Cyber Watch Cyber Watch, Tech News, TechieBrief.com October 23, 2025 0 Comments

The best AI chatbots of 2025: I tested ChatGPT, Copilot, and others to find the top tools now

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ZDNET's key takeaways

Free AI chatbots deliver more power than ever before.
ChatGPT, Copilot, and Grok top our performance rankings.
Image generation and storytelling now rival premium AIs.

The introduction of the first successful AI chatbot in 2022 was a tech quake on the scale of the introduction of the internet itself and the smartphone. The reality of its existence changed reality itself.

You know the story since then. AI chatbots have become hugely popular, often saving folks a lot of work, while also putting jobs at risk. They have transformed education, writing, coding, and more.

What is the best AI chatbot right now?

ChatGPT is the OG chatbot. This is the AI that shook up the world. The company has been innovating ever since, and its latest free offering shows that. Also, because ChatGPT is the market leader, there are many resources available for it, including tons of articles, many books, courses, free training videos, and more.

Also: I'm an AI tools expert, and these are the 4 I pay for now (plus 2 I'm eyeing)

With a top overall score, ChatGPT is our overall winner. Let's first explain our hands-on approach, tell you about a few surprises, and then we'll explain why ChatGPT won the top spot. We're also looking at Copilot, Grok, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, DeepSeek, and Meta AI.

Hands-on with the best free chatbots

Here at ZDNET, we publish plenty of articles on the impact of AI. This one is meant to be more practical. It's our hands-on, chatbot-by-chatbot comparison to help you decide which to use. We put each chatbot's free tier to the test (a total of 112 individual tests), proving you don't need to spend anything to gain access to billions of dollars of compute capability.

Rather than taking the easy way out and spewing a bunch of specs and model names at you, we approached the ranking process by running each chatbot through a series of real-world tests.

We're also avoiding AI model mentions (like GPT-5 vs. GPT-5-mini) here because the AI companies treat their free AI tiers like gumbo. Gumbo is often a restaurant offering made of whatever meat, poultry, or seafood leftovers are available. While almost always tasty, there's never a guarantee that the exact same gumbo experience will be repeated from day to day. Likewise, AI companies tend to provide whatever lower-resource-intensive models are available at the time to their free-tier users, and those models may change at any time.

Also: 10 ChatGPT prompt tricks I use - to get the best results, faster

Our tests consist of ten text-based questions encompassing summarization and web access, academic concept explanation, math and analysis, cultural discussion, literary analysis, travel itinerary, emotional support, translation and cultural relevance, a coding test, and a long-form story test. On one test, we ask the AIs to explain the academic concept to a five-year-old. There are also four image tests that include generating a flying aircraft carrier, a giant robot, a young baseball player in a medieval court, and an homage to the movie Back to the Future.

The details of the tests and the exact questions we asked are provided at the end of this article. That way, you can try our tests with any or all of the chatbots in your own browser window. If you do, let us know what you think of the results in the comments below.

Each chatbot is ranked on a 100-point scale for text-related prompts and a 20-point scale for image-related prompts. The overall scores are the sum of both score categories for a total of 120 points.

Big surprises

Doing the hands-on tests netted a number of fairly big surprises. We were particularly surprised by just how much value is being provided by the AI vendors for free.

We experienced almost no throttling through our series of 10 back-to-back prompts.
The second surprise was how much the AIs let you do without requiring you to create an account or log in.
The third big surprise was just the overall quality of the responses.

While some responses from bottom-of-the-list AIs seemed somewhat phoned in, the overall quality across the board has improved drastically since the last time we took a comprehensive look at free AI chatbot use.

We used each chatbot for a few hours straight, with little or no throttling. But if you want to use them constantly, all day every day, it's likely you'll hit some resource usage limits enforced by the AI vendors.

Most of the AIs have premium plans in addition to the free plans. These plans offer deeper thinking, more powerful AIs capable of solving bigger and more complex problems, with added features for things like more autonomous capabilities and in-depth programming support. Where appropriate, we've mentioned those plans and their prices.

And with that, let's dive into our overall winner, ChatGPT.