AI tools guide

AI Tools Directory

Practical guides to the best AI tools: ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Ollama, CrewAI, NotebookLM, and more. Learn what each tool is best for and how to use it.

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Showing 156 tools

Agent Plugins logo
Developer ToolsAI Agents

Agent Plugins

Agent Plugins is an open, vendor-neutral standard, initiated by Vercel and backed by AWS, Cursor, GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI, that packages Agent Skills and MCP servers into one portable format usable across multiple AI coding clients.

Agent Plugins is a free, open specification, there's nothing to purchase for the standard itself. Individual AI clients that support it (Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and others) have their own separate pricing.

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AthenaHQ logo
AI Search & GEOResearch

AthenaHQ

AthenaHQ is an AI search visibility platform for monitoring brand presence in AI-generated answers and tracking performance across AI answer engines.

AthenaHQ has an ongoing free Essential tier (300 monthly credits, unlimited team members, tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Claude). Starter is $295/month for 9 AI models including Copilot and Grok. Enterprise is custom priced. Check athenahq.ai/pricing for current details.

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Atlaso logo
AI AgentsDeveloper Tools

Atlaso

Atlaso is a cross-tool AI memory layer that connects once to Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Claude Desktop, OpenCode, Antigravity, and any MCP-compatible tool, so your project context, decisions, and preferences follow you between them instead of resetting each session.

Atlaso has a free tier limited to one device and one AI tool. The Pro plan is $10/month for unlimited devices and tools plus Ambient Memory and background enrichment. The Build plan is $25/month and adds a developer memory API. Check atlaso.ai for current pricing.

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Captions logo
Video EditingContent Creation

Captions

Captions is an AI video app built for creators. It handles captions, editing, dubbing, and AI-generated presenters, aimed at short-form and social video that would normally take an editor much longer to produce.

Captions has a free plan with limited credits, plus paid tiers that unlock auto-captioning and generative features. Pricing uses a credit model and changes over time, so check the official Captions pricing page before you subscribe.

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ChatGPT logo
WritingProductivity

ChatGPT

A practical guide to ChatGPT, its current models including GPT-6 Astra, best use cases, how to get better results, workflows, and alternatives.

There is a free tier on GPT-5.3 Instant. Paid plans start around $8/mo (Go) and $20/mo (Plus), up to about $200/mo (Pro), plus Business and Enterprise. GPT-6 Astra is not available on the free tier; it requires a paid plan or API access. Plans and model access change often, so check chatgpt.com for what is current.

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Coinbase x402 logo
Developer ToolsAI Agents

Coinbase x402

Coinbase x402 is an open payment protocol that lets apps, APIs, and AI agents make instant stablecoin payments over HTTP, using the HTTP 402 'Payment Required' status to automate machine-to-machine payments.

x402 is an open protocol that's free to adopt. Coinbase's hosted facilitator on the Coinbase Developer Platform offers a free tier (reported at 1,000 transactions/month); on-chain stablecoin payments still incur network and transaction costs. See the official docs for current details.

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Cursor logo
CodingDeveloper Tools

Cursor

Cursor is an AI-native code editor built on VS Code. It's the dominant coding tool for developers using AI in 2026, with full codebase context, multi-file editing, and an AI that understands your entire project, not just the file you're in.

There is a free tier. Pro is around $20/mo, with higher Pro+ and Ultra tiers (roughly $60 and $200/mo). Origin, Cursor's code-hosting feature, is included at no extra charge during its early beta on Pro, Teams, and Enterprise plans, not on the free plan. Check cursor.com for current pricing.

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DeepSeek logo
CodingDeveloper Tools

DeepSeek

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI lab known for competitive, low-cost models. Its V4 family spans DeepSeek-V4-Flash, an open-weight model for cheap, high-volume execution, and DeepSeek-V4-Pro, a larger model for harder agent and reasoning tasks.

