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Once the fever dream of tech gurus and Silicon Valley giants, artificial intelligence tools are now practical, accessible, and — in many cases — free to help you with everything from brainstorming ideas, menu planning, prepping for tests, writing computer code, organizing your day, or making music. Accessible on your laptop or phone, free AI tools let you explore, experiment, and benefit from their capabilities without spending a dime or committing to a contract.
Want a risk-free playground to test whether AI is a good fit for you? Here are some of my favorite free AI tools to try.
AI chatbots for conversation, research, or Q&A
ChatGPT
OpenAI’s free AI tool stands out for its multimodal creation, DALL-E integration, and unmatched conversational abilities. Respectively, that means you can use it to create text, music, or art, or just chat with it like a friend. ChatGPT relies on different models, each of which is better suited to certain tasks. The free plan lets you explore the GPT‑4.1 mini model with additional limited access to GPT‑4o, OpenAI o4-mini, and the deep research models. You can use it to brainstorm ideas, debug code, translate text, or generate images. It is versatile and easy to use — just tell it what you want to accomplish, either by typing in a prompt or using the voice mode feature.
Claude AI
Claude AI is a conversational AI chatbot that Anthropic designed and trained specifically to have natural, text-based interactions with users. If you are a beginner programmer — or just someone who wants to learn coding and app development without the financial commitment or who needs a piece of coding but doesn’t know where to get started — Claude AI’s got your back. This free tool is also a good option if you’re a visual learner, as it excels in generating charts and diagrams to help you understand complex data better. Plus, Claude offers options for people with dyslexia to choose a font that can help them better read and understand the responses.
If you play around with Claude and think it’s the best tool for you, consider subscribing to a paid plan. Anthropic recently released Claude 4 Opus, offering better features for coding, agentic search, and creative writing.
Perplexity
Need fast, sourced answers for research or other quick info? Try Perplexity AI. I often prefer Perplexity AI to ChatGPT when researching articles on topics for which new information is coming out quickly. You can access comprehensive information about any topic, complete with links to recent online sources, even with Perplexity’s free plan. It also offers unlimited free searches and access to a fast, free AI model, making it a great tool for brainstorming, whether you’re doing research on your academic paper or simply figuring out what is the best way to create a balanced daily meal plan.
AI design tools for presentations, signs, logos, or more
Canva
Want to create and animate social media graphics, presentations, and marketing materials? Canva lets you do it with a simple drag-and-drop tool, making it one of the best free AI tools for design. The platform’s free tier includes thousands of templates and design elements. Canva’s AI-powered Magic Design helps you generate custom, on-brand, and attractive designs in seconds — just describe what you’d like to see and Magic Design crafts professional output for you.
You can also upload your media to customize it further, and use Magic Write to generate compelling texts to go with your design for a social media post, product presentation, video script, and more. Your imagination is the limit.
Adobe Express
Adobe Express offers a powerful, no-cost design solution for creating professional marketing content. This free AI tool provides everything you need to produce eye-catching visuals for various materials, including landing pages, social media, and animated promotional materials, making it valuable for marketing teams or solopreneurs. Whether you’re designing social media posts, video content, carousel graphics, flyers, or presentations, the free version gives you thousands of high-quality templates to customize.
Microsoft Designer
If you have a Microsoft account, Microsoft Designer is included. This AI-powered graphic design tool helps you create, design, and edit visuals quickly and effortlessly, from social media posts and invitations to collages or photo edits. Designer uses generative AI to transform simple text descriptions into unique, eye-catching images and designs.
AI tools for writing and editing
Grammarly
Grammarly isn’t just a spell checker — it’s your personal writing coach and AI content generator. This free AI tool is an excellent AI writing assistant that combines real-time editing with generation capabilities. Grammarly’s free AI writer lets you create engaging content for social media, blog posts, documents, and more with just a few clicks. Simply write your prompt or instructions and watch Grammarly generate content types from detailed outlines and professional emails to creative stories and academic papers. Whether you’re crafting a resume, writing fan fiction, composing a thank-you note, or editing academic content, Grammarly is a reliable free AI tool you can use.
