Over the last few years, ChatGPT showed the potential of AI to assist in both routine and creative tasks, making it a go-to tool for many—students, professionals, entrepreneurs, and everyone in between. ​

While ChatGPT has proven effective for many use cases, people, and businesses, often require other tools that better fit their specific needs. Additionally, as more software platforms integrate AI features, many companies prefer using versions of their existing tools rather than adding another separate service. 

Despite its overwhelming success, OpenAI isn’t the only GenAI business in the market, and there are several ChatGPT alternatives that we should be on the lookout for. 

The Current Status of ChatGPT 

ChatGPT has recently experienced a surge in usage after a period of stagnation. According to Similarweb, OpenAI’s chatbot reached 3.8 billion visits across desktop and mobile web in January 2025, outpacing competitors such as Microsoft Bing, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Perplexity. 

ChatGPT’s user base is not limited to individuals. Businesses are rapidly adopting AI-powered chatbots, with OpenAI reporting 2 million enterprise customers—double the number from September. High-profile clients include Uber, Morgan Stanley, and T-Mobile.

The company’s developer community is also booming. More developers are using OpenAI’s AI models to power their apps and services. According to Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s COO, traffic from developers has doubled in six months, and usage of their advanced reasoning model, o3, has grown five times.

ChatGPT vs. Google: A search engine replacement?

An interesting phenomenon within the last year has been the increasing use of AI-powered tools like ChatGPT to replace search engines. 

A survey led by TechRadar showed nearly a third of Zillenial users have turned to AI for search-related tasks in the US, 16% of UK users reported a similar shift. The reasons behind this trend include:

• Time efficiency: AI tools deliver precise answers faster than conventional search engines.
• Contextual understanding: AI chatbots grasp user intent and provide more insightful responses.
• Content summarization: AI models can condense complex topics into accessible explanations.
• Creative engagement: AI chatbots offer interactive and dynamic exchanges.

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How does ChatGPT Compare to its Competitors?

Despite OpenAI's strong market position, competition is intensifying. DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, recently gained traction, causing Nvidia’s stock to drop by 17% in January. On the day of DeepSeek’s rise, ChatGPT logged 139 million visits, while DeepSeek reached 49 million—an impressive achievement for a relatively new player in the AI market.

Now, as of February 2025, OpenAI's ChatGPT maintains a leading position in the AI chatbot market, with approximately 300 million weekly active users or about 123.5 million daily active users. 

In comparison, Google's AI chatbot, Gemini, is targeting a user base of 500 million by the end of 2025. Perplexity AI, an AI search startup, has experienced significant growth as well, answering 250 million questions in a single month and projecting annual revenue exceeding $35 million. 

OpenAI aims now to position itself and ChatGPT as the “Coca-Cola” of AI, present, flexible, and widely available, as a way to maintain its dominance even as AI chatbots become more commoditized.

How to Choose the Best ChatGPT Alternative

If you're looking for a good ChatGPT alternative, there are a couple of key factors that you should keep in mind:

1. Cost and Pricing Models

Keep your budget in mind. Look for free tiers, pay-as-you-go options, or subscription plans. Some alternatives offer separate pricing for individual and business use, making it essential to compare enterprise-level features before deciding.

2. Conversation Flow and Context Retention

An effective AI chatbot should support seamless, multi-turn conversations without frequently losing context. Test alternative models by engaging in multistep interactions to determine whether they retain information across exchanges.

3. Content Moderation and Safety

Ensure that the alternative AI model has strong moderation filters to prevent inappropriate or harmful content. AI models with robust safety measures are critical for both personal and business use.

4. Real-Time Updates and Knowledge Base

Some AI models incorporate real-time or frequently updated knowledge, making them more reliable for recent events and industry trends. When choosing an alternative, consider its data refresh rates and ability to stay current.

5. Customization and Fine-Tuning

The best AI chatbot alternatives offer customization features that allow users to modify response styles, add domain-specific terminology, and adjust tone. Businesses benefit from models that provide industry-specific customization for enhanced relevance.

Top ChatGPT Alternatives

Last, but not least, here are some of our favorite ChatGPT alternatives available in the market today:

1. Claude

Created by Anthropic, Claude supports individuals and teams across language-based tasks, such as content generation, data analysis, customer support, brainstorming, coding assistance, and research. 

Claude Haiku is suited for quick, lightweight tasks, prioritizing fast execution. Claude Sonnet balances performance and speed for high-throughput tasks that need consistent efficiency. Finally, Claude Opus handles in-depth analysis, multi-step tasks, advanced math, and coding for complex work. 

Claude Key Features:

• Claude’s advanced reasoning capabilities allow it to perform complex cognitive tasks beyond standard pattern recognition or text generation.
• Vision analysis in Claude enables transcription and interpretation of static images, including handwritten notes, graphs, and photographs.
• Low AI hallucination rates, Claude ensures high accuracy over extended documents, making it suitable for detail-oriented and reliable outputs.
• Accessible via AWS and GCP and incorporates jailbreak resistance and misuse prevention. It aligns with enterprise security practices through SOC 2 Type II certification and optional HIPAA compliance for sensitive data.

