13 Best Free and Paid AI Chatbots in 2025: ChatGPT, Poe & More

And despite some early hiccups, has proven to be the best ChatGPT alternative. While STEM professionals often have a strong desire to use AI, don’t be surprised if the broader pool of employees aren’t immediately enamoured with the idea of integrating generative AI into their roles. You may see it as a productivity boon; they may see it as a threat to their jobs.

For those who have already deployed chat and are looking to maximize adoption, introduce strategies that encourage your callers to become chatters. This can be as simple as your IVR proactively offering a link to chat to anyone waiting on hold for a voice agent. If you do this, make sure that your digital support is as high-quality as what you offer by phone. If you send them to digital and your analytics tell you that they call you back within minutes, you’ll know that you have just executed an epic customer-experience fail.

• Now you’ve established your chatbot’s goal, it’s time to choose which platform you’re going to move forward with.
• If you’re not planning on making redundancies, but instead upskilling your staff so they can spend more time on the tasks AI can’t do, then tell them.
• There’s a free version available, while Perplexity Pro retails at $20 per month or $200 per year and allows for image uploads.
• The chatbot is a useful option to have if ChatGPT is down or you can’t log in to Gemini – which can happen at any given moment.
• For example, you can enter a detailed description of your ideal chatbot, and let ChatGPT do a lot of the leg work for you.

Test the chatbot

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. 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. At the time of writing, Grok does not currently offer a free plan in the US. Yet, as X aims to make use of the AI tool more widespread, the company has released a free tier to select users in New Zealand, with plans to eventually roll it out on home soil. 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.

Writesonic

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. 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. To address this, be upfront about what you’re hoping to achieve with the tech. If you’re not planning on making redundancies, but instead upskilling your staff so they can spend more time on the tasks AI can’t do, then tell them.

Guides

And segment audiences not by age/location, but by behavior (e.g., “abandoned cart three times”). Many of my clients have reported success by trying AI-powered email tools or a chatbot before a full implementation. Along with skills training, it’s also important to ensure workers are trained in AI ethics and governance so that they understand how to use AI systems transparently and fairly. Additionally, it’s vital to expand access to AI training programs for moderate to lower-income individuals to help increase their opportunities for economic mobility. You might create the time and space within your organization that motivates employees to continue learning, including designating specific times during the workweek. Another way to maintain positive momentum is to celebrate those who upskill, and create internal groups or meetups where people can share what they’ve learned.

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. 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. 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. You can use Claude for free, but there’s also a lightweight version called Claude Instant and a more powerful version called Claude Advanced.

How to build a better AI benchmark

Therefore, you’ll also need to create a fallback message which prompts users to take extra steps. Once you’ve logged into your chosen chatbot builder it’s time to decide which opening trigger to use. In other words, it’ll be the introductory message that the user will see when they start a chat.

Align AI training initiatives with both short- and long-term business objectives. As you roll out training, tailor goals to employees’ roles, responsibilities and levels within the organization, setting clear, measurable learning outcomes that reflect their specific functions, whether technical, analytical or managerial. Some people believe chatbots like ChatGPT can provide an affordable alternative to in-person psychedelic-assisted therapy. Even though the idea has made a real impact in the research world, it’s been slow to influence the way AI companies are actually using benchmarks. In a paper in March, researchers from Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, and others laid out a new framework for improving evaluations—with validity as the first step.

Honorable Mentions & Other AI tools

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. As the AI tidal wave continues to disrupt business practices, embracing technology is the only way to avoid getting swept away. But the good news is that you don’t need to be an AI aficionado to reap the benefits of artificial intelligence in 2025. If you aren’t a software engineer or coding whizz, building an AI chatbot for your company can be a great place to start.

Even if there were disputes about methods, no one doubted that the highest-scoring model would have an advantage when deployed in an actual image recognition system. Now all you need to do is test your chatbot to make sure it’s working in the way you intended. Explore Vector Shift’s comprehensive documentation to unlock these advanced features and push the boundaries of what your WhatsApp chatbot can achieve. By using AI in WhatsApp, you can automate various processes such as appointment scheduling, order tracking, and troubleshooting common issues. This automation not only improves operational efficiency but also significantly enhances customer satisfaction by providing prompt and accurate responses.

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. 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.