FREE AND PAID-FOR COPILOT ALTERNATIVES

Ignore the seemingly endless number of companies creating AI models based on GPT— this handful of genuine Copilot alternatives are actually worth considering

CHATGPT, CHATGPT PLUS, CHATGPT TEAM PRICE Chat G PT, free; Chat G PT Plus ,$20 per month; ChatGPTTeam, $30permonthfromchat.openai.com

Plain old ChatGPT is starting to look both old and plain, relying as it does on GPT-3.5 and—unless you download the iOS and Android apps—the stark web interface. Nor does it offer any way to create images. Where it wins compared to the free version of Copilot is that you get to keep your history, while there’s no limit on queries or interactions.

Things get more interesting with ChatGPT Plus. The interface is the same, but you can create

GPTs and connect with third-party services. That means it can do things such as plan holidays and make restaurant bookings. It’s also brilliant at analyzing data, making sense of complicated spreadsheets, for example. Like Copilot Pro, it gives you access to DALL-E for image creation—but we still prefer Midjourney.

There’s one final point in ChatGPT Plus’ favor. At $20 per month, it’s cheaper than Copilot Pro. OpenAI is hoping to lure more businesses to its service, too, with a new service called ChatGPT Team. This provides an admin console, the ability to share GPTs within your workspace, and higher caps on GPT-4 and DALL-E.

MICROSOFT COPILOT

PRICEFreefromcopilot.microsoft.com

There is a free version of Microsoft Copilot, and it’s available to everyone via apps on phones and its website, copilot.microsoft.com. There are several key differences to Copilot Pro. First, it doesn’t integrate with Office apps, which is, after all, arguably the biggest draw of the service. Second, you can’t create Copilot GPTs. Third, during peak times, you’ll likely be stuck with GPT 3.5 rather than the more powerful and up-to-date GPT 4. Fourth, image generation is restricted to 15 ‘boosts’ per day, and you may need to wait longer (depending on demand).

GOOGLE GEMINI, GEMINI ADVANCED PRICEGemini,free; GeminiAdvancedviaGoogleOne, $20permonthfromgemini.google.com

The basic version of Gemini is free, as was its predecessor, Bard, until Google replaced it in February. This free version of Google’s LLM isn’t as powerful as GPT-4, but its not-so secret weapon is integration with Google services such as Calendar, Gmail, and Drive, So you can tell it to hunt through all your documents looking for mention of a certain keyword, and then produce a summary.

However, Google hopes that you’ll upgrade to Gemini Advanced, which is now part of its One AI

Premium offering. This includes what Google describes as its “most capable model, Ultra 1.0”, and it certainly offers more nuanced, creative answers than plain Gemini. It’s early days, though, with no capability to create images and no integration with Docs or Gmail. Fortunately,

Google sweetens the deal with 2TB of storage and a VPN.

WRITESONIC PRICEFreeto$20permonthfrom writesonic.com

Occasional writers might find that this handy tool does what they need: kick things off. The Article Writer is a great way to turn an idea into— as the name suggests—an article, even if it’s likely to be a tad bland. Or you can use Writesonic to generate a structure, to rewrite your copy or simply use it to generate ideas. The free version is restricted to GPT-3.5 and includes 10,000 words, while the Small Team version ($19 per month) gives you a choice of GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 (you get 200K words per month with the former, 33.3K with the latter) and extra tools such as ‘brand voices’. If you need an unlimited number of words, but don’t mind GPT-3.5, you have the option of paying $20 per month for the Freelancer option.