The Best AI Chatbot in 2026: The Leaderboards Disagree, So Choose by Everything Else

Every AI company says its chatbot is the best one, and the two leaderboards people check most can't agree. On Artificial Analysis's intelligence index, read on 31 October, Anthropic's best model scored 58 and OpenAI's 57. The best one Google lets the public use, Argon, scored 50. On Arena, formerly LMArena, where people vote between two anonymous answers, the order flips. Google and Anthropic models held nine of the top ten places, Argon was second, and OpenAI's best-placed model was 22nd.

So the model is a poor way to choose. What separates these chatbots is everything around it: which of your accounts it can read, what the free plan holds back, what happens to your chats, and what the next plan up costs. This post sorts them that way, by the job you'd give one.

I read each company's pricing page, help centre and privacy terms on 31 October 2026, along with both leaderboards. The post covers the general chatbots people use for work and everyday questions.

The Short Answer

If you...	Use	The free plan's catch	Paid from
Want one app that does the most	ChatGPT	Ads may appear, and it runs OpenAI's lowest-cost model	$6 (Go), $20 (Plus)
Write things other people read	Claude	A limit that resets every five hours. Opus is paid	$20, or $17 a month yearly
Work in Gmail, Docs and Drive	Gemini	Mostly Flash-Lite, and reading your Gmail needs a setting that trains Google's models	$4.99 (AI Plus)
Work in Word, Excel and Outlook	Copilot	A limited version, and ads if you don't pay for Microsoft 365	$9.99 (Microsoft 365 Personal)
Need to know what people are saying today	Grok	No published limit or model, and no video	$8 (X Plus)
Need answers with sources you can check	Perplexity	Three Pro Searches a day	$20 (Pro)
Won't pay anything	DeepSeek	Your data is stored in China	No paid plan for the app

Start free with ChatGPT if you want range, or with Claude if you mostly write. Pay only when the free plan starts getting in your way.

Why No Chatbot Wins Everything

"Which AI is best" sounds like a simple question. Three things get in the way of a one-word answer.

The order keeps changing. The top of Artificial Analysis's index is now a Google model, Carbon, at 59, listed as released on 28 October. You can't use it yet. Google's launch post says it's going first "to a subset of cyber defenders", and the Gemini app's best model is still Argon, on AI Pro and Ultra.

The tests disagree. OpenAI's top model is fourth on Artificial Analysis, and its best-placed model on Arena is 22nd. Google's Argon is eight points behind Anthropic on one board and ahead of it on the other. One board runs tests that have right answers. The other counts which of two answers people prefer. Both are fair measures, and they produce different winners.

The app doesn't run the model flat out. On Artificial Analysis, Claude Sonnet scores 54 at its highest effort setting and 30 at Medium, which Anthropic's launch post calls "the default in the Claude apps". A leaderboard score is the ceiling. The chatbot you open usually runs below it.

At full strength there's a gap below the top three. Grok 4.7, the model xAI released in September, scores 35 on Artificial Analysis at its high setting, and the model in DeepSeek's app scores 32. On Arena, xAI's and DeepSeek's best-placed models sit 40th and 35th. At the settings the apps actually use, the picture changes again. Sonnet at Medium, which is what free Claude runs, scores 30, below both.

The Best AI Chatbots, by What You Need Them For

ChatGPT: The Most in One App

ChatGPT is the sensible default because one app covers most of what people ask a chatbot to do. OpenAI's plan table lists voice, image generation, file uploads, memory, projects, deep research and ChatGPT's add-ins for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Google Sheets on the free plan, most of them marked "Limited". For text, OpenAI's help centre says "Free users have unlimited everyday text chats, subject to abuse-prevention safeguards."

The free plan saves money on the model. Free and Go default to Luna, which OpenAI's help centre calls its "fastest and lowest-cost" model. A free chat holds 27K tokens, and OpenAI puts the most you can paste in at about 12 pages. Then there are ads: "Ads may appear for users on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu accounts will not have ads." There's a free option without ads, which OpenAI says comes with "fewer messages and no access to some tools like image generation or deep research".

OpenAI can train on chats from its individual plans. The switch is "Improve the model for everyone" under Settings > Data controls. Rating an answer overrides it for that chat: "If you choose to provide feedback, the entire conversation associated with that feedback may be used to train our models."

Go costs $6 a month and "may include ads". Plus costs $20 with none. The whole ladder is in how much ChatGPT costs, and the free plan in detail in is ChatGPT free.

Pick ChatGPT if you want one app that answers questions, makes images, takes voice and works on your documents, and ads on the free plan don't bother you.

