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By TJ SoftUpdated:

Alternatives to ChatGPT. What to do when ChatGPT isn’t working?

Alternatywy dla Chat GPT. Co robić gdy Chat GPT nie działa?

With the rapid rise in popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, many solutions have emerged on the market attempting to match or surpass its capabilities. ChatGPT is used for a wide range of tasks, from text generation and coding to data analysis; however, users are beginning to expect additional features, faster performance, better privacy, or lower prices.

In response to these needs, numerous alternatives have emerged, offering innovative approaches to interacting with AI, models specialized for specific tasks, and locally deployed options.

It’s worth knowing them, even if ChatGPT is enough for you—it’s good to be prepared for various outages, an unjustified ban, and other unforeseen situations.

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This article presents a comprehensive analysis of the most important alternatives to ChatGPT available in 2025. We discuss both commercial solutions from leading providers and open-source models, evaluating them in terms of functionality, performance, affordability, and integration capabilities with users’ ecosystems. The tools covered include Claude by Anthropic, Google Gemini, Grok-3 by xAI, Perplexity AI, Lindy, OmniMind, DeepSeek, as well as open-source solutions such as LLaMA, GPT-J, and GPT-Neo. Each will be characterized in detail, taking into account its key features, advantages, and limitations, enabling readers to choose the alternative best suited to their needs.

Table of Contents

Claude AI (Anthropic)

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This tool stands out with its thoughtful configuration and aesthetically pleasing notebook-inspired application, making it simply enjoyable to work with. A major advantage is the ability to run code (e.g., websites or applications) directly in the chat window, without needing to copy it elsewhere.

Although Claude does not always dominate the benchmarks, in spring 2024 the 3.5 Sonnet model outperformed ChatGPT-4o in coding (92% vs. 90.2%), mathematics (96.4% vs. 90.5%), and reasoning (87.1% vs. 83.4%) tests. It also has a larger context window, which makes working with long documents easier.

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One drawback of Claude is that it cannot generate images (although Claude can interpret images). It also lacked access to the Internet for a long time.

In practice, Claude performs better than the tests suggest—especially in logical tasks and planning. Although I use the paid version of ChatGPT, in some situations I prefer to turn to the free version of Claude.

Google AI – Gemini, NotebookLM, Google AI Studio

Gemini is a fast AI chat integrated with YouTube, Maps, and Drive. It works great for research (the Deep Search feature), generates podcasts, and exports text to Google Docs. Its main advantages are speed and integration with Google Drive. The Canvas feature in Gemini is truly convenient because it allows us to work within a simplified Google document.

Notebook LM is an assistant for working with knowledge: it analyzes documents, PDFs, and YouTube videos, and creates summaries, mind maps, or FAQs. You can decide which sources the AI should use.

This is a free but more advanced project feature (available in the paid version of ChatGPT).

Google AI Studio is a free environment for testing and building simple AI applications. It enables audio processing, video creation, and token cost control — even without coding skills.

I describe the entire Google artificial intelligence ecosystem in greater detail here.

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Perplexity

Perplexity AI is an advanced AI-powered search engine that combines traditional search functions with the capabilities of chatbots in a freemium model. It offers the Deep Research feature for creating detailed analyses based on multiple sources, as well as access to various language models: GPT-4.1, Claude 4.0, Gemini 2.5 Pro, DeepSeek, and its own Sonar and R1 1776 models. In the near future, the Bielik AI model is also expected to be added there.

Hosting the DeepSeek model on Western servers eliminates the risk of sending data to China. Perplexity Lab (the premium version at $20 per month) enables the creation of reports with infographics and illustrations, as well as multi-step reasoning supporting multiple threads.

In the tests of the Deep Research tools I conducted, Perplexity stood out for its good balance between time and results. It was also able to create long texts. It performed best at drawing conclusions based on research. Another undeniable advantage is its “search engine-like” nature – with each query, we immediately get access to the graphics found (most often infographics), as well as a convenient preview of some linked pages, etc.

Grok (xAI/Twitter)

Grok AI is an advanced chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI. The latest version, Grok 3 (February 2025), topped AI benchmarks at the time of its release. Its main advantages are unique access to Twitter (a vast database of current events) and significantly fewer censorship restrictions—virtually none for text and less restrictive for images. If ChatGPT refuses to generate something for me, I turn to Grok.

Key features include Think mode (reasoning process tracking) and Big Brain (complex tasks requiring greater computing power), as well as DeepSearch for searching the internet and the X platform in real time. The model stands out for its casual, sarcastic response tone, which sets it apart from other chatbots. Available to X Premium+ users and through mobile and web applications.

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Bielik AI

Bielik is a Polish open-source project developed by the SpeakLeash Foundation in cooperation with Cyfronet AGH. The model is based on the Mistral architecture, with 11 billion parameters, and uses modern learning techniques such as Weighted Instruction Cross-Entropy Loss and Adaptive Learning Rate.

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The greatest value lies in complete openness—source code, training data, tools, and documentation are publicly available. It can be installed locally, modified, trained on your own data, and used commercially without licensing restrictions. It supports mixed languages and is robust against linguistic errors.

The community has over 3,000 members, and its partners include NVIDIA, PZU, Credit Agricole, Google, and the Polish Development Fund. The model was presented at the prestigious GOSIM AI conference in Paris (among the top 10 open-source projects in the world) and integrated with the Perplexity platform. Available on Hugging Face for immediate testing.

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PLLuM

PLLuM is the first Polish large language model (LLM) developed from the ground up with the Polish language in mind by a consortium of six research institutions led by Wrocław University of Science and Technology (NASK, IPI PAN, OPI-PIB, University of Łódź, IS PAN). The model was trained on a corpus of 150 billion tokens from a variety of Polish sources—including academic, literary, official, and educational materials.

It uses modern Mixture of Experts (MoE) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques, offering a family of models ranging from smaller ones to a 70-billion-parameter version. The project budget amounts to PLN 14 million and is funded by state funds.

PLLuM is completely open – it can be downloaded, run locally, further trained, and used commercially without licensing restrictions. Available on Hugging Face with a public chat interface. It is already being used in practice – Comarch has implemented it in the ChatERP system, selecting it from among various models as the most accurate for Polish applications. It represents a step toward Poland’s digital linguistic sovereignty.

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Deep Seek

DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company that developed a family of language models of the same name. Main features of the DeepSeek models:

Architecture: Based on the transformer architecture, similar to GPT or Claude, but with its own modifications and optimizations.

Variants: The company released several versions, including DeepSeek Coder (specialized in programming) and DeepSeek Chat (for general conversations).

Performance: The models demonstrate competitive results in benchmarks, particularly in tasks involving code and mathematics.

Availability: Offered as an API and, in some cases, as open-source models.

Characteristics: Known for a good quality-to-computational-cost ratio, making them attractive for commercial applications.

DeepSeek is one of the major players in the Chinese AI market, competing with global models such as GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini.