The 30 Best AI Tools I’ve Tried and Tested in 2025

AI tools are everywhere in 2025, but which ones are actually worth your time and money? I’ve spent countless hours testing different software to find the real winners. This list covers my top 30 picks across several categories, from content creation to business productivity. In this article, I'll break down my top 30 picks to help you choose the right tools for your specific needs.

How I Tried & Tested These AI Tools

I don't just read feature lists. For every tool on this list, I signed up, ran it through its paces, and used it for real tasks. I looked for ease of use, the quality of the output, and whether it solved a real problem. My goal is to give you a straightforward look at what works and what doesn't, based on actual experience.

TL;DR: Best AI Tools By Category

For Marketers & Social Media: Jasper, Copy.ai, Lately, AdCreative.ai, Anyword, Omneky
For Writers & Content Creators: KoalaWriter, Agility Writer, SEOWriting.ai, Grammarly, ProWritingAid, QuillBot
For Designers & Creatives: Midjourney, DALL-E 3, Stable Diffusion, Synthesia, Descript, Pictory
For Businesses & Productivity: Zapier, Make.com, Bardeen, Intercom, Zendesk, Tidio
For Students & Researchers: Perplexity AI, Consensus, Elicit, Notion AI, Mem, Evernote AI

Marketers are juggling more tasks than ever, and the right AI can be a massive help. These tools are designed to streamline everything from creating social media posts to optimizing ad campaigns. Here's a breakdown of the tools that impressed me most.

Jasper

Jasper is an AI writing assistant that excels at creating a wide range of marketing copy. It can handle everything from social media captions and blog post ideas to full-length articles and email campaigns.

What I like most is its Brand Voice feature. You can train Jasper on your existing content, and it learns to write just like you. This is a huge advantage for maintaining brand consistency across all your marketing channels.Jasper's Creator plan is $49 per month for one user and one Brand Voice. The Pro plan at $69 per month expands access to five users and three Brand Voices. For larger teams, a custom-priced Business plan offers unlimited features.

Copy.ai

Copy.ai is another powerful AI writer focused on marketing copy. It offers over 90 templates for different use cases, including social media content, ad copy, and sales emails.

Its strength lies in its speed and simplicity. You can generate dozens of variations of copy in seconds, making it great for brainstorming and A/B testing different messages on social media. The "Infobase" feature allows it to remember key facts about your products and services for more accurate copy.

Copy.ai offers a Free plan with a 2,000-word limit. The Pro plan is $49 per month for unlimited words and five user seats, while a custom Enterprise plan is available for larger needs.

Lately

Lately is a social media management tool that uses AI to turn long-form content like blogs or videos into dozens of social media posts. It analyzes your content and pulls out the most compelling snippets to share.

What's really cool is its ability to learn from your social media analytics. It identifies which posts get the most engagement and uses that knowledge to generate future content that is more likely to perform well, saving you a ton of time on content repurposing.

Lately's Individual plan costs $29 per month for one user. The Business plan is available for $129 per month for five users, and a custom Enterprise plan is offered for larger teams.

AdCreative.ai

AdCreative.ai focuses on one thing: generating high-converting ad creatives. You provide it with your logo, brand colors, and ad copy, and it produces a variety of images and banners ready for platforms like Facebook, Google, and Instagram.

I'm impressed by its performance-focused approach. The AI is trained on a massive dataset of successful ads, so its suggestions are based on what has actually worked. It even provides a score to predict how well each creative will perform.AdCreative.ai uses a credit system. The Starter plan is $29 per month for 10 credits, the Professional plan is $59 per month for 25 credits, and the Agency plan is $99 per month for 50 credits.

Anyword

Anyword is an AI copywriting tool specifically designed for performance marketing. It can generate copy for ads, landing pages, and emails, but its real power is in its predictive performance scores.

The tool analyzes your copy and gives it a score based on how likely it is to convert with your target audience. You can even create customer personas to get more accurate predictions. This takes a lot of the guesswork out of writing ad copy.

Anyword's Starter plan is $49 per month for one user. The Data-Driven Teams plan costs $99 per month for three users and unlimited words, with a custom Business plan also available.

Omneky

Omneky is an AI platform that connects ad generation with real-time performance data. It creates personalized ad creatives across different platforms and then uses data from your ad accounts to iterate and improve them automatically.

Its ability to A/B test on a large scale is its biggest selling point. The platform can test thousands of creative variations to find the best-performing combinations of images, copy, and audiences, optimizing your campaigns for you.