DeepSeek's web chat is free. As of August 2026, deepseek-v4-flash API pricing is $0.14 per million input tokens ($0.0028 for cache hits) and $0.28 per million output tokens; deepseek-v4-pro-0813 is priced at $0.435 per million input tokens ($0.003625 for cache hits) and $0.87 per million output tokens. DeepSeek has said a V4 family price increase takes effect August 16, 2026, alongside new peak/off-peak billing at half price off-peak. Check the official API pricing page for current rates.

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DeepSeek Harness logo
AI AgentsDeveloper Tools

DeepSeek Harness

DeepSeek Harness (dsh) is DeepSeek's open-source, MIT-licensed agent harness built on an everything-is-a-plugin architecture, letting developers swap models, tools, sandboxes, and even call other coding agents as sub-agents inside one orchestrated workflow.

DeepSeek Harness is free and open-source under the MIT license. Running it costs whatever the models and tools you configure inside it cost, your own DeepSeek API usage, another provider's API, or a local model with no per-token fee.

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Devin logo
AI Coding AgentsCoding

Devin

Devin is an AI software engineering agent that plans, writes code, debugs, and ships tasks end-to-end. Designed to handle full development workflows with minimal manual direction.

Devin now offers a Free tier, Pro at $20/seat/month, Max at $200/seat/month, and Teams at $80/month base plus $40/month per full developer seat, plus custom Enterprise pricing. This is a significant change from Devin's earlier flat enterprise-style pricing, so check the Devin website for current plans.

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Fathom logo
ProductivityMeetings

Fathom

Fathom is an AI meeting notetaker that records, transcribes, and summarizes your video calls automatically. It's the highest-rated tool in its category, and its free plan includes unlimited recording with no time limits.

Fathom has a free plan with unlimited recording and AI summaries, one of the most generous free tiers in the meeting AI category. Paid plans add team features, CRM integrations, and additional sharing options. Check the official Fathom website for current pricing.

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Fireflies.ai logo
ProductivityMeetings

Fireflies.ai

Fireflies.ai is a team-focused AI meeting recorder that transcribes, summarizes, and makes every meeting searchable across your organization. It integrates with CRMs, project tools, and collaboration platforms to automate meeting follow-up.

Fireflies.ai has a free plan with limited storage and transcription minutes. Paid plans unlock unlimited storage, more AI features, and CRM integrations. Check the official Fireflies.ai website for current pricing.

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Foundation by Chroma logo
AI AgentsDeveloper Tools

Foundation by Chroma

Foundation is Chroma's research-preview solution to AI agent memory: a self-improving, wiki-like knowledge base built from agent sessions, with versioning, lineage, concurrency, and access control, rather than a raw conversation log.

Foundation is a free research preview as of this writing. It's built on Chroma's open-source database and Context-1 retrieval engine; Chroma's core database is free and open-source under Apache 2.0, while Chroma Cloud (the managed hosting option) uses usage-based pricing. Foundation-specific commercial pricing hasn't been published yet; check Chroma's official pages for current terms.

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Gemini logo
WritingResearch

Gemini

A practical guide to Google Gemini, its current models including Gemini 3.8 Flash, Workspace integration, computer use, and how it compares to ChatGPT and Claude.

There is a free version. Paid access comes through Google AI plans, Google AI Plus (~$9.99/mo), Google AI Pro (~$19.99/mo), and Google AI Ultra (~$249.99/mo), which bundle Gemini with Google One storage and other Google perks. Separately, Gemini Flash API access is priced per million tokens and changes with each new Flash release. Plans and pricing change often, so check the official site for what is current.

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Gemini Code Assist logo
AI Coding AgentsCoding

Gemini Code Assist

Gemini Code Assist is Google's AI coding assistant for the IDE. It brings Gemini models into editors like VS Code, JetBrains, and Android Studio for code generation, explanation, and chat, with a large context window for reasoning across a codebase.

