I was asked this question recently. As an LLM enthusiast, I feel like I try most of the models out there (at least try to). So here are my picks;
ChatGPT free: This is more than enough to replace my google queries and I feel like the ChatGPT apps on my phone and Mac compliment each other quite well. But document analysis is pretty limited so I've been using other products. One thing ChatGPT has over others is its ability to generate documents in word, pdf or ICS formats which makes is very useful for specific tasks like creating calender entries, preparing documents, etc.
DeepSeek: This has been my go to since last couple of weeks and I'm amazed at how good it is. Esp with document analysis on the free version. Also the prive via API is very cheap compared to ChatGPT and this can be self hosted (have yet to try it locally). Here's a message I sent to one of my groups recently after seeing this post from a Reddit community.
Perplexity: Though I'm not a heavy user, perplexity has a good reputation and I use it sometimes.
Gemini: New features like live are cool but the tool still falls short of expectations and I hate how bad it is in google search results as well. There is still heaps of work to be done before google wins me back.
Claude: It has gone down the shitter slot. I can't even log in properly on my phone anymore. It used to be okay and the agentic AI feature sounds like a game changer but it's in beta and looks complicated for the time being.
Microsoft Copilot: I never use it as it is severely limited and is mostly wrong. But if my tenancy allows me to, I would use it for data security reason.
To summarise, I use ChatGPT for normal chat stuff, DeepSeek for document analysis and the rest. This helps me spend nothing and get the best out of all AI tools.
