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There’s a new “best AI” every week. We ignore the hype and the slick demos, and just use each tool for three months — on the kind of real work you’d pay for anyway.
Every subscription, we pay for ourselves at full price. Then we give them all the same tasks — writing, coding, research, data and translation — and keep the ones that actually hold up. Nothing else makes the list.
“Still the most consistent assistant for daily work — strong at writing, code, and tools.”
“Beats GPT-5 on multi-step code reasoning in our benchmark — at the same $20.”
“Strongest research workflow thanks to native Google integration and a 2M-token context window.”
“Answers with real sources attached — the fastest way to research without the hallucinations.”
Marketing-focused AI writer built for teams shipping content at scale.
Long-form drafts, marketing copy and brand-voice content at scale — tools that adapt to your tone instead of flattening it.
Brief-to-publish content built to rank: SERP analysis, outlines and on-page optimisation in one workflow.
Turn a script into a presenter-led video — no camera, no studio. Best for explainers, training and social at volume.
Studio-grade voice cloning, narration and dubbing — the specialists are now indistinguishable from a real booth.
Wire your apps together and let AI run the repetitive steps — the connective tissue behind every lean team.
Describe the site, get a live one — AI generates layout, copy and images, then hands you something you can actually edit.
Auto-join, transcribe and summarise every call — action items and decisions captured while you stay present.
Answers with real sources attached — verify what you are told instead of trusting a hallucinated URL.
Every tool is paid for at full retail, out of our own pocket — no vendor demos, no sponsored access. Then real people run the same 240 prompts across writing, code, research, data and translation: the work you’d hand it day to day.
Two reviewers score every output blind, and that weighted result is what you see. Never a number a vendor gave us, never a verdict an AI wrote. We re-run the whole benchmark every quarter — this leaderboard moves fast.
Read full methodologyIt depends on what you do most. For long-form writing and general-purpose work, ChatGPT is still the safest pick. For multi-step code, Claude is now ahead. For research, Gemini (or Perplexity).
All three are $20/mo. Pick the one whose top use case overlaps your week most — and switch every 6 months. We rerun this benchmark quarterly because the leaderboard shifts.
Free tiers usually mean older models, lower usage caps, no advanced tools (Code Interpreter, Deep Research, Projects), and no API access. For occasional questions, free is fine. For daily work, the $20/mo plans pay back in saved time within a week.
Only with citations. The newer models (GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini Ultra 2) hallucinate far less than 2023-era models, but they still occasionally invent a plausible-sounding source. Use research-mode tools (Perplexity, Gemini Deep Research) that actually link the page they’re quoting, and double-check anything that matters.
Five task families: writing, code, research, data, translation. Each family has 48 prompts run on every model, with two reviewers scoring blind. Final score is weighted by how often we see each task in real work — writing and code carry the most weight, which is why all-rounders dominate the top of the leaderboard.
We benchmark them too. Mistral Large 2 and Llama 3.3 70B are competitive in some niches (code, multilingual). Grok 3 is fast but inconsistent. Local models (Ollama + Qwen, Phi) are useful when you can’t send data to a vendor. None of them are top-3 across the whole benchmark yet — but the gap is closing fast.
Yes — and we say so on every page. If you subscribe through one of our links, we earn a commission. It does not change the price, and it does not change our verdict. Two of our top-rated tools (Mistral, local Llama setups) don’t have affiliate programs at all — we still cover them when they’re the right answer.
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