The Best ChatGPT Alternatives in 2025: 12 AI Rivals

With over 200 million weekly active users, ChatGPT is by far the biggest AI assistant in the world. Yet, ever since ChatGPT shocked the world in November 2022, there’s been an explosion in apps and software similar to the chatbot.

ChatGPT quickly drew attention due to its ability to answer questions in natural language on almost any topic. It could also generate written content and code, opening the door to lots of use cases in content creation and software development.

Now, in the golden era of generative AI development, a number of other natural language processing-driven large language models (LLMs) have come to the fore, with companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft,  X, and Meta all releasing similar apps to ChatGPT.

Below, we look at the best ChatGPT alternatives on the market, from their capabilities to their histories.

Table of Contents Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. ChatGPT: Where It All Began
3. What Are the Best ChatGPT Alternatives?
4. 9. Microsoft Phi 3.5
5. The Bottom Line
6. FAQs

Show Full Guide

Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. ChatGPT: Where It All Began
3. What Are the Best ChatGPT Alternatives?
Show Full Guide
4. 9. Microsoft Phi 3.5
5. The Bottom Line
6. FAQs

ChatGPT: Where It All Began

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI and originally launched in November 2022. The virtual assistant uses large language models such as GPT 3.5, GPT-4, GPT-4o, and GPT-4o Mini to process and respond to user inputs.

Users can ask the chatbot questions on almost any topic and receive answers directly from content found on the Internet via the Bing search engine.

It is worth noting that ChatGPT has been trained on a wide range of data, including text taken from books, articles, and web pages (this is also true of many tools similar to ChatGPT).

Analyzing this data with natural language processing, supervised learning, reinforcement learning and other techniques enables the chatbot to learn patterns in natural language and to respond to inputs with relevant outputs.

While ChatGPT can respond to user questions with relevant and verbose outputs, it doesn’t “think” as a human being does. More specifically, it doesn’t understand the outputs it generates. It just predicts the most likely natural language response to your input based on its training data.

As a result, it’s important to be aware that ChatGPT and other substitute tools that use LLMs are prone to hallucinating (inventing facts) and generating misinformation.

What Are the Best ChatGPT Alternatives?

As the generative AI market continues to evolve, there are more and more ChatGPT alternatives available to choose from. Below, we’re going to look at some of the best ChatGPT alternatives on the market:

1. Gemini

Google Gemini is one of the best ChatGPT alternatives on the market today. It was initially launched in December 2023 as a successor to Google’s previous chatbot, Bard, which was released in March 2023.

Gemini is a multimodal family of LLMS, which supports a mix of text, image, and audio inputs. Its use of the Imagen 2 AI model also enables it to generate images. Different versions of Gemini include Gemini Ultra, Gemini Pro, Gemini Flash, and Gemini Nano.

2. Claude

Claude is a family of LLMs developed by Anthropic and released in March 2023. The chatbot has a similar user interface to ChatGPT and can respond to text or image inputs (though it can’t generate images itself).

Anthropic recently announced the launch of its Claude 3 family of models in March 2024, which include Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Claude 3 Opus. These models offer improved performance and even outperform key competitors like GPT-4 and Gemini Pro on certain benchmarks.

3. Llama 3

Llama 3 is Meta’s open-source entry into the LLM market. Meta first launched the base version of Llama in February 2023 in an attempt to offer an alternative to proprietary programs like ChatGPT.

Back in April 2024, the social media giant launched Llama 3, a multilingual and multimodal AI model available with 8B and 70B parameters.

Today, LLama 3 is not only one of the best open-source LLMs on the market but is also used to power Meta AI, an intelligent AI assistant that has been rolled out to Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram.

4. Microsoft Copilot (Ex Bing Chat)

Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft’s AI-powered research assistant designed to offer users an AI-driven search experience. Copilot was initially known as Bing Chat, an assistant that was launched in February 2023 and was later rebranded in November 2023.

Copilot uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 model to respond to user queries. It can be accessed via the Bing.com website and the Microsoft Edge sidebar. It supports a mixture of text, image, and voice inputs. It can also create images, but you need to be signed in with a Microsoft account.

