The best ai assistants and general-purpose ai tools

General-purpose AI products used across a company rather than for one job: chat assistants, writing and research tools, and the model providers behind them.

Last reviewed 23 SEPT 2026How we test this category How we make money Markdown version

What has to be true to appear here

General-purpose rather than built for a single workflow, which has its own category
Available directly to a business, not only as an API for developers
States which models it runs and whether your inputs train them

Inclusion is not for sale, and neither is order. Nine of the products we cover have no affiliate programme at all.

No test rubric published yet

This category is open because people have listed in it, not because we have started testing it. Nothing here carries a Crash Test score, and the order below is alphabetical rather than ranked.

When we do write the rubric we will publish the scenarios and the weights here first, before a single product in this category goes on the bench.

How we write a rubric

Ranked by Crash Test score

The shortlist

Tested products come first, ordered by score. Untested products appear below them regardless of their community rating, because we have not looked at them. Nothing on this page can read a vendor’s subscription tier.

Product	Crash Test	Verified reviews	From (5 seats)	Best for
ChatGPT AI assistant from OpenAI	Not tested	Too few to publish	– –	No tested verdict yet.
Claude AI assistant from Anthropic	Not tested	Too few to publish	– –	No tested verdict yet.
Perplexity AI-powered answer engine	Not tested	Too few to publish	– –	No tested verdict yet.
Gemini Google's AI assistant	Not tested	Too few to publish	– –	No tested verdict yet.
Midjourney AI image generation	Not tested	Too few to publish	– –	No tested verdict yet.
ElevenLabs AI voice and audio generation	Not tested	Too few to publish	– –	No tested verdict yet.
Grammarly AI writing assistance	Not tested	Too few to publish	– –	No tested verdict yet.
Otter.ai AI meeting notes and transcription	Not tested	Too few to publish	– –	No tested verdict yet.
Fireflies.ai AI notetaker for meetings	Not tested	Too few to publish	– –	No tested verdict yet.

Feature matrix

What each one actually does

Confirmed in testing. Where the honest answer is a sentence rather than a tick, we write the sentence. A safety-relevant feature that is off by default may not be recorded as a plain yes.

Capability	ChatGPT	Claude	Perplexity	Gemini	Midjourney

Real questions

What buyers actually ask

Sourced from launch threads, review text and search data, not invented to fill a schema block. Each answer is two to four sentences and says a number where we have one.

Why this page has no winner badge

“Best overall” is a question about your situation, not about the software. The table gives you a tested score, a real price at your team size, and a one-line statement of who each product is wrong for. The last of those is usually the one that decides it.

Found something out of date?

Pricing moves constantly in this category and we miss things. Send a correction with a dated link and it goes in the public log, with your handle on it if you want it there.

Corrections log and policy