Spanish, German among others.
  • Code generation: Claude can help with code generation, extracting structured data like JSON and also debugging the code..
  • Vision analysis: Claude can transcribe handwritten notes, interpret graphs, and analyze photos, making image-based data processing fast and efficient.

Claude AI Pricing

Claude AI comes with a free plan and three paid plans. Here’s a price breakdown of Claude AI.

  • Free: 30 messages per day
  • Pro: costs $20 per month
  • Team: costs $25 per month
  • Enterprise: custom

Claude AI Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

✅ Upload and analyze documents

❌ Doesn’t have internet access

✅ Can engage in creative and analytical thinking

❌ Many of its features require a paid plan

✅ Multilingual support

✅ Ability to extract information form an image

✅ Image generation in all its plans

  • Microsoft Copilot

Best for seamless integration with Microsoft products

Microsoft was among the first tech companies to integrate generative AI into its products, with early implementations in its Edge browser and Bing search engine. Interestingly, ChatGPT’s internet access functionality is powered by Bing, and Microsoft Copilot is built on the GPT AI model.

Unlike ChatGPT, which operates as a standalone tool, Copilot is fully embedded into Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, Teams, and the Edge browser.

Given this, Copilot can offer context-aware assistance based on your active tasks, enhancing productivity without requiring you to switch platforms.

For example, in your browser, you can prompt Copilot to summarize a webpage or generate insights, all without needing to log into separate interfaces like you would with ChatGPT.

Another key distinction is how Copilot handles information sourcing. While ChatGPT often provides responses without any citations, Copilot provides links to the original sources for further validation and analysis, making it a more reliable AI chatbot for research.

Microsoft Copilot Features

  • Code Generation: Copilot can suggest code, complete lines or entire blocks, and even generate new functions based on your input.
  • Tone Customization: When generating content with Copilot, you can adjust the tone to match your needs. Choose from a variety of tones, including casual, professional, funny, and enthusiastic.
  • Copilot Vision: This feature enables Copilot to analyze and interpret visual data such as images.
  • Mobile App: Access Copilot’s features directly from your mobile device, allowing you to work on the go.

Microsoft Copilot Pricing

The Copilot AI chatbot is free to use, but there is also a paid version, Copilot Pro, which costs $20 per user per month. It provides access to additional features, including integration with Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook, Word, and Teams.

Microsoft Copilot Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

✅ Take notes and summarize meetings in Teams

❌ Limited to Microsoft products (e.g., only available on Edge browser)

✅ Free image generation

❌ Integrating with Microsoft 365 ecosystem requires a paid version of Copilot

✅ Provides up-to-date web information summaries

✅ Best in class for including source links in generative AI outputs

✅ A lot of functionality for free

✅ Delivers context-aware assistance tailored to your tasks

  • Grammarly

Best for writing and grammar correction.

Grammarly is best known as a grammar checking tool, but it also offers an AI writing assistant to help you improve your writing. Via its browser extension and desktop app, Grammarly allows you to edit your content without leaving your writing environment.

For example, within Google Docs, Grammarly’s AI feature allows you to generate new paragraphs, rewrite sentences for clarity, and summarize text. Although there are limitations compared to what you can do with ChatGPT’s AI writing assistant, I found Grammarly’s integration convenient because it allows you to enhance your writing in the same place where you’re creating the content.

Grammarly Features

  • Browser extension: Offers real-time writing suggestions across websites and web apps for spelling, grammar, and style.
  • Content paraphrasing: Helps you reword sentences to improve clarity and tone.
  • Quick email reply suggestions: Provides ready-made responses, improving email writing efficiency.
  • Custom content style guide: Allows teams to create rules for consistent writing style.

Grammarly Pricing

Here’s a simple breakdown of Grammarly plans.

  • Free: Includes 100 AI prompts per month
  • Pro: $12/month, offering 2,000 prompts per member per month
  • Enterprise: Unlimited prompts, contact sales for pricing

Grammarly Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

✅ Plagiarism and AI text checker

❌ Image generation not supported

✅ Custom style guide and brand tones

❌ Less customization options

✅ Good customer support

✅ Team collaboration features

✅ Free plan available

  • Perplexity

Best for quick web research.

Perplexity is a better ChatGPT alternative for web searching. By default, Perplexity is an AI-enabled search engine designed to find and summarize content from the web. Just enter a prompt and the AI will provide quick answers and citations to the sources for further browsing and validation.

