The best free chatbot: every free plan compared

The best free chatbot depends on what you want to do with it, because every company now limits its free plan in a different way. ChatGPT promises unlimited text chats but a small working memory; Google sends most free Gemini prompts to its lightest model since October 9; Claude's free plan includes web search and code but no image generation; and DeepSeek publishes no paid consumer plan at all. This guide compares the free plans of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Mistral's Vibe (formerly Le Chat) and DeepSeek from each company's own pages, as of October 14, 2026, and says which one to pick for which job. We compare what the plans include and how they use your data; we have not run a quality test of the answers.

Free chatbots compared

Table: free plans of the main chatbots (each company's pages; checked October 14, 2026 unless the date says otherwise)

Which free chatbot to choose

• For the most everyday chatting: ChatGPT Free is the only one that advertises unlimited text chats. The catch is memory: its 27K token context on the free plan means it loses track of long documents and long conversations sooner. Our guide to context windows explains what that limit means in practice.
• For long documents: Claude Free. Anthropic's plans page listed a context window of up to 1 million tokens, depending on the model, on the free plan as well as the paid ones when we checked on October 6, 2026.
• For images and video: Gemini, through limited access to Google Flow and Nano Banana Pro, or ChatGPT's limited image creation. Claude's free plan lists no image generation.
• If you live in Google's or Microsoft's apps: Gemini or Copilot. Both put their paid features inside Gmail and Docs or Word and Excel; see our guides to Gemini pricing and Microsoft Copilot pricing for what upgrading adds.
• If you want a European company: Mistral's Vibe has a free plan with web search and basic image generation, and the same Free plan also gives access to Mistral Studio, the company's developer platform.
• For research with sources: our Perplexity vs ChatGPT comparison covers the assistant built around web search.

What "free" costs you: limits and data

Free plans are paid for in two ways. The first is limits. ChatGPT's unlimited text chats are "subject to abuse guardrails", and uploads, images, voice and deep research are all limited. Gemini switched to compute-based limits this year: your allowance depends on how complex your prompts are, refreshes every 5 hours and stops at a weekly cap, and since October 9 the free plan answers most prompts with Flash-Lite. Claude's limits reset on a rolling five-hour window. Mistral and Microsoft describe their free limits in words, not numbers.

The second is data. On every free plan here, your conversations can be used to improve the company's models unless you change a setting or opt out:

• ChatGPT: OpenAI's pricing page says content is used to train its models, with an opt-out available. Our guide to whether ChatGPT is safe shows where the setting is.
• Gemini: with Keep Activity on, Google uses chats to improve its services, including training its models, with help from human reviewers.
• Claude: chats are used for training if you allow it, if they are flagged for safety review or if you explicitly opt in; Incognito chats are excluded.
• DeepSeek: its privacy policy says it stores personal data in the People's Republic of China and lists training among its purposes, and Italy's data protection authority ordered it to limit the processing of Italian users' data in January 2025. Our DeepSeek vs ChatGPT comparison covers this in detail.

If nothing you type should leave your computer, the free option is a model you run yourself: our guide to running an LLM locally shows how with Ollama.

When it is worth paying

Upgrade when you keep hitting a limit that blocks real work, not because a paid plan exists. The cheapest step up is Google's Plus plan at $4.99 a month, which doubles Gemini's free usage. At about $20 a month, ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro and Google's Pro plan are similar in price and differ in what they bundle; our Claude vs Gemini comparison and the guide to ChatGPT alternatives go through the differences.