The best AI tool for every task, reviewed honestly

A Swiss Army knife that reads, writes, plans, explains, and occasionally argues with itself so you don't have to. You bring the mess; it brings the structure.

GPT‑5.2 Thinking is state‑of‑the‑art for professional knowledge work. Instant, Thinking, and Pro tiers let you trade speed for depth. Persistent memory, canvas editor, and image generation built in.

Model churn is real — OpenAI retired GPT‑4o and other models in Feb 2026, so continuing old chats can produce different outputs than before.

Think of it as a profoundly educated research partner who actually takes a minute to think before answering. It trades instant speed for deep, methodical analysis. When your problem requires real, deliberate logic — not just a quick guess — this is Google's flagship brain upgrade.

Verified 77.1 on ARC‑AGI‑2. Generates text, videos (Veo), images (Nano Banana), and music (Lyria 3) natively. Deep Google ecosystem integration across mobile and web.

In public preview with a Jan 2025 knowledge cutoff — brilliant at reasoning but can be stale on late‑2025/2026 facts unless connected to search.

The calm, capable coworker: great at long documents, careful explanations, and turning vague thoughts into crisp prose. It actually reads what you paste.

Full upgrade across coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, and planning. 1M-token context window (beta) means it can handle enormous documents in one shot.

The 1M-token context is beta — expect limits, variability, and occasional weirdness right when you're most tempted to trust it with your entire life's paperwork.

A text prompt goes in; a gallery-worthy image comes out. It's the tool you use when you want "wow" more than "technically correct."

V7 is a major step in prompt precision and coherence — especially bodies, hands, and objects. Default model since June 2025, with a web-based editor supporting inpainting and outpainting.

No free tier. If you need strict brand compliance or pixel-perfect typography, expect more iteration than you want.

Image generation that behaves like a conversation: refine, edit, and steer the picture the way you'd direct a helpful illustrator. Less roulette wheel, more "yes, like that — now fix the text."

State-of-the-art conversational image editing. OpenAI is migrating devs away from DALL·E snapshots toward GPT Image models. Text rendering and iterative refinement are best-in-class.

DALL·E model snapshots are being shut down in 2026 — treat old image endpoints as a melting iceberg.

The model that thinks before it codes. Opus 4.6 plans multi-step refactors, sustains context across sprawling codebases, and writes production code that reads like a senior engineer reviewed it — because, in a way, one did.

Anthropic's most capable model. 1M-token context window (beta) lets it hold entire repos in working memory. Top marks on agentic coding benchmarks — it plans, executes, and self-corrects across long tasks.

The most expensive model in its class. Long agentic sessions can amplify cost if you don't supervise — and it's slower than lighter models for quick questions.

The specialized coding intelligence engine powering next-generation developer tools. Rather than a standalone app, GPT-5.3-Codex is the underlying foundational model optimized for deep architectural reasoning, massive context windows, and flawless code generation across dozens of languages.

400K token context, achieving 77.3% on SWE-bench Verified. Its unprecedented agentic capabilities empower developers to build complex multi-file features and audit architectures autonomously at massive scale.

API costs can escalate quickly during heavy agentic workflows. Access requires premium developer tiers, and the model's extreme autonomy can sometimes lead to overly aggressive refactoring if not strictly guided.

Describe an app like you're explaining it to a smart intern; it generates working code and can push it toward a real deployment pipeline. "From idea to shipped" energy, minus three weeks of setup drama.

Built for production workflows (Git sync, repo integration). Over 4 million people have used it since GA to turn ideas into apps. The Feb 2026 rewrite brings serious vibe-coding polish.

From demo to production, you inherit real software responsibilities — security, data handling, and code review. "It works" is not the same as "it's safe."

Like hiring a junior developer who never sleeps and already has the full coding workspace open. You ask for a thing; it builds, runs, tests, and iterates — right where the app lives.

Can test itself, run autonomously for extended periods, and even build other agents. Full IDE in the browser with deploy built in.

Autonomous building can spiral into error loops on bigger projects. You'll want checkpoints and the habit of reviewing what it actually changed.

When you don't just want an answer — you want the trail of breadcrumbs that proves it. The research assistant that actually shows its homework.

State-of-the-art on deep-research benchmarks. Every answer comes with inline citations and source links. Pro mode cross-references answers using multiple models including Claude and GPT.

The best Deep Research stack is gated to higher tiers, so heavy research sessions quickly become a subscription decision.