5. Perplexity AI

Perplexity AI is an AI research assistant that users can “ask anything” to and receive an instant response alongside citations to web content. It was initially released in August 2022 and is based on OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-4 models.

The platform’s use of in-app citations has made it one of the most popular AI search tools on the market and a key competitor against other research assistants like Gemini and Copilot.

6. Grok

Grok is a humorous AI assistant produced by Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, and released in November 2023. Currently, Grok is one of the top competitors to ChatGPT, available to X premium subscribers and offering the ability to respond to text and image inputs.

According to Musk, Grok was inspired by The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and is intended to respond to user questions with a sense of humor. This emphasis differentiates it from services like ChatGPT, which often offer overly moderated responses.

In August 2024, xAI announced the launch of Grok 2, which has improved reasoning capabilities and outperforms Claude and GPT-4 on certain benchmarks. The Grok 2 family currently has two models: Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini.

7. Midjourney

Midjourney is an AI model developed by an AI startup of the same name, which launched in July 2022 and provides users with a text-to-image tool they can use to create images on demand. Simply enter a short text prompt describing the type of image you want to create, and the chatbot will generate an output.

Users can access Midjourney via Discord and use it as a photorealistic alternative to other software like ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, Gemini, or ImageFX.

8. Stable Diffusion

Stable Diffusion is a text-to-image model developed by Stability AI that generates high-quality images. It was originally launched in August 2022, and Stability AI announced the release of Stable Diffusion 3 in February 2024, a suite of models ranging from 800M to 8B parameters.

At the time of writing, Stable AI claims that Stable Diffusion 3 Medium is its most advanced text-to-image model. This model offers 2 billion parameters, can produce photorealistic images, and can process complex prompts.

9. Microsoft Phi 3.5

Microsoft Phi 3 is a set of open-source small language models released by Microsoft in April 2024. These models have been developed to offer users high performance while being less computationally effective than LLMs.

Phi 3 models can be run in the cloud, at the edge of the network, or on-device, and can also be accessed via Azure AI Studio, Hugging Face, and Ollama.

In August 2024, Microsoft also announced the release of Phi 3.5 models, including the Phi-3.5-MoE-Instruct model. This model can support general-purpose AI systems with high-quality data and a 128,000-context length. Microsoft claims that Phi 3.5 models outperform those produced by competitors like Meta and Google.

10. Jasper AI

Jasper AI is an AI copilot and content platform launched in February 2021 that has been designed to support marketers and creative professionals. Jasper AI is a ChatGPT substitute that can be used to create blogs, copy, SEO writing, and images with a consistent brand voice.

The virtual assistant is available via the Chrome and Edge web browsers and integrates with third-party tools, including Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Zapier, and more.

11. GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot is a coding copilot that was launched by GitHub in October 2021 to help developers generate code. Today, it can be used to generate code, query a codebase, and suggest code and syntax in real-time in multiple languages.

At the same time, GitHub Copilot offers integrations with editors, including Neovim, JetBrains IDEs, Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code.

12. Amazon Q

Amazon Q is an AI assistant designed to help streamline software development workflows, which was first announced in preview in November 2023. Amazon Q can be used to produce, test, debug, or transform code. It can also be used to request summaries of data stored in external data repositories.

There are two main versions of Amazon Q to choose from: Amazon Q Business and Amazon Q Developer. Amazon Q Business is designed for querying enterprise systems and producing content, whereas Amazon Q Developer is designed to help IT professionals with coding, testing, and upgrading applications.

The Bottom Line

As you can see, there are plenty of other options besides ChatGPT. If OpenAI’s models don’t meet your needs, don’t be afraid to look for another alternative.

Gemini, Claude, Grok, Microsoft Copilot, and Perplexity AI are all great starting points and even offer a superior user experience in some aspects.

We’re also likely to see more and more software like ChatGPT in the future as generative AI continues to evolve. While it is easy to think of AI as just one thing, even our potential overlords can have a degree of specialization.

FAQs