Top AI Tools for 2026
We've tested hundreds of tools so you don't have to. Here are our top picks for productivity, creativity, and development.
GetResponse is a comprehensive marketing platform that combines powerful email marketing, marketing automation, landing pages, webinars, and SMS capabilities—all enhanced by AI. Trusted by over 350,000 entrepreneurs, e-commerce stores, and global brands across 160+ countries, it delivers a 99% email deliverability rate while offering AI-powered features that write subject lines, optimize send times, and generate content. From startups to enterprises, GetResponse scales affordably while providing the sophisticated automation workflows that drive conversions.
Originality.ai is the industry-leading AI content detection and plagiarism checking platform trusted by content marketers, SEO professionals, publishers, and educators worldwide. With claimed accuracy rates of up to 99.5% for plagiarism detection and 97%+ for AI detection, it identifies content generated by GPT-5, GPT-4, Claude 4, Gemini 2.5, Grok 3, DeepSeek, and other major AI models. The platform supports 30+ languages and offers multiple detection models tailored for different use cases—from light AI editing tolerance to zero-tolerance academic policies. The free Chrome extension brings powerful detection directly to your browser, enabling seamless on-the-fly content verification.
Perplexity AI is a revolutionary AI-powered search engine that combines the conversational capabilities of large language models with real-time internet access. Unlike traditional search engines that return a list of links, Perplexity synthesizes information from multiple sources and delivers comprehensive, cited answers. Supporting access to premium models like GPT-4, Claude 3, and their own fine-tuned models, it has become the go-to research companion for professionals, academics, and curious minds seeking accurate, up-to-date information.
Grok AI is xAI's flagship large language model, designed by Elon Musk's AI company to provide real-time information with a distinctive, unfiltered personality. Deeply integrated with the X (formerly Twitter) platform, Grok leverages live social media data streams to answer questions about breaking news and current events that other AI models miss due to training cutoffs. With the release of Grok 3, it has become one of the most capable reasoning models available, competing directly with GPT-4 and Claude.
Sudowrite is the premier AI writing assistant designed specifically for fiction authors, novelists, and screenwriters. Unlike generic AI tools, Sudowrite understands the craft of storytelling—from character development to plot structure, pacing to prose style. Its Story Engine can generate entire chapters while maintaining narrative consistency, and its specialized tools help writers overcome blocks, expand scenes with sensory detail, and explore alternative plot directions without losing their unique voice.
Pictory is a powerful AI-driven video creation platform that transforms text content into professional videos in minutes. Whether you're repurposing blog posts, converting scripts to video, or extracting highlights from long recordings, Pictory's machine learning algorithms handle the heavy lifting—automatically selecting relevant stock footage from Getty Images and Storyblocks, generating accurate captions, and adding background music. With 51 hyper-realistic ElevenLabs AI voices and support for videos up to 180 minutes, it's the go-to solution for content marketers scaling video production.
Runway ML is the industry-defining platform for AI-powered video creation and editing. Home to groundbreaking models like Gen-4.5, Gen-4, and Act-Two, Runway enables creators to generate cinematic-quality video from text prompts or images. Beyond generation, its comprehensive Magic AI toolkit handles everything from rotoscoping to background removal, green screen, and inpainting—tasks that traditionally required hours of manual work. Used by Hollywood studios and independent creators alike, Runway represents the cutting edge of creative AI.
Cleanup Pictures is a remarkably powerful AI-powered image editing tool that makes professional-grade object removal accessible to everyone. Using advanced inpainting technology, it intelligently removes unwanted people, objects, text, watermarks, and blemishes while seamlessly reconstructing the background. Part of the ClipDrop suite by Stability AI, it works instantly in any browser without downloads, making it the fastest path from cluttered photo to clean result for real estate agents, e-commerce sellers, photographers, and casual users alike.
Jasper AI is the enterprise-grade AI marketing platform trusted by over 100,000 businesses worldwide. Purpose-built for marketing teams, it goes beyond generic AI by deeply understanding brand voice, style guidelines, and marketing frameworks. With Jasper IQ, teams can train the AI on their specific brand knowledge, ensuring every piece of content—from social posts to long-form articles—maintains perfect consistency. The platform includes AI Agents that automate complex campaign workflows, a no-code App Builder for custom applications, and enterprise security features that satisfy even the most demanding compliance requirements.
Notion AI transforms the popular workspace platform into an intelligent productivity powerhouse. Unlike standalone AI tools that require context switching, Notion AI lives directly within your documents, databases, and projects—understanding your workspace context to provide relevant assistance. From summarizing meeting notes to drafting content, extracting action items to answering questions about your entire knowledge base, it's the AI assistant that actually knows your work. The new Agent feature can even complete complex multi-step tasks autonomously.
Midjourney reigns supreme in AI image generation, consistently producing the most aesthetically stunning and artistically coherent visuals of any generator. Its understanding of composition, lighting, texture, and style is unmatched—whether you're creating photorealistic scenes, fantasy illustrations, or abstract art. With the Mega plan offering 60 hours of fast GPU time and the ability to run up to 12 simultaneous jobs, professional creatives can maintain high-volume production without compromising on the quality that made Midjourney famous.
Claude by Anthropic has emerged as the thinking person's AI assistant, consistently outperforming competitors in coding, complex reasoning, and nuanced writing. Claude's responses feel genuinely thoughtful rather than formulaic, with an ability to handle ambiguity and follow complex multi-step instructions that sets it apart. The Max plan unlocks extended thinking for the most challenging problems, cross-conversation memory for personalized assistance, Google Workspace integration, and Claude Code for programming directly from the terminal.
ChatGPT needs no introduction—it's the AI assistant that launched a revolution and remains the most versatile option for everyday use. With GPT-4o handling text, vision, and voice seamlessly, DALL-E 3 for image generation, Advanced Data Analysis for spreadsheets, and web browsing for real-time information, it's a complete AI toolkit in one interface. The ChatGPT Pro tier at $200/month unlocks unlimited access to o1, OpenAI's most capable reasoning model, for users who push AI to its limits. The Custom GPT store adds specialized capabilities for virtually any use case.
GitHub Copilot has become essential infrastructure for modern software development, with millions of developers relying on its AI-powered code completion daily. Beyond simple autocomplete, Copilot now offers Chat for natural language debugging, Agent capabilities for complex multi-step coding tasks, and access to multiple AI models including Claude Opus 4.1 on Enterprise. Deep integration with VS Code, JetBrains, and other major IDEs makes it feel like a natural extension of the development environment rather than a bolted-on tool.