Claude: The Best Writer, on a Clock

On Arena's creative-writing board, Anthropic's best model is first and Google's second, close enough that the board's own confidence ranges overlap. Claude also came out ahead when I tested the best AI for writing in August. That's the reason to choose it: proposals, client emails, reports, anything another person has to read.

Claude's free plan doesn't give you a smaller model. Anthropic says "Anyone can chat with Claude using Sonnet 5.5 on Claude.ai", and Sonnet is on every plan. Opus starts at Pro. Fable, Anthropic's top model, costs extra on Pro and is included from Max. Free also includes web search, file uploads, memory, connectors, Artifacts, Claude's Docs, Slides and Design tools, and voice mode, which is in beta on every plan.

What it rations is time. "While using the free Claude plan, there is a session-based usage limit that will reset every five hours." The pricing card now says "Limited usage every 5 hours and every week" for Free too. When you hit it, you wait. And Claude doesn't make pictures: "Claude doesn't generate photos or illustrations the way image-generation tools do", though it does build charts and diagrams.

Anthropic marks model training "Opt-out" on every personal plan. The switch is "Help Improve our AI models" in the privacy settings.

Pro costs $20 a month, or $17 a month if you pay $200 for a year. Max is now a flat $100, and a new Ultra plan at $200 has "No 5-hour limit" for verified accounts. More in is Claude free and Claude's usage limits.

Pick Claude for writing that goes out under your name.

Gemini: For Gmail, Docs and Drive

Gemini's argument is your Google account. Google AI Plus, at $4.99 a month, adds Gemini in Gmail. AI Pro, at $19.99, adds it in Docs, along with Argon in the Gemini app and 5 TB of storage.

Free Gemini includes image generation, Deep Research, Gemini Live for voice, and Canvas. Google's plan card also names the free model: "Access to our Flash-Lite model". Its help centre says "Most prompts will go to Flash-Lite, our fastest model", and a free chat holds 32K tokens.

The catch is how the account connection works. For the Gemini app to read your Gmail or Drive, Keep Activity has to be on: "Gemini can't connect to Google Workspace when this setting is off." Keep Activity is on by default if you're 18 or over, and Google's privacy hub says it uses that activity to "provide, develop, and improve its services (including training generative AI models)". On a personal account, the feature that makes Gemini worth choosing comes with training switched on.

On the leaderboards, Google holds first and second place in Arena's overall votes. The details are in is Gemini free and how much Gemini costs, and Google AI Pro vs ChatGPT Plus puts the two $20 plans against each other.

Pick Gemini if your work already lives in Google and you're comfortable leaving Keep Activity on.

Grok: For What's Happening Right Now

xAI says Grok searches the web and X live, "so answers always reflect what's happening right now". It's also inside X, behind an icon in the navigation bar, in every country where X is available. If your customers talk about you on X, or your work depends on this morning's news, that's the reason to use it.

The free plan includes chat, image generation and Grok Build, all marked "Limited". xAI puts no number on that and doesn't name the model a free account gets. Video starts at Premium, $30 a month, and Plus costs $8. Is Grok free has the full picture.

xAI may train on your chats unless you turn off "Improve the model". Signed out, it's stricter: "in some regions (excluding the EU/UK), when you use Grok without logging in, you won't have the option to opt out of model training."

Pick Grok for live news and X. For your hardest questions, the top three score well ahead of it.

DeepSeek: Free, With One Condition

DeepSeek's app is free: "Chat with leading AI models for free." There's no subscription to upgrade to. DeepSeek charges for its API, so nothing in the app is held back for paying customers. It has web search, a reasoning mode called DeepThink and file uploads.

The condition is where your data goes: "we directly collect, process and store your Personal Data in People's Republic of China." DeepSeek may also use your chats to train its models, and its terms say you can stop that by turning off "Improve the model for everyone". Is DeepSeek safe goes through what that means in practice.

Pick DeepSeek for $0 with no upsell, if you're fine with where your chats are stored.

Two More: Perplexity and Copilot

Perplexity calls itself "an answer engine built around real-time web search with inline citations on every response." Its free plan has "Practically unlimited basic searches" and three Pro Searches a day, with "No access to advanced AI models, image generation, or premium support." Pro costs $20 a month or $200 a year. Perplexity keeps "AI Data Retention" on by default for Free, Pro and Max. Perplexity vs ChatGPT compares the two.

Copilot is Microsoft's, and its argument is Office. Microsoft 365 Personal, $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year, puts it in the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote desktop apps. The free version is "a limited free version of Copilot subject to available capacity and limits", and Microsoft says that without a Microsoft 365 subscription "you might see advertising in Copilot." It's the one chatbot here whose maker says prompts and responses in its current consumer app "aren't used to train foundation models". ChatGPT's add-ins for Word, Excel and PowerPoint are on every ChatGPT plan, the free one included, so Copilot is no longer the only way to put a chatbot inside Word. Copilot vs ChatGPT has the rest.

