🧰 AI Toolbox
AI tools worth using in 2026
Tools we've tried, stumbled with, and kept—organized by use case. ⭐ Starred = most-used in each category.
🦅 General LLM chat 💻 AI coding assistants 🚀 AI app builders 🎨 Image generation 🎬 Video generation 🎙️ Voice / audio 🤖 Agents / automation 🔍 RAG / knowledge bases ⚙️ Models & platforms 📊 Monitoring / eval 📚 Learning resources
🦅 General LLM chat
Daily use: writing, thinking, Q&A, coding
⭐ Claude
free + paid By Anthropic. Flagship Opus 4.8 — best writing & reasoning.
⭐ ChatGPT
free + paid By OpenAI. GPT-5.5 — biggest ecosystem, most integrations.
Gemini
free + paid By Google. Gemini 3.5 — multimodal + deepest product integration.
DeepSeek
free Open-weight V4 — the price/performance champion.
Qwen
free + paid By Alibaba (formerly Tongyi). Strongest open ecosystem, cheap API.
Kimi
free Moonshot AI. Open-weight K2, long context + long-horizon agents.
Grok
free + paid By xAI. Real-time + X integration, iterating fast.
Mistral Le Chat
free + paid By Mistral (France). EU/privacy-friendly, self-hostable.
💻 AI coding assistants
IDE plugins / CLI agents / editors — AI touching your code directly
⭐ Claude Code
paid Official CLI/desktop coding agent from Anthropic. Subagents + 1M context.
⭐ Codex
free + paid OpenAI official coding agent. CLI + cloud + IDE; open-source CLI, BYOK.
Cursor
free + paid Most popular AI-native IDE. Composer for multi-file edits.
GitHub Copilot
free + paid Widest reach; now an async agent (issue → PR).
Windsurf
free + paid AI IDE (Cascade agent / Codemaps). Now part of Cognition.
Devin
paid By Cognition. Autonomous cloud AI software engineer in a sandbox.
Cline
free + BYOK VS Code extension. Autonomous agent, fully open source, BYOK.
Zed
free + paid Blazing-fast Rust editor with a built-in agent (ACP).
Aider
free + BYOK Command-line AI pair programmer, git-first, minimalist.
Continue
free + BYOK VS Code / JetBrains plugin, fully open source, BYOK.
🚀 AI app builders
One prompt → a running web app (prompt-to-app)
⭐ Lovable
free + paid Prompt-to-full-stack-app; fastest-growing vibe-coding product.
v0
free + paid By Vercel. Now a full-stack agent (code + DB + deploy), not just UI.
Bolt.new
free + paid In-browser AI builds you a full web app.
Replit Agent
free + paid Agent 3 builds and deploys apps online; can even build agents.
🎨 Image generation
Text-to-image / image-to-image
⭐ Gemini Image (Nano Banana)
free + paid By Google. Tops the arena, great quality + reasoning, strong free tier.
GPT Image
free + paid By OpenAI (replaces DALL·E). Reasoning-based image gen, in ChatGPT.
Midjourney
paid Best artistic quality. Latest V7 series. Discord + Web.
FLUX
free + paid Black Forest Labs. FLUX.2 open/commercial, strong photoreal + editing.
Ideogram
free + paid Best at rendering text (posters, logos).
Recraft
free + paid Only major generator with native vector/SVG output.
Adobe Firefly
free + paid Cleanest commercial licensing — best for brand assets.
Stable Diffusion
free OG open source. Runs locally, huge community.
🎬 Video generation
Text-to-video / image-to-video
⭐ Veo
free + paid By Google. Veo 3 — most realistic + native audio, up to 4K.
Seedance
free + paid By ByteDance. Multimodal reference input, strong physics + value.
Kling
free + paid By Kuaishou. Multi-shot storytelling + realistic human motion.
Runway
free + paid Hollywood favorite. Gen-4 with strong control + Director Mode.
Luma Dream Machine
free + paid Ray3, native HDR, great image-to-video.
Pika
free + paid Precise image-to-video (start/end frames), social-friendly.
🎙️ Voice / audio
TTS, voice cloning, transcription, music
⭐ ElevenLabs
free + paid De facto TTS + voice-cloning standard. Eleven v3, 70+ languages.