Prices for Claude range from free (with access to Claude 3.5 Sonnet) to $25 per person per month, with team and enterprise options available. 

2. Perplexity

When it comes to research, Perplexity is a great ChatGPT alternative. It provides accessible, conversational, answers to user queries, using AI to generate comprehensive responses that summarize relevant information. Each answer includes citations, allowing users to further verify or explore the information. 

Perplexity also offers two modes of search: Quick Search for immediate responses and Pro Search for more detailed answers, with features such as conversational dialogue and contextual memory to facilitate a seamless user experience.

Preplexity Key Features:

• Uses language models like GPT-4 Omni and Claude 3 to interpret questions and search authoritative sources such as news outlets, academic papers, and established blogs.
• Allows users to organize their research through Spaces, facilitating collaboration and file uploads.
• Enables the creation of shareable articles using Perplexity Pages, allowing users to transform research into polished content.
• Provides an API for integration of open-source language models into projects, with straightforward access and management options.

Perplexity offers a free plan with unlimited quick searches and 5 pro searches per day and a professional, $20 monthly plan with access to various AI Models, visualizations, API credits, and more.

3. DeepSeek AI

We already talked about DeepSeek’s success. This up-and-coming AI platform is designed for language processing, vision-language understanding, and code generation. 

Its latest model, DeepSeek-V3, offers improvements in reasoning, math, and programming tasks, performing on par with leading AI models. The platform includes specialized models such as DeepSeek-VL for multimodal understanding, DeepSeek-Coder for software development, and DeepSeek-V2, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model focused on efficient inference.

DeepSeek Key Features:

• Provides multiple model sizes, including 7B and 67B, with open-source options for research and commercial use.
• Flexible API access for businesses and developers with transparent service status monitoring.
• Includes the DeepSeek App for mobile use, DeepSeek Chat for AI interactions, and the DeepSeek Platform for integration.
  

DeepSeek AI offers a mix of open-source and paid API-based models. Some models are open-source, however, if users prefer a hosted API service without managing their infrastructure, DeepSeek provides cloud-based access with a token-based pricing structure.

4. Google Gemini

Google Gemini, developed by Google DeepMind, facilitates tasks related to creativity and productivity. Built on Google’s TPU infrastructure, Gemini offers improved training speed and efficiency for deploying large-scale AI models. 

Gemini aims to assist users in writing, planning, learning, and addressing complex problems while improving the coding capabilities of developers and enterprises in building solutions. 

Gemini Key Features:

• Includes Gemini Ultra for complex tasks, Gemini Pro for broader applications, and Gemini Nano for efficient on-device use.
• Pre-trained to process and understand multiple types of information (text, images, audio, and video) simultaneously to integrate diverse data sources.
• Gemini API allows developers to develop code in programming languages (Python, Node.js, REST, Go, Android, Dart (Flutter), Swift) using Gemma open AI models into their applications, enabling customization and lightweight model access.

Google Gemini offers a free plan with usage limits, while Gemini Advanced is available for $20 per month through a Google One AI Premium subscription. 

5. AutoGPT

AutoGPT is an open-source AI agent developed in Python by Significant Gravitas to simplify workflows and reduce the need for human oversight on repetitive tasks. 

AutoGPT can handle complex operations like data processing, client communications, and report generation for business, marketing, and education industries using continuous AI agents. The platform’s dual architecture, comprising a server for backend processing and a frontend with an intuitive interface, enables both flexibility and ease of use.

AutoGPT Key Features:

• Simplifies content workflows by automating tasks like transcribing videos into articles, generating outlines, and applying SEO optimizations. It also supports social media management by scheduling posts, drafting trend-aligned content, and maintaining engagement consistency across platforms.
• Integrates with CRM systems, email platforms, and other tools, and its low-code interface makes building workflows accessible even to non-technical users.
• Links various LLMs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Llama, and Groq, allowing users to perform tasks like content creation, sentiment analysis, and natural language processing.

Much of the AutoGPT platform is available under the MIT License, enabling free use, modification, and distribution of the core code, however, certain elements are licensed under the Polyform Shield License, which restricts direct competitive use.

Although it’s clear that ChatGPT isn't going anywhere, it’s still important for businesses to keep an eye out for the available alternatives, especially since they determine how the future of AI/ML.

The future of conversational AI will be shaped by innovation, competition, and user demand. Whether ChatGPT maintains its lead or new challengers emerge, it’s still clear that AI-powered assistants are becoming indispensable across industries. 

Choosing the right AI chatbot depends on individual use cases, and as the landscape evolves, users can expect even more powerful and tailored solutions to meet their needs.