The Best Free AI Chatbot

Each company holds back something different on its free plan.

Free plan	The model you get	What runs out	Training on your chats
ChatGPT	Luna, OpenAI's lowest-cost model	Images, uploads and deep research. Text is "unlimited", with ads	On unless you switch off "Improve the model for everyone"
Claude	Sonnet, which every Claude plan includes	A usage limit that resets every five hours	On unless you switch off "Help Improve our AI models"
Gemini	Flash-Lite for most prompts	A usage limit, and chats hold 32K tokens	On while Keep Activity is on, and Gmail and Drive access needs it
Grok	Not published	"Limited", with no number	On unless you switch off "Improve the model"
DeepSeek	DeepSeek's current models	DeepSeek doesn't publish a limit	On unless you switch off "Improve the model for everyone"
Perplexity	No advanced models	Three Pro Searches a day	On unless you switch off "AI data retention"
Copilot	Not named	"Subject to available capacity and limits"	Microsoft says app prompts aren't used to train foundation models

My pick for the best free AI chatbot is Claude, if most of what you do with it is writing. ChatGPT's and Gemini's free plans run what their makers call their fastest models. Claude's runs Sonnet, the model every Claude plan includes, at Medium, which Anthropic calls the default in the Claude apps. You pay for it in time. When the five-hour limit runs out, you wait.

ChatGPT has the most features for $0: images, voice, uploads and the Office add-ins. It also runs OpenAI's lowest-cost model and, unless you pick the version without them, shows ads.

DeepSeek is the one free chatbot with no paid version to push you towards. If China storage rules it out for you, ChatGPT and Perplexity are the free plans you're least likely to run out of, ChatGPT for chat and Perplexity for search.

Which AI Chatbot Is Best for a Small Business?

Start from where your work already lives. If your mail and files are in Google, Gemini is the chatbot built into them. If they're in Microsoft 365, Copilot is built into the same apps, and ChatGPT's add-ins work there too. Then look at what you produce. If it's mostly words for clients, Claude.

Then test before you pay. Give two of them the same real job, such as a quote, a reply to an unhappy customer, or a summary of a contract you're about to sign. Ten minutes with your own work tells you more than any leaderboard, mine included.

Where izzedo Fits

izzedo chat's free plan has models from five of these companies in one chat: GPT-6 Luna, Claude Haiku 5.5, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Grok 4.7 and DeepSeek, plus Kimi, Qwen and others, with no card. You can switch models on any message, and the next one reads the whole thread.

Here's that test in one thread. A wedding photographer needed a quote: 7 hours at two hourly rates, travel charged past 30 miles each way, an album and a 30% deposit. Gemini 3.8 Flash worked out the numbers. Then I switched to Claude Haiku 5.5, also on the free plan, to check the sums and write the message to the couple.

Both got it right: $2,105.20, with a $631.56 deposit. The mileage was where I expected a slip. Eighteen billable miles charged each way comes to $25.20, not $12.60. Gemini did the numbers and Claude did the words, the same split as the sections above, and the check took one follow-up.

The Gemini on izzedo's free plan is 3.8 Flash, which Google's API documentation calls "Our most intelligent Flash model". The free Gemini app sends most prompts to Flash-Lite. izzedo reaches these models through APIs, where the model companies don't train on what you send, and its DeepSeek runs on Fireworks AI, so nothing you type goes to DeepSeek.

The free plan also has agent mode and 1,400+ connectors, Gmail, Google Drive and Outlook among them, and izzedo asks before each tool call unless you change that. The $6 Hobby plan adds every other chat model, including Claude Opus, GPT-6.1 Sol and Gemini 4 Argon. The allowance is shared across models and a flagship like Opus uses it faster. Current amounts are on the pricing page. If you haven't run one question past two models before, here's how it works.

The Bottom Line

In 2026 the model isn't what makes one AI chatbot better than another. Anthropic and OpenAI are a point apart on one leaderboard, Google and Anthropic lead the other, and neither board scores the model at the setting your chatbot uses. Choose by what the chatbot is attached to: ChatGPT for range, Claude for writing, Gemini for Google, Copilot for Office, Grok for X, Perplexity for sources, DeepSeek for $0.

Then check two things the plan cards make easy to miss: which model the free plan runs, and what happens to your chats. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI and DeepSeek have all changed a plan or a model since late September, so check the date on anything you read about them, this post included. If you'd rather compare paid plans, the best AI subscription does that, and every head-to-head we've run is on one page.

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Want ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek in one chat, starting on a free plan? Try izzedo chat free, no credit card required.