Inference platform for open-source LLMs — fast, cheap hosting for Llama, Mixtral, Qwen, DeepSeek, and 200+ others.
OpenAI-class API, open-source weights, half the price
Together.ai serves Llama, Mixtral, Qwen, and DeepSeek at production latency through an OpenAI-compatible API at meaningfully lower cost than the frontier providers. The right pick for inference-heavy apps that don't need GPT-5 or Opus.
Anthropic's advanced AI assistant with extended context and reasoning
The thinking person's chatbot subscription
Claude remains the best model for long-form writing, code review, and nuanced reasoning. But Pro usage limits and the missing consumer polish around voice and image generation keep it one step behind ChatGPT for mainstream users.
OpenAI's enterprise-grade conversational AI platform
Table stakes for big-company AI
ChatGPT Enterprise is the safe, CIO-approved choice for deploying AI at scale. Pricing is opaque and negotiable, and the value over ChatGPT Team is thinner than OpenAI's sales reps suggest.
#4Zapier★ Cautious-Buy· starter★ 4.6 · 3,724 reviews No-code automation platform connecting 6,000+ apps
The default, despite everything
Zapier has the largest integration catalog in iPaaS and remains the easiest starting point for non-technical automation. But pricing scales harshly with task volume and the Central AI agent push feels bolted on.
#5Dust★ Cautious-Buy· professional Enterprise AI agent platform — build custom agents wired to your company's tools, deployed across the team.
The European answer to enterprise AI agents
Dust gives mid-market and enterprise teams a platform to build custom AI agents wired to their existing tools (Notion, Slack, Drive, Salesforce, GitHub). Strong in Europe; faces hard competition from Glean, Microsoft Copilot, and Gemini for Workspace elsewhere.
AI assistant integrated across Microsoft 365 apps
The default if you're already paying Microsoft
Microsoft 365 Copilot is bundled into existing E3/E5 contracts, integrates everywhere, and reaches millions of users without a separate procurement cycle. The capability is competent but rarely best-in-class.
Chinese frontier AI lab — open-weight reasoning models that outperform GPT-4 at a fraction of the training cost.
The Chinese frontier lab that broke the AI cost curve
DeepSeek-R1 matches OpenAI o1 quality at training costs that should not be possible. The API at ~$0.14/M tokens (vs. $15+ for Claude/GPT-5) is real. The Chinese-origin concern is real for some buyers.
The most widely adopted AI API — GPT-4o, embeddings, image generation, and speech.
The default LLM API, with shrinking moats
OpenAI still has the best brand recognition and the most mature partner ecosystem, but Anthropic and Google have caught up on quality and undercut on price for most production workloads. Default to it; do not lock to it.
Not sure which alternative fits?
Describe your situation. The advisor reads your goals, constraints, and existing stack — then names 3 of the above with honest tradeoffs.
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