Omneky offers personalized pricing based on ad spend. You must contact their sales team for a custom quote.

Best AI Tools for Writers & Content Creators

For anyone creating content, AI has become an indispensable partner. From generating first drafts of articles to polishing the final text, these tools can improve both the speed and quality of your writing.

KoalaWriter

KoalaWriter is a favorite in the SEO and affiliate marketing community. It’s an AI writer designed specifically for creating long-form, SEO-optimized content like blog posts and affiliate roundups.

What sets it apart is its integration of real-time SERP data. When you give it a keyword, it analyzes the top-ranking articles on Google to generate a comprehensive piece of content that includes relevant entities and answers key questions. This makes it incredibly effective for creating articles that rank.

KoalaWriter's Starter plan is $9 per month for 15,000 words. The Professional plan offers 100,000 words for $25 per month, and the Business plan provides 250,000 words for $49 per month.

Agility Writer

Agility Writer is another excellent tool for creating high-quality, long-form articles. It has a multi-step process that includes creating a detailed outline before writing the full article, which gives you more control over the final output.

I really like its "Advanced Mode," which can write articles over 3,000 words long with detailed factual information. It also has a feature that automatically adds internal links to your other articles, which is a great time-saver for on-page SEO.

Agility Writer uses a credit-based system. Plans start at $25 for 25 credits.

SEOWriting.ai

SEOWriting.ai is a one-click article generator that also supports bulk generation. You can upload a list of keywords, and it will create dozens of SEO-optimized articles for you automatically.

Its efficiency is its main draw. It can also generate product roundups from Amazon URLs, making it a very useful tool for affiliate marketers looking to scale their content production quickly. The output quality is consistently high for a tool with this level of automation.

SEOWriting.ai has a Free plan for up to 5,000 words. The Pro plan costs $19 per month for 100,000 words, and the Business plan is $39 per month for 300,000 words.

Grammarly

Grammarly is probably the most well-known AI writing assistant. It goes beyond simple spell checking to offer suggestions on grammar, clarity, tone, and style.

The GrammarlyGO feature, its generative AI component, is what makes it stand out in 2025. It can rewrite sentences, generate text based on prompts, and adjust the tone of your writing on the fly. It's an all-in-one editor that works across almost every platform.

Grammarly provides a Free plan with basic checks. The Premium plan is $30 per month for advanced suggestions, and the Business plan costs $25 per user, per month for team features like a style guide.

ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid is a powerful editor aimed at long-form writers like authors and academics. It provides over 20 different writing reports that analyze everything from sentence structure and pacing to clichés and repetitive words.

The depth of its analysis is unmatched. While Grammarly is great for everyday writing, ProWritingAid gives you the tools to do a deep, structural edit of a long document. It's like having a professional editor built into your word processor.ProWritingAid has a Free version with a 500-word limit. The Premium plan is $30 per month for unlimited access, and the Premium Pro plan at $36 per month adds plagiarism checks.

QuillBot

QuillBot started as a paraphrasing tool, but it has grown into a full writing suite. It can paraphrase sentences in different styles, summarize long texts, check for grammar errors, and even help you generate citations.

Its paraphraser is still its best feature. It's incredibly good at rephrasing text to improve clarity or avoid plagiarism without losing the original meaning. The co-writer tool combines all its features into a single interface, making it a great tool for students and researchers.QuillBot offers a Free plan with limited functionality. The Premium plan costs $19.95 per month and provides unlimited words and access to all advanced features.

Best AI Tools for Designers & Creatives

AI is changing the game for visual creators. Whether you're generating stunning images from a text prompt or editing video with text-based commands, these tools open up a whole new world of creative possibilities.

Midjourney

Midjourney is an AI image generator known for producing highly artistic and stylized images. It operates through a Discord server, where you use text prompts to create and refine your images.

The quality and artistic style of its output are simply on another level. It's particularly good at creating complex scenes, characters, and environments that look like they were made by a professional artist. The community aspect on Discord is also great for inspiration.

Midjourney's Basic plan is $10 per month for approximately 200 images. The Standard plan costs $30 per month for around 900 images, while the Pro plan is $60 per month for about 1,800 images.

Want all the details? Check out my full review of Midjourney.

DALL-E 3

DALL-E 3 is OpenAI's image generation model, and it's integrated directly into ChatGPT Plus. Its main strength is its ability to understand natural language prompts with incredible accuracy.

