Who this article is for: Casual ChatGPT users

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Without a doubt, ChatGPT has become the breakthrough technology of the decade. As of February 2025, ChatGPT boasts a staggering 400 million weekly active users worldwide, and for good reason. People have been finding so many great uses for the tool.

Following its success, many companies are now actively working towards building AI tools that offer ChatGPT-like solutions to traditional ways we do things. We’re going to look at some of these tools in this article. Read on!

Ideogram for Pictures

You are probably familiar with the obviously AI-made images that dominated the internet in 2022. These images looked cartoonish, surreal, and many times depicted poorly-rendered mishmash of deformed hands and faces.

Cue to 2025 and you now have tools like Ideogram that do a great job at generating artificial images.

Prompt used: Angry cat sitting on a pile of gold in a goblin cave, realistic photograph” made with


Prompt used not disclosed by source

Pricing: Free! | Paid subscription starts at $8 USD per month.

Tip: To produce great images, ask your ChatGPT to improve your prompt first, optimize it for an AI image generator, and feed that prompt into Ideogram.

DeepSeek for Solving Problems

If you’re not using AI to solve small problems here and there, are you really using AI? Don’t get me wrong: you should still take charge of your own thinking. But if you want to make the process faster, why refuse the help?

The secret is 1) to give your AI assistant as much context as possible, and 2) to be very specific about what you want the output to be.

I found DeepSeek to be excellent for this use case. Since I don’t have a paid ChatGPT subscription, taking advantage of a smarter model like DeepSeek just makes sense.

So far, I have used DeepSeek to write article outlines, give me a step-by-step solution to an automation problem, and brainstorm article ideas for specific personas. DeepSeek can search the web and read images, PDFs, and other files so it’s just a very natural ChatGPT alternative to work with.

Pricing: Free!

Perplexity for ‘Googling’

As someone who asks Google a lot of questions all day, every day, discovering Perplexity was life-changing. I used to have to read through multiple snippets on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), sometimes across multiple pages! But now, I can ask a question (as weirdly as I want) and get the answer I need almost instantaneously.

Of course, I still have to double-check the sources. But for questions that just need a quick answer, it really saves you time. You can even give Perplexity a link and ask it to summarize the key points discussed on that page.

Google has caught on but I’m suspicious about this new AI Overview feature, especially after it told me that hackers can establish a Bluetooth connection to my device from another country.

Tip: You can use ChatGPT to do web research. Just make sure to click on the Search button when entering your prompt so ChatGPT can give you answers that are sourced from the web. Otherwise, it might give you incorrect or fabricated information due to a phenomenon called “hallucination.”

Pricing: Free | Paid: $20 USD per month

Claude for Wireframing

Visualizing ideas is Claude AI’s biggest differentiator. With Claude AI’s Artifacts feature, you can generate different types of visual output from the drawing of a cat to a full landing page that you can use as a wireframe for your own design.

You can even download the code or the file of the output in SVG so you can flexibly use it for other things.

Personally, Claude AI’s Artifacts feature has been able to help me create website wireframes, document design suggestions, mind maps, flowcharts to visualize processes, and different button suggestions for a UI prototype, among other things.

But that’s only scratching the surface of what people have been doing with Claude AI Artifacts. Here are some amazing examples.

Pricing: Free! | Paid subscription starts at $20 USD per month.

Ari for Productivity

Ari is an AI assistant within the goal-setting app called TaskSpur. I have tried ChatGPT tasks but I need a task manager that can integrate with my goals. I like how this app makes you file any goal into either Finance, Health, Career, or Personal, so you are encouraged to also track everything in your life within one platform.

This way, the AI assistant within the app actually has context to my goals and it has helped me strategize about how to get stuff moving when I’m stuck.

Other than that, it can do all the other things I usually use ChatGPT for, which is a win-win. The app has a decent AI image generator too!

Pricing: Free! | Paid subscription starts at $20 USD per month.

Final Word

If you found ChatGPT to be an amazing tool, you’ll be thrilled to find out that there are plenty of less-known but equally incredible others out there. The thing is, AI is still in its infancy and we’re only going to discover more amazing tools in the near future. So have fun exploring!