Top 5 Free Alternatives to Paid ChatGPT You've Never Heard Of
In this guide I want to explain to you what are the best alternatives to ChatGPT that I have been able to try in the last months or that I know about. I will show you all kinds of free options. Likewise, I am talking about tools with which you will be able to test all kinds of models from an interface very similar to the OpenAI tool.
- Best Chatbots to Say Goodbye to ChatGPT
Gemini, Claude, and Copilot: all of these services share something in common with ChatGPT. Basically, they all base their operations on LLM, i.e., Large Language Model. Moreover, apart from the fact that their engine is very similar, the interface with which they are presented is also similar. Even when it comes to data processing, most of them are on par with OpenAI, so we won’t include them in this article. Here are the best chatbots that you should forget about ChatGPT with.
- Perplexity.ai
It is a combination of a chatbot and an internet search engine. The goal of this platform is to unify the two concepts in one place. By default, the tool will prepare its answers taking into account what some relevant sites say. The problem is that it does not invite much visiting of sources, and in general, it does not delve into them very deeply.
This tool has different modes of interaction. Although online search is the default option, it is also possible to switch to conversation mode, as well as the mode where you only search for academic documents.
- HuggingChat
It’s a tool that lets you test a lot of models. So to speak, it’s like having a car whose engine you can change over and over again. When you first log in, the chatbot is activated using Meta’s LLaMA model in version 3.1. It’s capable of searching the internet, parsing documents, and generating images.
However, in the middle of the page, there is a selector where you can choose another model. Hugging Face is an AI platform where all the models that see the light are documented. Its chat function is an arena where you can try most of them out, try out different prompts, and take advantage of the tools that each model integrates. If you want to dive deeper into how the different AI models currently out there work, this is a tool you can’t miss.
- Mistral
Mistral is a chatbot born in Europe. This French-based company has several models that you can try for free on its website. For example, Large 2 has the most “reasoning” power, while Codestral specializes in coding. For its part, Pixtral is used to analyze images, and Nemo is used to provide answers at a reduced cost.
Mistral models are freely available to everyone. It can be said that it is open source, although this term in the field of artificial intelligence is not well defined. However, as is the case with Meta’s LLaMA, anyone will be able to implement it in their environment and modify it to their needs.
- Duck.ai
Duck.ai is a proposal from DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine that, by the way, I always highly recommend. At its core, it’s a chatbot that you can change the form of as many times as you want.
When you first sign in, Duck.ai asks you to choose which model you want to use. Currently, the chatbot works with four models: GPT-4o mini, Claude 3 Haiku, Llama 3.1 70B, and Mixtral 8x7B. The truth is, all of them are pretty good language models for most tasks. The best thing is that DuckDuckGo promises that chats in this app are not recorded, and the data is not used to train models. Therefore, it is a more private option.
- Venice.ai
The latest alternative to ChatGPT is Venice.ai. In this case, we are talking about a chatbot that focuses on privacy, does not record any of the chats, can be used without logging in, and is not subject to any censorship. Well, regarding the latter, some clarification is in order. Although the chatbot in its free version will explain how to make a homemade bomb, which is the typical test to determine the control of the model, the truth is that there are many things it will not tell you. It will also generate images of famous people, which is not possible with ChatGPT.
In its pro version, Venice.ai allows the user to modify the internal parameters of the model and receive responses without any restrictions. In general, in my opinion, the free version is sufficient for most tasks.