What I like is how well it handles text within images. Unlike many other generators, DALL-E 3 can create images with accurate and readable text, which is a big deal for creating memes, ads, or logos. Its direct integration with ChatGPT makes the creative process very conversational.

DALL-E 3 is included with a ChatGPT Plus subscription for $20 per month.

Stable Diffusion

Stable Diffusion is an open-source image generation model. This means you can run it on your own hardware for free if you have the technical skills, or you can use it through various web platforms like DreamStudio.

Its biggest advantage is its flexibility and the massive community built around it. There are thousands of custom models (checkpoints) trained on specific styles, allowing you to create images in almost any style imaginable, from photorealistic to anime.

Stable Diffusion is free to use on your own computer. Web platforms like DreamStudio use a credit-based system, with $10 buying about 1,000 credits, which can generate around 5,000 images.

Synthesia

Synthesia is an AI video generation platform that lets you create professional-looking videos with AI avatars. You just type a script, choose an avatar and a background, and it generates a video of the avatar speaking your text.

This tool is perfect for creating training videos, corporate communications, or product tutorials without needing cameras or actors. The quality of the avatars and voices is impressively realistic, and it supports over 120 languages.

The Personal plan is $30 per month for 10 minutes of video. The Creator plan costs $89 per month for 30 minutes of video, and a custom Enterprise plan is available for larger needs.

Descript

Descript is a video and audio editor that works like a word document. It transcribes your media, and you can edit the video or podcast just by editing the text. Deleting a word in the transcript removes it from the video.

Its "Studio Sound" feature is incredible. It can remove background noise and echo from your audio, making a poorly recorded track sound like it was done in a professional studio. It's an essential tool for podcasters and YouTubers.

Descript has a Free plan with one hour of transcription per month. The Creator plan is $15 per month for 10 hours, and the Pro plan is $30 per month for 30 hours of transcription.

Pictory

Pictory uses AI to create videos from long-form content. It can take a blog post, a script, or even a long video and automatically turn it into a short, engaging video for social media, complete with stock footage, music, and captions.

I love its "Article to Video" feature. It’s an incredibly fast way to repurpose blog content for platforms like YouTube or TikTok. The AI does a great job of selecting relevant visuals to match the text.The Standard plan costs $23 per month for 30 videos. The Premium plan is $47 per month for 60 videos, and the Teams plan costs $119 per month for 90 videos and three users.

Best AI Tools for Businesses & Productivity

In a business context, AI can automate repetitive tasks, provide better customer support, and help manage workflows more efficiently. These tools are designed to save you time and help your business run more smoothly.

Zapier

Zapier is a well-known automation tool that connects thousands of different web apps. With its AI features, you can now build more intelligent workflows, or "Zaps."

What's powerful is the ability to use natural language to create Zaps. You can just describe the workflow you want, and Zapier's AI will build it for you. You can also add AI steps to your Zaps, like having an AI summarize an email before adding it to a Trello card.

Zapier offers a Free plan with 100 tasks per month. Paid plans include the Starter plan at $29.99 per month for 750 tasks and the Professional plan at $73.50 per month for 2,000 tasks.

Make.com

Make.com (formerly Integromat) is a powerful automation platform that offers a more visual approach to building workflows. Its drag-and-drop interface lets you see exactly how your apps are connected and how data flows between them.

Its visual builder is its key strength. It makes it easier to build and debug complex, multi-step automations compared to list-based builders. It's a great choice for people who want more control and a clearer view of their workflows.

Make.com has a Free plan with 1,000 operations per month. The Core plan is $10.59 per month for 10,000 operations, while the Pro plan at $18.82 per month offers the same number of operations but with more advanced features.

Bardeen

Bardeen is a browser-based automation tool that helps you automate repetitive tasks you do on the web. It lives in your browser and can do things like scrape data from a webpage, send notifications, or create entries in Notion or Google Sheets.

I like that it's designed to automate manual browser tasks. It's perfect for things like lead generation, data entry, or research. The "Magic Box" lets you describe what you want to do in plain English, and it suggests automations for you.

Bardeen currently offers a generous free plan, with a professional plan available for teams at $10 per user, per month.

Intercom

Intercom is a customer communications platform that uses AI chatbots to provide instant support. Its AI bot, Fin, can understand complex queries and provide accurate answers based on your help documentation.

What's impressive about Fin is how conversational it is. It doesn't just link to help articles; it provides direct answers and can ask clarifying questions. It can also handle more complex tasks and knows when to hand off a conversation to a human agent.

