AI chatbots including ChatGPT, Bing, Bard and Claude are in a constant arms race for features, performance and price, and it's hard to keep up with new developments. So I'm happy to bring you my latest AI Chatbot comparison table, updated for November 2023.
ChatGPT
The free version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT is still the most popular AI chatbot. It's entirely free, and the recently added "Custom Instructions" feature allows you define a "SystemPrompt" that will be added to each of your prompts in order to personalize and customize the responses. However, it has two major drawbacks: It is based on an outdated Large Language Model, GPT 3.5, which provides responses that are way below the current industry standard, and it might not be accessible at peak usage times, since it gets lower priority on OpenAI's servers. In addition, the free version of ChatGPT lacks advanced features such as Internet connectivity, plugins, and image support. In general, I wouldn't recommend the free version of ChatGPT even for AI beginners - you are much better off with Bing Chat which is based on the more advanced GPT-4 Large Language Model, has many advanced features, and is also free.
ChatGPT Plus
My personal choice is ChatGPT Plus, as it is based on GPT-4, and supports many advanced features including plugins, image analysis and creation, data analysis and Internet connectivity. I've written a separate blog post detailing all of these advanced features, and in my opinion the Advanced Data Analysis mode and DALL-E 3 mode alone are each worth the $20 a month price tag. With Advanced Data Analysis, you can upload an Excel file for example, and ask ChatGPT to extract interesting insights, graphs and charts based on the data - it magically cleans the data, "understands" the meaning of each column, and writes Python code to process the file. And using the DALL-E 3 mode, you can write short descriptions which ChatGPT develops into elaborate prompts, and then easily refine your images through a natural conversation. With a paid subscription to ChatGPT you'll also be the first to enjoy any new modes and features that will be introduced in the future.
Bing Chat
Microsoft’s Bing Chat is a great free choice: It is based on GPT-4, connected to the internet, and supports both image analysis and image creation (with DALL-E 3). Until recently, Bing Chat only worked in Microsoft's own Edge browser, but now it works in other browsers as well, most notably Google Chrome. If you are using Bing Chat on Edge, you can enjoy the Edge Sidebar feature - when you load a web page of PDF document in the browser, Bing shows a chat sidebar where the chat functionality can answer questions or provide analysis about the currently open document or page. Personally I’m not very fond of the user interface for Bing Chat. For example, there isn't even a URL for the service - you need to go to www.bing.com/new, and then press the "New Chat" button. But I guess you can’t beat the features, quality and price...
Bard
Google’s Bard, based on their PaLM 2 Large Language Model, is Internet-connected and supports image input and analysis. It also supports voice input and output, so you can ask questions and get answers without typing. Google recently added "Extensions", which connect Bard to other Google services, such as Maps, Flights and YouTube, and to Google Workspace. Using Extensions you can ask Bard questions about your personal Docs, Sheets and Slides files, without uploading or copying and pasting them. Bard also has an option of "fact checking" its results with Google Search - you will find this very useful, since in my experience it tends to "hallucinate" wildly (and confidently!).
Claude
Claude is the latest AI Chatbot to support a free web interface, and it is based on Anthropic’s Claude 2 Large Language Model. It doesn’t support Internet connectivity, plugins, voice or image, and the limitation on message capacity is unknown, but its killer feature is the 100K token (75K word) context window. This means that you can upload documents spanning hundreds of pages and then extract insights and answer questions about them. Until recently Claude had limited availability - US and UK only, but two weeks ago it opened up to 95 countries, so now almost anyone in the world can access it. This is important because in Claude has better support than the GPT-4 chatbots for several non-English languages, such as Hebrew.
Other AI Chatbots
There are many other AI chatbots not included in this table because they are not general-purpose, don't have a web interface or are just not as popular as the major ones. For example, Character.ai is great if you want to talk to specific "personas" or build your own, Pi.ai let's you have deep conversations but provides more questions than answers, and there are others such as perplexity.ai, you.com and more. But given the amount of resources the major companies invested in their AI chatbots, it is quite hard for the smaller ones to compete, so I would recommend sticking with the big ones unless you have a specific need that is answered by one of the smaller ones.
What has been your experience with AI chatbots? Let me know in the comments 👇
And if you found this guide helpful, feel free to share it with your network and spread the AI love!