Gemini Code Assist is offered in different editions, including options for individuals and for business and enterprise use. Availability, features, and prices vary by plan and can change, so check Google's official pricing before you rely on a tier.

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GLM 5.3 logo
Local AICoding

GLM 5.3

GLM 5.3 is Z.ai's current open-weight coding model, a post-training update to GLM 5.2 with a reported 50% coding-capability jump, a 1M-token context window, and strong results on cybersecurity-focused evaluation.

GLM 5.3 costs $1.40 per million input tokens and $4.40 per million output tokens via the Z.ai API, with cached input at $0.26 per million tokens (limited-time free as of launch). The separate GLM Coding Plan starts at $18/month on a credit basis rather than per-token metering. Open weights are free to download once released. Check z.ai for current rates.

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Grok logo
ResearchWriting

Grok

A practical guide to Grok by xAI, current model Grok 4.6, real-time web and X integration, long-running agent work, and how it compares to ChatGPT and Claude.

Grok has a free tier through X. Full access comes via X Premium (roughly $8/mo) or SuperGrok tiers (from about $30/mo). Separately, Grok 4.6 API access is priced from $2 per million input tokens through the xAI API, Cursor, Grok Build, OpenRouter, Vercel, and Cloudflare. Consumer and API pricing are billed separately; check grok.com and x.ai for current rates.

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Ideogram logo
Image GenerationDesign

Ideogram

Ideogram is an AI image generator purpose-built for creating images that contain readable text. It achieves around 90% text accuracy, far ahead of most other AI image tools, making it the best choice for social graphics, posters, logos, and any image where readable text matters.

Ideogram offers a free tier with daily generation limits. Paid plans unlock more generations, faster processing, and private images. Check the official Ideogram website for current pricing.

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LTX-2.5 logo
VideoOpen Models

LTX-2.5

LTX-2.5 is Lightricks' open-weight AI video model, a 22-billion-parameter diffusion transformer that generates synchronized video and audio from text, an image, or an audio track, with weights on Hugging Face for local use and fine-tuning.

LTX-2.5's weights are open on Hugging Face, and organizations under $10 million in annual revenue can use it commercially at no licensing cost. Hosted inference is available through providers like fal.ai on a usage-based, per-generation basis. Check official sources for current terms above the revenue threshold.

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Meta AI logo
WritingProductivity

Meta AI

A practical guide to Meta AI, free AI assistant built into WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger.

The core Meta AI assistant is free across WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and at meta.ai, with daily/monthly limits on messages and image or video generation. Meta has started testing paid Meta One AI tiers (Plus and Premium) in select markets for higher limits and deeper reasoning. Check meta.ai for what's currently available in your region.

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Meta Muse Code logo
AI Coding AgentsDeveloper Tools

Meta Muse Code

Muse Code is Meta Superintelligence Labs' first coding agent, a terminal-based tool powered by Muse Spark 1.2 that plans, implements, and validates multi-file changes across large repositories.

Muse Code offers two pricing tiers: Standard at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens, and a Contributor tier at $0.10 / $0.20, roughly a 20x discount, in exchange for allowing Meta to train on your prompts and completions. Check Meta's official pages for current terms before choosing a tier.

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Muse Image logo
Image GenerationContent Creation

Muse Image

Muse Image is Meta's AI image generation model, built by Meta Superintelligence Labs. It creates and edits images from text prompts inside Meta AI, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and is rolling out to advertiser tools.

Meta says Muse Image is free for everyday use, with higher generation limits offered through Meta's subscription plans. It is newly launched and rolling out across Meta apps, so availability and limits vary. Check Meta's official pages for current access.

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n8n logo
AutomationAI Workflows

n8n

n8n is an open-source workflow automation platform, a more flexible, self-hostable alternative to Zapier. It connects hundreds of apps and APIs, supports code nodes for custom logic, and has strong AI workflow capabilities including native LLM integration.

n8n can be self-hosted for free (open-source). n8n Cloud is available with a paid subscription for those who don't want to manage their own server. Check the official n8n website for current cloud pricing.