CopyAI
Looking for a free AI tool to assist you in creating sales and marketing content? Copy.ai lets you generate content like marketing emails, Instagram captions, article outlines, sales copies, and product descriptions. This easy-to-use tool will help you overcome writer’s block or brainstorm with teammates using Copy.ai’s AI generator. Simply choose from its extensive templates designed for different content types that you can tailor to your specific audience and industry.
Writesonic
If you’re worried about AI text sounding like it was written by a very polite robot, Writesonic will put your mind at ease. This free tool will help you generate more human-like text using a free AI humanizer tool to transform awkward AI-generated text from ChatGPT, GPT Zero, Gemini, Claude, or any other AI writer into warm, engaging content that sounds like a real human wrote it. Aside from making your AI content sound less robotic, its real-time web search feature also ensures that your content is accurate and up-to-date, while its built-in SEO features optimize your generated content.
Free AI tools for productivity
Notion AI
If you love keeping notes and projects organized, Notion AI is a game-changer. This free AI productivity tool uses an intuitive, colorful, and customizable platform to help you keep track of your daily tasks and progress toward goals. You can also collect any resources you want, including custom databases, notes, wikis, project boards, and more in one easy-to-use platform. This AI productivity tool lets you manage your goals, whether you’re planning to save up for a big investment or simply tracking the books you’ve read this year. Notion AI is a versatile tool for both personal and professional use.
Fireflies.ai
Fireflies.ai serves as an intelligent meeting companion that automates the process of recording, transcribing, summarizing, and analyzing virtual conversations. The platform captures both video and audio content while simultaneously generating comprehensive meeting notes that can be easily reviewed, shared, or referenced later. Fireflies.ai automatically creates detailed notes, produces concise summaries, and identifies potential action items, saving you time in post-meeting tasks. This AI productivity tool is great for work, but you can also use it when planning your trip with friends, hosting virtual book club meetings, or playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons with friends.
ClickUp
ClickUp functions as an all-in-one project management and productivity platform to help you easily collaborate with others. Whether you’re working solo or with a team, this free AI tool helps you keep everything organized, from tasks, docs, and goals to communication, in an accessible platform. It’s a favorite among teams looking for a free tool to create unlimited tasks and invite as many team members as there are, as there’s no cap on users. You can also collaborate in real-time on documents, jot down meeting notes, or brainstorm ideas visually with whiteboards.
Free AI tools to make music, video, or images
Stable Diffusion
Stable Diffusion is one of the best free AI generators to explore if you’re new to using AI for producing images, videos, or any multimedia content. Developed by Stability AI, it stands out for its image quality as it produces photorealistic and sharp images. Use Stable Diffusion to create detailed scenes and realistic representations and to tweak your output until you produce the exact image you want. You can also blend different art styles and use them for ads, presentations, websites, or maybe some cool posters for your room.
Runway
If you’re an aspiring filmmaker or just love to make videos and animations, you should give Runway AI a try. The free basic tier allows you to explore its AI and content creation features. You can access the platform for free and receive 125 one-time credits upon signing up, which is equivalent to 25 image generations. Turn those 3 AM creative thoughts into videos or animation with Runway’s text-to-video feature, editing tools, and special effects. It’s like having a film crew, VFX team, and storyboard artist all rolled into one, right at your fingertips.
DALL-E
If you prefer a simple, fast, and highly accessible tool, look no further than DALL-E — which is integrated with ChatGPT — especially if you want creative, artistic images with minimal setup. It’s perfect for casual users and marketers needing quick visuals without wanting to commit to a paid subscription. Just type the output you want to create on the ChatGPT platform and it creates graphics for your social media post, presentations, or maybe just a photo inspo for your Pinterest board or mood board.
Get more done with free AI
Starting with free AI tools is the practical way to explore AI and incorporate it into your daily tasks without financial risk. These tools can act as your assistant to help you organize and prioritize important tasks or as your creative partner to help you brainstorm ideas when you’re in writer’s block or run out of art inspirations. Knowing the right AI tool to use will empower you to boost productivity, enhance creativity, and automate tedious tasks, giving you more time to focus on what matters.
Interested in creating content using free AI tools? Read our list of the best free AI art generators to see which tool you can try first.