01 GPT, Claude, and Gemini on one canvas best for: Keeping GPT and losing the linear thread
One workspace where GPT answers next to Claude and Gemini, picked per message, and each model receives exactly the context you assembled: fork tangents onto visible parallel paths, reference exact messages with @, merge chats into one draft. No hidden memory, no injected system prompt; what the model sees is on the canvas. No voice or image generation, though; ChatGPT keeps those.
pricing · Free on community models; paid plans from $5/mo, every paid plan reaches every model.
best for: Writing and reasoning quality
The app people switch to when the words have to be right. Careful long-form reasoning, Projects with knowledge bases, the most user-controllable memory in the category (view, edit, pause, reset), and Claude Code bundled at $20. The 200K consumer context ceiling is the known trade.
pricing · Free; Pro $20/mo; Max $100 to $200/mo.
03 Google's assistant and bundle best for: Long context and bundle value
A million-token context window on paid plans, a $4.99 entry tier, Deep Research on the free plan, and the Google Workspace integration. Chat organization is thin (no working folders as of mid-2026), but the capacity per dollar is unmatched.
pricing · Free; AI Plus $4.99/mo; AI Pro ~$20/mo; AI Ultra $100 to $200/mo.
best for: Cited answers from live search
If your ChatGPT use is mostly "look this up and explain it", Perplexity is the dedicated version: every answer grounded in live web results with checkable citations, and a Pro model picker that includes GPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok.
pricing · Free; Pro $20/mo; Max $200/mo.
05 xAI's fast frontier models best for: Real-time social and news intelligence
Fast, direct, and natively wired into X's firehose, which makes it the strongest tool here for what-is-happening-right-now questions. The plan ladder is confusing and rate limits shift, but the price at the frontier is aggressive.
pricing · Free; SuperGrok Lite $10/mo; SuperGrok $30/mo; Heavy $300/mo.
06 Open-source, self-hosted chat best for: Owning the whole stack
A self-hosted chat UI with your own API keys behind it, including OpenAI's, so you can keep the GPT models and drop the app. You trade polish for control and per-token pricing; the right answer when the objection is governance, not capability.
pricing · Free and open source; you pay the model APIs.
07 Self-hosted UI for local and API models best for: Local models alongside the frontier
The other self-hosted default, strongest when part of your work should run on local open-weight models with cloud APIs mixed in. Setup and upkeep are yours, which is the point.
pricing · Free and open source; you pay for hardware or APIs.