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OpenScience logo
AI ResearchDeveloper Tools

OpenScience

OpenScience is an open-source, model-agnostic AI workbench for scientific research from Synthetic Sciences. It runs the full research loop across machine learning, biology, physics, and chemistry using agent skills and scientific databases.

OpenScience is open-source and released under a permissive license. It is bring-your-own-key: you supply your own model API keys (or run local models) and pay those providers directly. Check the official GitHub repository for the current license and setup.

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OpenWorker logo
Personal AI AssistantAI Agents

OpenWorker

OpenWorker is an open-source, local-first desktop AI coworker from Andrew Ng that returns finished deliverables, like a written document, a Slack reply, or an updated calendar, instead of just chat, with 25-plus integrations and your choice of AI model.

OpenWorker itself is free and open-source (MIT license). You bring your own API key for whichever model provider you choose (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, and others), or run fully local models through Ollama at no per-token cost. Check each model provider's own pricing separately.

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Otter.ai logo
ProductivityMeetings

Otter.ai

Otter.ai is an AI meeting assistant that records, transcribes, and summarizes conversations. Its OtterPilot bot joins Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams calls, captures a live transcript, and produces summaries with action items.

Otter.ai has a free plan with a monthly transcription-minute limit, plus Pro, Business, and Enterprise tiers that add more minutes and features. Minute limits and prices change, so check the official Otter.ai pricing page before you subscribe.

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Otterly AI logo
AI Search & GEOResearch

Otterly AI

Otterly AI is a monitoring tool for tracking how your brand, content, and products are mentioned and cited in AI search results and AI-generated answers.

Otterly AI starts at $29/month (Lite plan, 15 prompts, 4 AI engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot). Standard is $189/month and Premium is $489/month. Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons rather than included by default. A free trial is available with no credit card required. Check otterly.ai/pricing for current details.

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Palette logo
Creative AIAI Video

Palette

Palette is a creative AI studio that generates images, video, and music from one workspace, using automatic model routing across providers like Seedance, Veo, and Kling to balance cost, speed, and quality.

Palette uses a credit system priced at $0.01 per credit on its individual tier, with credits charged only for successful generations (failed jobs refund automatically). Roughly 1,000 credits covers a full character reel (character sheet, storyboard, and 15 seconds of character-consistent video). Enterprise pricing is custom; check the official site for current rates.

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Peec AI logo
AI Search & GEOResearch

Peec AI

Peec AI is an analytics tool for monitoring brand visibility and citations in AI search engines and AI-generated answers.

Peec AI uses a four-tier plan structure: Starter, Pro, Advanced, and Enterprise (custom). Third-party pricing trackers report Starter around $89 to $95/month for a limited number of prompts and AI models, but Peec AI's own pricing page does not publish exact figures, so treat that number as a starting estimate and confirm on peec.ai/pricing.

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Perplexity logo
ResearchSearch

Perplexity

A practical guide to Perplexity AI, best use cases, how it differs from ChatGPT, and when to choose it for research.

There is a free tier. Perplexity Pro is around $20/mo, and a higher Max tier is around $200/mo. Separately, Perplexity's developer platform (Search API, Agent API, Embeddings API, Sandbox) is billed per use: Agent API model calls at direct provider rates with no markup, Sandbox sessions at $0.03 per 20-minute container, plus per-tool-call charges for things like web search. Check perplexity.ai and the API Platform pricing page for current rates.

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Poolside Laguna S 2.1 logo
AI ModelsOpen Models

Poolside Laguna S 2.1

Laguna S 2.1 is Poolside's open-weight coding model, a 118-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts system built for agentic software engineering that runs on a single GPU and ships under Poolside's own OpenMDW-1.1 license.

