I Tried 10 AI Tools So You Don't Have To

Okay so I have a problem. Every time someone mentions a new AI tool on Twitter or in a Discord I'm in, I immediately sign up. I can't help it. I'm genuinely curious and also a little bit addicted to testing things. The result of this particular compulsion is that I now have accounts on approximately ten thousand platforms and a very informed opinion on which ones are actually good versus which ones just have great marketing copy.

I'm going to walk you through ten of them. Real talk, not a sponsored roundup. Some of these I love, some of them wasted my time, and I'll tell you exactly which is which.

The Writing Tools

I started with Claude. I know, I know, everyone says this. But I've been using it for months now and I genuinely think it's the best for anything that requires actual thinking. Not just autocomplete vibes, but real back-and-forth reasoning. I use it for drafting emails I'm stressed about, working through ideas, and honestly just talking through problems when I'm stuck. It doesn't feel like talking to a robot. It feels like talking to a very smart, patient person who never gets tired of me.

ChatGPT is the other one I use regularly. It's great for quick tasks, image generation, and web browsing. I go back and forth on which I prefer for writing. Honestly it depends on the day and what I'm doing. For longer, more nuanced stuff I lean toward Claude. For quick things I'll grab whatever's already open.

I tried Jasper for about two weeks. It's marketed as this big deal content writing platform for businesses. My honest take? It felt like it was optimizing for sounding professional instead of actually being good. Everything it produced had this very polished-but-hollow quality that I kept having to tear apart and rewrite. I gave it a real shot but I ended up just going back to Claude and doing it myself.

The Image Tools

Midjourney is still incredible for images if you know what you're doing. The learning curve is real though. I spent probably three weeks just figuring out how to prompt it effectively, and even then I get results that are completely wrong sometimes. But when it works, it works. I've used it for making shop mockups and the quality difference versus free tools is obvious.

Adobe Firefly is more predictable. Less stunning sometimes, but it plays nicely with other Adobe stuff I already use, so that matters. If you're someone who lives in Photoshop, it's worth having. The generative fill feature alone is kind of wild.

I also tried Stable Diffusion running locally on my machine. This was a whole thing. I spent an entire weekend setting it up, broke something, reinstalled it, watched like six YouTube tutorials. It's free and endlessly customizable but I won't pretend the setup process didn't make me want to close my laptop and go outside. If you're technical and patient, great. If you just want to make images, honestly Midjourney is less headache.

The Productivity Tools

Notion AI is already baked into something I use every day, so this one was easy to test. I like it for summarizing notes and drafting first versions of things like project plans. I don't love it for creative writing because it always sounds like a Notion template. Very organized. Very beige. But for work stuff? It's solid and I use it almost daily.

I tried Otter.ai for transcription. It works. That's my review. It transcribes things accurately enough that I don't have to redo the whole thing by hand, which is exactly what I needed. Not exciting, just useful.

Then there's Perplexity. I have complicated feelings about this one. The idea is great, answering questions with sourced citations from the web. In practice I've found it confidently states things that are wrong sometimes, and I've learned to double-check anything important. But for quick research? I use it constantly. Just with my skeptical hat on.

The Wildcard

The last one is ElevenLabs. I started using it to make voiceovers for some content I was putting together and I was not prepared for how good it is. The voices sound like actual humans. Not in that uncanny valley way, but genuinely convincing. I've had people listen to things I made with it and not realize it wasn't a real person talking. That kind of blew my mind a little bit.

The Honest Summary

If I had to pick a starting lineup for someone who's just getting into AI tools, it would be: Claude for thinking and writing, Midjourney for images when you have patience, Notion AI if you're already in Notion, and ElevenLabs if you're making any kind of audio content. Those four would actually cover most situations.

The rest are worth knowing about. Some are better for specific niches. Some just didn't click with how I work. I'm not saying they're bad, just that they didn't earn a permanent place in my rotation.

And look, this stuff changes fast. Tools I loved six months ago have gotten worse after updates, and tools I wrote off have come back with genuinely improved versions. I keep testing. It's kind of the whole point of being into this space.

If you want me to do a deeper look at any of these specifically, let me know. I have opinions. Many of them.