Regular search gives you ten blue links; AI Mode tries to give you a guided tour with follow-up questions. Google Search wearing a tutor's hat.

Powered by Gemini 3, designed for tougher questions with an assistant-like conversational flow across searches. Integrated into the world's most-used search engine.

AI-overview answers can be confidently wrong and have been exploited by scammers. Still need to click sources for anything high-stakes.

Remember those soul-crushing hours spent wrestling with misaligned text boxes? This tool acts as your personal graphic design agency, instantly transforming rough notes into stunning, interactive visual presentations.

It eliminates visual formatting friction completely. Users effortlessly generate and iterate upon visually striking decks, webpages, and documents using purely natural language commands.

Operates within a rigid block-based framework. Pixel-obsessed designers will occasionally find themselves frustrated by the inability to manually tweak microscopic details.

A tireless study partner who instantly memorizes every dense textbook, rambling lecture transcript, and complex research paper you hand it. Builds a highly factual universe out of your own notes to query, summarize, and debate.

Operates strictly within the confines of uploaded documents, virtually eliminating hallucinations. Its Audio Overviews generate engaging, podcast-like deep dives from dense source material.

Entirely dependent on the quality and volume of documents provided. It acts as a brilliantly clear mirror reflecting only the knowledge you bring to the table.

A billion-dollar Hollywood studio compressed into a microchip. Capable of dreaming up entire cinematic sequences—with expressive actors, breathtaking camera movements, and sweeping musical scores—all from a simple sentence.

Possesses an unprecedented Dual-Branch architecture generating cinema-quality video and perfectly synchronized, lip-synced audio simultaneously, allowing digital characters to speak organically within scenes.

Providing the model enough multimodal reference materials to maintain absolute narrative control feels as meticulously complex and demanding as genuinely directing a live film crew.

Type a scene, get a short film — with sound. Like your imagination just learned how to render reality. The closest thing to "dream it, watch it" that consumers can actually use.

Flagship video + audio generation with improved realism, physics, and synced sound. Most advanced synced-audio video model on the market.

Access is constrained — eligibility, concurrency limits, and billing tiers. Plan-based caps on concurrent generations and watermark differences.

Not just generation but a toolkit for iterating scenes, styles, and shots like you're editing a real project. Video AI that wants to live beside professionals, not replace them.

Frontier video model with state-of-the-art motion quality, prompt adherence, and visual fidelity. Motion brush lets you control exactly which parts of the scene move.

Generation in fixed-duration chunks (5-10 sec) makes longer storytelling feel like assembling LEGO from short bricks. Expensive credit system.

You hum an idea in words, and Suno turns it into a full song — vocals, instruments, structure — the whole band, on demand.

Most advanced AI music model available. Full song creation from text prompts with vocals, instruments, and musical structure that actually sounds produced.

AI music is under heavy licensing pressure. Label deals shape what you can create and export — rules can change faster than the models improve.

Voice acting as a slider bar: tell it "sound relieved, then suspicious" and it performs — pauses, emphasis, and even the little human imperfections.

Most expressive voice model with dialogue mode and audio tags to control emotion and delivery across 70+ languages. Voice synthesis graduating into voice direction.

Labeled alpha — with expressive voice comes higher misuse risk, so expect stricter guardrails and occasional friction.

OpenAI went open-weight. GPT-OSS 20B is a reasoning model you can run on your own hardware — no API key, no subscription, no data leaving your machine. MIT-licensed and sized to fit a MacBook Pro or a single consumer GPU.

Near o4-mini reasoning quality on a model that fits in 16 GB of RAM. MIT license means zero restrictions. Run it via Ollama, LM Studio, or any GGUF-compatible tool. The best "first local model" for most people.

20B parameters means it's smart for its size, but won't match the full GPT-5.2 API on the hardest tasks. Speed depends entirely on your hardware — older machines will feel the gap.

Z.ai's open-weight frontier model that narrows the gap with Claude and GPT on reasoning, coding, and agentic tasks — without requiring a subscription. One of the lowest hallucination rates among open models, and it's MIT-licensed.

Frontier-class performance on reasoning and coding benchmarks. Excels at long-horizon agentic workflows with very low hallucination. Supports vLLM and SGLang for high-throughput local serving.

Larger model — needs 24 GB+ GPU or a well-specced Mac for comfortable local inference. Quantized versions exist but sacrifice some quality. Less community tooling than Llama-based models.