OpenAI Realtime Voice
paid gpt-realtime speech-to-speech; powers ChatGPT Advanced Voice.
Cartesia
free + paid Sonic-3, ~40ms ultra-low-latency TTS for voice agents.
Suno
free + paid One-click full songs with lyrics; leads consumer music gen.
Udio
free + paid Suno competitor, strong audio (pivoting to licensed platform).
Whisper
free OpenAI open-source transcription; for new builds use gpt-4o-transcribe.
AudioPen
free + paid Voice-to-notes, designed for dictation.
🤖 Agents / automation
Let AI complete multi-step tasks autonomously
⭐ Claude Desktop + MCP
free + paid MCP is now a cross-vendor standard (OpenAI/Google adopted). The standard for local control.
ChatGPT Agent + Agents SDK
free + paid OpenAI computer-using agent + multi-agent framework with a sandbox.
LangGraph
free Stateful multi-step orchestration; v1 is the production default.
CrewAI
free + paid Role-oriented multi-agent framework, high enterprise adoption.
Cline
free + BYOK Open-source autonomous agent that runs commands and edits code.
n8n
free + paid Visual workflow automation with native AI agent nodes.
AutoGen / AG2
free Microsoft multi-agent framework; succeeded by AG2 / MS Agent Framework.
🔍 RAG / knowledge bases
Turn your docs into LLM-queryable knowledge
⭐ NotebookLM
free By Google. Easiest—upload files and ask.
LlamaIndex
free De facto RAG framework, broadest integrations, production-focused.
LangChain
free Broadest LLM application framework + agent ecosystem.
Pinecone
free + paid Zero-ops hosted vector database.
pgvector
free Postgres vector extension — best free option if you already use PG.
Weaviate
free + paid Open-source vector DB, strong hybrid retrieval + multi-tenancy.
Qdrant
free + paid Open-source high-performance vector DB, great cost/control.
Cohere Rerank
paid Retrieval rerank (Rerank 3.5), multilingual recall boost.
⚙️ Models & platforms
Open-source model access, hosted inference, training
⭐ Hugging Face
free + paid GitHub of open-source AI. Models / datasets / Spaces / courses.
OpenRouter
free + paid One API routing 400+ models across 60+ providers, failover/cost routing.
Ollama
free One-click local open-source LLMs.
LM Studio
free GUI version of Ollama. Desktop app.
Groq
free + paid Custom LPU silicon — the lowest inference latency.
Fireworks AI
paid Fast serverless inference + fine-tuning, broad catalog.
Together AI
paid Open-source model hosting + fine-tuning, fast and cheap.
Replicate
paid One-click run any open-source model (esp. media).
Modal
paid Serverless GPU, per-second billing.
RunPod
paid GPU cloud rental, cheaper than AWS.
vLLM
free De facto open-source serving engine for high-throughput self-hosting.
📊 Monitoring / eval
Must-have after launching LLM apps
⭐ Langfuse
free + paid Open-source LLM monitoring + eval, self-hostable, most complete.
LangSmith
free + paid LangChain/LangGraph companion: deepest tracing + eval.
Braintrust
free + paid Prompt + eval workflow platform built for teams.
Helicone
free + paid One-line (change base URL) LLM monitoring.
Arize Phoenix
free Open-source LLM observability, 50+ metrics, drift/hallucination.
Promptfoo
free + paid Prompt unit testing + red-teaming, CLI/config-driven.
DeepEval
free pytest-native open-source LLM eval framework.
📚 Learning resources
Free / quality resources for systematic AI learning
⭐ HelloAI Learning Paths
free L0-L7 systematic path (this site).
Karpathy "Zero to Hero"
free Build GPT, Tokenizer from scratch. Masterclass.
Karpathy nanochat
free Train your own ChatGPT clone for ~$100, end-to-end code.
3Blue1Brown Neural Networks
free Best visual intro to deep learning math.
fast.ai
free Top-down practical ML by Jeremy Howard.
Hugging Face LLM Course
free Free LLM / NLP curriculum (formerly NLP Course).
AI Alignment Forum
free Alignment research community.