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The Best AI Chat Tools and More Importantly, When to Use Them

January 09, 2025

There are so many AI tools out there, it's really tough to figure out what to use and which might be more useful than the others for particular scenarios and use cases. Hopefully, this post will help you out. It's built from research I did but also my own use of the tools.

Firstly, here is an answer from Claude, with information valid from April 2024 although relatively recent, 8 to 9 months is a long time in AI!

Top AI Chatbots & Language Models

1. ChatGPT (OpenAI)

Key Strengths:

  • Exceptional at creative writing and brainstorming

  • Strong coding capabilities

  • Extensive knowledge base

  • Intuitive conversation flow

  • GPT-4 excels at complex reasoning tasks with later current versions having real-time information from the internet

Best Use Cases:

  • Content creation and editing

  • Programming assistance

  • Academic research and writing

  • Business analysis and strategy

  • General knowledge Q&A

I personally use ChatGPT the most myself. It became much better in 2024 when live search from the internet and importantly key features like custom GPT creation and project creation. I use the paid version of ChatGPT though could soon research tools that combine multiple AI tools under one subscription.

2. Claude (Anthropic)

 Key Strengths:

  • Superior analytical capabilities

  • Excellent at technical writing and documentation

  • Strong ethical framework

  • Longer context window

  • Artifacts feature

  • Exceptional at complex task decomposition

Best Use Cases:

  • Long-form document analysis

  • Technical documentation

  • Research synthesis

  • Data analysis

  • Policy and compliance work

I use Claude in parallel with ChatGPT but only the free version so far. I like the ability to publish answers and find the responses a good alternative and 'check' against ChatGPT. The information cut-off of April 2024 though is a large limitation. What I like about Claude is the 'artifacts' feature, with more detail here. When I tested briefly to ask ChatGPT to create a simple web application vs Claude, I liked the way Claude did it immediately in a separate window rather than having to remember to use 'canvas' in ChatGPT.

3. Perplexity

Key Strengths:

  • Real-time Internet search integration

  • Citation of sources

  • Clean, focused interface

  • Fact-checking capabilities

Best Use Cases:

  • Academic research

  • Fact-checking

  • Current events analysis

  • Topic exploration with citations

Perplexity is in the top 3 tools I use and by far, its greatest ability is to research, collate, synthesize, and summarise the latest information from the web. I am trialing setting it as the default search engine within my browsers! That should show how useful it is.

4. Gemini (Google)

Key Strengths:

  • Strong integration with Google's ecosystem

  • Real-time information access

  • Multimodal capabilities

  • Competitive performance with GPT-4

Best Use Cases:

  • Real-time information processing

  • Image and text analysis

  • Research requiring current data

  • Educational applications

I don't have much great to say about Gemini yet. So far, in many responses recently, the chat simply 'stopped' and did not give full answers, including when trying to do research for this post.

Specialized Comparison: Major Chat Tools

Scenario-Based Tool Selection

For Academic Research:

  1. Start with Perplexity for initial research and citations

  2. Use Claude for in-depth analysis and technical writing

  3. Supplement with ChatGPT for brainstorming and structuring

For Business Analysis:

  1. Use Claude for complex data analysis and report writing

  2. Leverage ChatGPT for creative problem-solving

  3. Utilize Gemini for real-time market data

For Creative Projects:

  1. Begin with ChatGPT for ideation and creative writing

  2. Use DALL-E 3 or Midjourney for visual elements

  3. Implement Claude for technical documentation

Additional resources with comprehensive details are at Zapier and Andreessen Horowitz.

I hope that helps give a guideline and ultimately as you can see above, you may end up using a combination of at least 2 or 3 of the tools. We'll see in future if one becomes the 'swiss army knife' solution for all or if there is some easier way to combine the strengths of each tool than using and comparing each of them manually. As a final hint, Poe might be worth checking out to get access to multiple tools for one subscription price.