01 Claude, GPT, and Gemini on one canvas best for: Keeping Claude and escaping single-vendor limits
The odd entry out, because you do not give Claude up. NodePad runs Claude, GPT, and Gemini in one workspace, chosen per message, and each model receives exactly the context you assembled on the canvas: fork tangents, reference exact messages with @, merge chats into one draft. If your reason for leaving is limits or a missing second opinion rather than the models themselves, this solves it without the goodbye.
pricing · Free on community models; paid plans from $5/mo, every paid plan reaches every model.
best for: The most polished all-round product
The strongest ecosystem in the category: the GPT-5.6 family, best-in-class mobile and voice, image generation, agents, and custom GPTs. Its memory is the deepest anywhere and also the least inspectable, and in-app context windows run far below what the models support over the API.
pricing · Free; Go $8/mo; Plus $20/mo; Pro $200/mo.
03 Google's assistant and bundle best for: Long context on a budget
The million-token context window on paid plans is the largest of the big apps, five times Claude's consumer ceiling, and the $4.99 entry price undercuts everyone. Chat organization is thin (no working folders as of mid-2026) and model versions swap beneath capability labels, but the value for Workspace users is real.
pricing · Free; AI Plus $4.99/mo; AI Pro ~$20/mo; AI Ultra $100 to $200/mo.
best for: Cited answers from live search
Not a Claude replacement so much as a different loop: ask, get a sourced answer from live web search, follow up. The Pro model picker actually includes Claude models, though they always run inside Perplexity's search pipeline rather than on your bare prompt.
pricing · Free; Pro $20/mo; Max $200/mo.
05 Open-source, self-hosted chat best for: Owning the whole stack
An open-source chat UI you run yourself, pointing your own API keys at Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and most other providers. You trade polish and hosted convenience for control and per-token API pricing; a natural fit if your Claude problem is data governance rather than capability.
pricing · Free and open source; you pay the model APIs.
06 Self-hosted UI for local and API models best for: Local models alongside the frontier
The other default of the self-hosted world, 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.