Intercom plans start at $74 per month, with custom pricing for larger businesses that includes the AI features.

Zendesk

Zendesk is a leading customer service platform, and its AI offerings are deeply integrated into its ticketing and help center products. Zendesk AI can categorize and route support tickets automatically.

The AI-powered macros are a huge time-saver for support agents. The system suggests relevant macros (canned responses) based on the content of a ticket, allowing agents to respond to common questions with a single click.

Zendesk's Suite Team plan is $69 per agent, per month. The Suite Growth plan is $115 for light AI features, and the Suite Professional at $149 includes advanced AI.

Tidio

Tidio is a customer service platform that combines live chat, chatbots, and email marketing. Its Lyro AI chatbot is designed to be easy to set up and can answer up to 70% of common customer questions.

The ease of setup is its best feature. You can activate the AI with one click, and it learns from your FAQ page. You don't need any coding or complex training to get a powerful chatbot working on your site.Tidio provides a Free plan for up to 50 live chat conversations. The Starter plan is $29 per month and includes 50 Lyro AI conversations, while the Communicator plan at $29 per month offers unlimited live chats.

Best AI Tools for Students & Researchers

AI is revolutionizing how we find and process information. For students and researchers, these tools can help summarize complex papers, find relevant sources, and keep notes organized, making the learning process much more efficient.

Perplexity AI

Perplexity AI is an "answer engine" that acts like a combination of a search engine and a chatbot. When you ask a question, it searches the web and provides a direct, summarized answer with citations to its sources.

The inclusion of sources is what makes it so valuable for research. You don't have to take its word for it; you can check the sources yourself. The "Pro" version allows you to upload documents for analysis and uses more advanced AI models.

Perplexity AI has a Free version with its standard model. The Pro plan is available for $20 per month, which unlocks advanced models and file uploads.

Consensus

Consensus is an AI search engine specifically for scientific research. You ask a question in natural language, and it scans millions of peer-reviewed papers to find direct answers and relevant studies.

It's fantastic for getting a quick overview of what the scientific literature says about a topic. It uses "Consensus Meters" to show you the level of agreement on a particular finding across multiple studies, which is incredibly useful for literature reviews.

Consensus offers a free tier, with a Premium plan available for $11.99 per month that provides unlimited access to advanced features.

Elicit

Elicit is an AI research assistant that helps automate parts of the research workflow. It can find relevant papers, summarize them, and extract key information into a structured table.

The "Literature Review" feature is a standout. You can enter a research question, and Elicit will find the most relevant papers and create a summary table of their findings, methodologies, and conclusions. This can save hours or even days of work.

Elicit uses a credit-based system. You get a one-time grant of free credits upon signing up and can purchase more as needed.

Notion AI

Notion AI is built directly into the popular Notion workspace app. It can help you summarize notes, brainstorm ideas, draft content, and organize information right inside your Notion pages.

The seamless integration is its biggest strength. You don't have to switch to a different app to use AI. You can highlight text and ask the AI to improve it, translate it, or turn it into a to-do list. It's a powerful productivity booster for anyone already using Notion.

Notion AI is available as an add-on to any Notion plan for an additional $10 per user, per month.

For all the details, read my full review of Notion.

Mem

Mem is a "self-organizing workspace" that uses AI to automatically connect your notes. As you write, Mem's AI identifies related concepts, people, and projects, creating a web of knowledge without you having to manually tag or folder everything.

The "Mem Chat" feature lets you ask questions about your own notes. You can ask it to find a specific piece of information or summarize everything you know about a particular topic. It's like having a personal assistant for your own brain.

Mem offers a Free plan for basic note-taking. The Mem X plan, which includes AI features, costs $10 per month, while the Mem for Teams plan is $15 per user, per month.

Evernote AI

Evernote, the long-standing note-taking app, has integrated AI to enhance its core functions. Its AI-powered search can understand natural language questions to find notes, even if you don't remember the exact keywords.

The "AI Note Cleanup" feature is surprisingly useful. It can automatically format messy notes, fix typos, and organize your thoughts into clear lists or summaries. It's a great way to bring order to your brain dumps.

AI features are included in Evernote's Personal ($14.99 per month) and Professional ($17.99 per month) plans.

Summary

There you have it—my top 30 AI tools for 2025. The key is finding the right tool for the specific job you need to do. Many of these have free trials or free tiers, so I recommend giving a few a try to see what fits your workflow best.