Multiple tools, similar promises, and no obvious way to decide. Here are the criteria that genuinely determine which one suits your needs.
Three tabs open, three assistants, and the same question: which one will actually help finish this presentation, draft this tricky message, prepare for this meeting?
There is no single best tool in absolute terms. There is the one that fits your use case, your way of working, and your constraints.
Here is how to decide — using criteria that will remain relevant long after the tools have changed their names and version numbers.
Before distinguishing between them, one useful point: they all rest on the same family of technologies. They read text, produce it, and chain reasoning across structured problems.
None of them thinks in the way we mean the word. All of them can save hours of repetitive work.
And all of them, now, have access to recent information. The argument that these tools are blind to current events no longer holds.
This is the criterion that draws the clearest line.
If your work involves analysing long documents — a tender, a report, a contract, a technical file — you need a tool that maintains coherence across dozens of pages without losing the thread or inventing things it never read.
Not all of them are equal on this point, and the difference shows immediately in practice. The test is simple: submit a long document you know well, ask for a summary, and check whether the key points are there — and above all whether statements that do not appear in the document have crept in.
If you work primarily with short texts, this criterion does not apply to you.
Some assistants plug directly into an office suite: messaging, word processing, spreadsheets, calendar. If you spend your days inside that kind of environment, native integration changes daily life more than raw model quality does.
Summarising a message thread without switching windows, finding a piece of information across a dozen documents, drafting directly inside the open file: these gains add up.
Conversely, if you work with specialised or varied tools, this advantage disappears and other criteria take over.
Certain uses call for specific capabilities.
Long-form, nuanced text production — reports, briefing notes, sensitive communications — requires a tool that stays measured and consistent, and does not drift toward a promotional tone after two pages.
Visual creation requires image generation, which not all of them offer.
Code is handled well by several of them, with differences that are best measured on your own cases rather than on rankings.
Data analysis requires the ability to upload files and reason over them, which is not universal.
This question is almost absent from comparisons, and it is the most important one in a professional context.
Three points to check before submitting anything.
Do your data serve to train the model? Answers differ depending on the publisher and the plan — free, paid, or professional.
Where are they hosted? The location determines the applicable legal framework, which matters as soon as you are handling personal data.
What do your employer or your clients say? Many organisations have rules governing the use of these tools. Submitting a confidential document to an unauthorised service is your responsibility.
No time saving justifies a client data leak.
Many professionals end up using two: one main tool for most tasks, a second for a specific use where it performs better.
This is a sensible arrangement, as long as it comes from practice rather than from a comparison article read somewhere. You discover a tool's limits by using it, and that discovery is what justifies adding a second one.
The opposite mistake is more costly: spending hours comparing instead of actually using. Choose one this week, use it seriously for a fortnight, then adjust.
Do not rely on rankings — they change with every release and do not test your specific use.
Take three tasks you genuinely carry out, among your most frequent ones. Submit them to two tools. Compare the results against your own criteria: accuracy, tone, and the time actually saved once editing is done.
That last point matters. A fast tool that produces text you have to rewrite entirely saves you nothing.
They invent information with perfect confidence. A plausible statistic, attributed to a well-known source, with a precise date — and none of it exists.
Verify every factual claim before using it as your own. This is true of all of them, without exception, whichever one you choose.
These tools amplify what is already there. A professional who knows their field produces better work with them. Someone who does not know their field produces wrong things faster.
This is precisely why training has value: not to learn how to operate an interface, but to know what to hand over to them, what to keep back, and how to check what comes out.
The Publisher's catalogue includes training courses on the professional use of these tools, tailored to different roles, with a completion certificate issued after assessment.
Identify the task that takes you the most time. Just one.
Spend half an hour putting it to the test with a tool. Not to judge the technology in general, but to see what it delivers on that specific case.
Measure the time actually saved, editing included. That is the only measure that counts, and it is one no comparison article can produce on your behalf.