Interestingly, Perplexity AI allows you to customize the sources it uses for answers, giving you more control over retrieved information. You can focus the AI to provide output from the web, social discussions, and academic papers, discover relevant videos online, and even generate content output without needing to do web research.

For example, you can prompt the AI chatbot to find information from discussions and social communities like Reddit.

Another reason I love Perplexity AI is that, unlike other web enabled AI chatbots like Gemini and Copilot, Perplexity offers more neutrality so that you get better results without being trapped in the use of giants like Google and Microsoft. Generally, Perplexity is designed to be an independent AI-based search engine and you can use it on any browser.

Perplexity Features

  • Independent AI search engine: Perplexity operates as a standalone AI search engine that combines natural language processing with web searches. It provides real-time responses, leveraging models like GPT-4 to offer contextual answers. This sets it apart from traditional keyword-based search engines by focusing on generating coherent, conversation-like results without the need to click on links.
  • Discover tab: This feature allows users to explore popular topics and trending queries. It helps you discover fresh content and trending topics and research into areas they may not have previously considered.
  • Source citations: Every result in Perplexity includes citations, enabling you to trace the information back to its sources.
  • Custom research sources: Users can customize their search experiences by integrating specific sources for research. This allows for more tailored responses, making it suitable for academic or industry-specific queries.
  • Upload and analyze files: Available for Pro users, this feature lets you upload documents or images for analysis. Perplexity can extract relevant information from these files, answering questions or generating insights based on the uploaded content.

Perplexity AI Pricing

Perplexity AI is generally free to use with unlimited access. However, for advanced features like unlimited file uploads or API access, you’ll need a paid account, which costs $20 per month.

Perplexity AI Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

✅ Discover latest topics

❌ Limited integrations

✅ Ability to find quick and coherent answers from the web without clicking the web

❌ Integrating with Microsoft 365 ecosystem requires a paid version of Copilot

✅ Cites information sources

✅ Analyze file uploads

✅ Image generation

✅ Image and media search

Final Verdict: What are the Best ChatGPT Alternatives

There’s no denying that there are many tools that can replace ChatGPT depending on what you wnat to do. Since ChatGPT is trained on a vast amount of data, it lacks the specialization required to deliver optimal results without highly optimized prompts..

We researched and tested several alternatives, each excelling in different areas. Some of these AI tools are direct competitors to ChatGPT, while others are built on GPT models but fine-tuned for specific tasks. Here are our top recommendations:

  • Jasper — Best for creating on-brand marketing content.
  • Surfer AI — Best for generating optimized SEO content
  • Grammarly — Best writing teams
  • Perplexity — Best for unbiased and quick web research

Do you use any of these ChatGPT alternatives? Or is there another tool we missed? Share your suggestions in the comments below.

ChatGPT Alternatives: FAQs

Which AI is better than ChatGPT?

Several AI tools can outperform ChatGPT in specific areas. For example, Claude AI is better at handling large-scale conversations and processing extensive documents. Meanwhile, Microsoft Copilot integrates well with Microsoft products, making it a stronger choice to boost your productivity. If you’re want to create marketing materials you’ll want to go with Jasper AI as it allows you to create onbrand content with minimal prompting.

What is Google’s replacement for ChatGPT?

Google’s Gemini AI is the direct alternative to ChatGPT. It combines language capabilities with real-time web access, making it more effective for up-to-date research and gathering current information from the internet.

Which is the best AI in the world?

Currently, OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Google’s Gemini, and Claude AI are among the best in natural language processing. GPT-4o excels as a multi-variate generative AI, Claude AI thrives in coding and document analysis, and Gemini specializes in research with real-time data access.

What is the best ChatGPT alternative for coding?

GitHub Copilot is the best ChatGPT alternative for coding. Built specifically for developers, it integrates directly into code editors like Visual Studio Code, offering real-time coding suggestions, error detection, and automated code completion.

What are the best ChatGPT alternatives for research?

For research, Google Gemini and Perplexity AI are top alternatives. Gemini excels in real-time web data retrieval Google search engine, while Perplexity AI is more comprehensive with option to customize your data sources. It also cites data in every search making it easy to verify sources.

Hello, I’m James, a bottom of funnel content marketer. I help you build content programs that drive meaningful business growth. Learn more from my website.

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James Njoya
James Njoya

Written by James Njoya

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Brand story teller. B2B SaaS writer and content marketer.

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