Welcome to the forefront of conversational AI as we explore the fascinating world of AI chatbots in our dedicated blog series. Discover the latest advancements, applications, and strategies that propel the evolution of chatbot technology. From enhancing customer interactions to streamlining business processes, these articles delve into the innovative ways artificial intelligence is shaping the landscape of automated conversational agents. Whether you’re a business owner, developer, or simply intrigued by the future of interactive technology, join us on this journey to unravel the transformative power and endless possibilities of AI chatbots.
Are all AI chatbots the same? Absolutely not. Each has unique strengths and weaknesses that affect how and whether you should use them. We’ve been testing AI chatbots since their inception, cutting through the hype and assessing what they can really do. On a basic level, they can help you find information much faster than you could with manual searches. But they can also create images and videos, generate comprehensive research reports, and process files. ChatGPT is our Editors’ Choice winner for the category because it provides the most accurate and detailed answers out of all the chatbots we’ve tested. But the field is rapidly evolving, and plenty of other options stand out for other reasons. Read on for all of our top picks, followed by what you need to know before choosing the best AI chatbot for your needs.
ChatGPT, which has almost become synonymous with AI, runs on OpenAI’s extremely powerful 4-series and o-series of LLMs. It produces incredibly comprehensive responses with a friendly attitude. From creative writing to deep research, ChatGPT excels at providing you with a foundation of content to build off of and shape as you see fit. It’s especially adept at generating images and providing sources for information in a straightforward way.
Choose ChatGPT if you want to experience the best of what a chatbot can offer. It’s easy to use, and you can do plenty for free.
Gemini offers the strongest value of all the AI chatbots we’ve tested. It generally performs well with complex reasoning, file processing, and web search tasks, and its video generation engine can uniquely create accompanying audio. An impressive suite of useful integrations across pretty much every Workspace app and 2TB (or more) of cloud storage for premium users round out the experience.
If you already rely on Google apps such as Docs, Drive, Gmail, and Sheets, Gemini is the chatbot you should use. Its rich integrations make everything from generating emails to curating playlists as simple as clicking a button.
Copilot uses powerful LLMs from OpenAI and blends them with Bing web-scraping data for relevant and up-to-date responses to your text prompts. It’s available via mobile apps, on the web, and within Windows. For an extra subscription fee, Copilot also works inside Microsoft 365 apps, suggesting edits or formulas and even generating illustrated presentations based on your text prompts.
Choose Copilot if you want to leverage AI across the Microsoft ecosystem. It’s an especially good option if you primarily use the Edge web browser and the Microsoft 365 suite.
Claude has some unique features, such as an app creator and a host of unusual integrations, but its defining attribute comes down to how it handles data. By default, Claude encrypts your data and doesn’t use it to train its models. Many competitors do. In general, it deletes your conversation history within a month, too. In a sense, Claude is the opposite of DeepSeek, which allegedly funnels your data to the CCP.
Claude is a great fit if you are interested in trying out AI but have privacy concerns. It’s also worth a look if you want to try and make an app without any prior programming skills. Many developers find Claude useful for its coding capabilities, but we did not evaluate it for that use case.
To test AI chatbots, we ask each one the same series of questions and compare their answers, looking for accuracy, consistency, complexity, and depth. We also look at each chatbot’s core features, such as whether it can create tables of data, provide citations, summarize information, and so forth. As AI technology advances, we adjust our methods of evaluation accordingly.
There are pitfalls to this approach that are worth bearing in mind. For one, it’s impossible to fully vet the scope of an AI chatbot. One person might have a niche use case related to their work, while another might have zero use for that same functionality. It would require an army of experts in every field to fully evaluate these tools, and even then, what works well one day might not the next after an update.
That said, we noticed some clear differences in testing. After spending significant time with each one, you will likely form your own opinion on which are the best AI chatbots, just as we have.
All the chatbots we tested have free versions. Paid plans start around $20 per month, which has become the standard for a premium chatbot subscription. Most chatbot features are available for free, albeit with usage limits, but you need to pay extra if you want Copilot’s or Gemini’s integrations across their respective app ecosystems.
‘Chatbot’ is just an umbrella term that large language models fall under. It can apply to a customer service answer bot with limited responses or a more sophisticated tool like ChatGPT. 
We specifically test chatbots that rely on large language models. These models train on vast quantities of data to “understand” patterns in information and respond to prompts. Answers aren’t canned or predetermined; chatbots generate unique responses for each conversation.
Although you can chat with an AI chatbot like you would a person, and though some think chatbots are conscious, an AI chatbot can’t actually think or feel like a human. An AI chatbot is like a video game character with different dialogue options, except that chatbots have an infinite number of options you can choose between. Our point is that chatbots are merely complicated prompt-response machines and not sentient in any way. So, you can’t have real relationships with them, nor can they truly be your friend or therapist.
I’m the expert at PCMag for all things electric vehicles and AI. I’ve written hundreds of articles on these topics, including product reviews, daily news, CEO interviews, and deeply reported features. I also cover other topics within the tech industry, keeping a pulse on what technologies are coming down the pipe that could shape how we live and work.
Before starting at PCMag, I worked in Big Tech on the West Coast for six years, where I got an up-close view of how software engineering teams work, how good products are launched, and the way business strategies shift over time. I then changed course and enrolled in a master’s …
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