Laguna S 2.1's weights are free to download under the OpenMDW-1.1 license. Running it yourself still costs GPU hardware or cloud compute. It's also available through OpenRouter on a usage basis. Check official sources for current details.

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Profound logo
AI Search & GEOResearch

Profound

Profound is an AI search visibility platform for tracking how brands, products, and content appear in AI-generated answers across tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Profound doesn't publish self-serve pricing; its official pricing page is demo-gated. Third-party pricing trackers report a Starter plan around $99/month (ChatGPT only) and a Growth plan around $399/month (adds Perplexity and Google AI Overviews), with Enterprise custom-quoted and reportedly running $2,000 or more per month for full multi-engine coverage. Book a demo at tryprofound.com to confirm current pricing.

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Qwen3.8-27B logo
AI ModelsOpen Models

Qwen3.8-27B

Qwen3.8-27B is Alibaba's open-weight, 27-billion-parameter dense multimodal model, released under Apache 2.0 and built to run on a single consumer GPU, a practical local sibling to the trillion-scale Qwen3.8-Max.

Qwen3.8-27B's weights are free to download from Hugging Face or ModelScope under the Apache 2.0 license. There's no per-token API fee for self-hosting; you pay only for your own hardware. Third-party providers and OpenRouter also host it for pay-per-token API access if you'd rather not self-host.

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Qwen3.8-Max logo
AI ModelsOpen Models

Qwen3.8-Max

Qwen3.8-Max is Alibaba's flagship 2.4-trillion-parameter multimodal model, now generally available with published benchmarks and API pricing, ahead of an open-weight release expected the week of August 10, 2026.

Qwen3.8-Max is available through Alibaba Cloud's Model Studio at $2.00 per million input tokens and $6.00 per million output tokens as of its August 3, 2026 GA launch. Alibaba has committed to an open-weight release the week of August 10, 2026, alongside a smaller Qwen3.8-27B checkpoint. Check official sources for current terms.

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Scrunch AI logo
AI Search & GEOResearch

Scrunch AI

Scrunch AI is an AI visibility tool for helping brands understand and improve how they appear in AI-generated answers and search responses.

Scrunch AI's Starter plan is $250/month billed annually (or $300/month month-to-month), covering ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, and Meta AI on every plan. Growth is $417/month annual ($500 month-to-month). A 7-day free trial of Starter is available with no credit card. Check scrunch.com/pricing for current details.

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Stagehand logo
AI BrowsersDeveloper Tools

Stagehand

Stagehand is Browserbase's open-source SDK for browser agents, letting developers script natural-language browser actions alongside precise code, with v4 adding a browser extension mode, self-healing actions, and result caching.

Stagehand itself is free and open-source under the MIT license. You provide your own AI model API key (OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, via the Vercel AI SDK) and pay that provider directly. Browserbase, the company behind Stagehand, offers a separate paid hosted browser runtime with free, $20, and $99 tiers plus custom enterprise pricing, if you'd rather not manage browser infrastructure yourself.

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Unsloth logo
Local AIDeveloper Tools

Unsloth

Unsloth is a local AI toolkit for running, fine-tuning, and deploying open-weight models, now available as a free, open-source Desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux, alongside its original Python library and web-based Studio interface.

Unsloth is free and open-source. The core package uses the Apache 2.0 license; some optional components, including the Unsloth Studio UI, use AGPL-3.0. There's no subscription for the software itself; you provide your own hardware or cloud compute.

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Zapier logo
AutomationProductivity

Zapier

Zapier is the most widely used no-code automation platform, connecting 9,000+ apps so they work together automatically. With built-in AI features, you can now build automations that include AI-powered steps, not just data transfers.

Zapier offers a free plan with limited Zaps and tasks per month. Paid plans unlock more Zaps, tasks, and premium app connections. Pricing scales with the number of tasks automated monthly. Check the official Zapier website for current pricing.

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