Which AI is right for me? Model selection guide
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, or a local model? Find out with a few simple questions which AI assistant is best suited for your work, studies, or business.
Ask First: "For What Purpose?"
No model is the best at everything. Making the right choice starts with what you do most often, not from rankings tables. The table below is a good starting point:
| If you mostly... | Suggested options | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Have everyday and varied tasks | ChatGPT, Gemini | Versatile, with image and voice |
| Write or edit | Claude, ChatGPT | Natural and accurate writing |
| Do programming | Claude, ChatGPT, DeepSeek | Code accuracy and agentic tools |
| Read long documents and books | Claude, Gemini | Large context window |
| Want research and sourced search | Perplexity, Gemini | Answers with citations |
| Work with Office files | Microsoft Copilot | Integration with Word and Excel |
| Privacy is critical for you | Qwen, Llama, DeepSeek locally | Data does not leave your computer |
| Have a very limited API budget | DeepSeek, smaller models of large families | Low cost per token |
Five Criteria That Truly Matter
1. Quality in the Persian Language
Most models are trained on English text. Large commercial models (GPT, Claude, Gemini) are significantly better in Persian; small open models usually produce stiff and sometimes incorrect Persian sentences. If your end audience is Persian-speaking, take this criterion seriously.
2. Accessibility
Many major AI services are not officially offered in all countries, and signing up and paying for them can be difficult. Before planning for serious work, check the terms of use and stable access. Open-weight models do not have this limitation because they run on your own hardware.
3. Cost
- Regular user: The free version of one or two services is usually sufficient.
- Pro user: A monthly subscription to a main service is worth it; you don't need to buy all of them.
- Developer: API cost is based on tokens. For high-volume, simple tasks (like text classification), smaller and cheaper models of each family are a better choice, and for complex tasks, flagship models.
4. Privacy
Anything you enter into an online chatbot is processed on the creator company's servers. Read the data retention policies and use enterprise versions or local execution for confidential information.
5. Ecosystem
If all your work is in Google, Gemini makes life easier; if you work in Microsoft 365, Copilot. For programming, tools like Claude Code or Codex are more important than the model itself.
A Practical Method for Choosing
- Choose three real and repetitive tasks of your own (e.g., writing an official email, summarizing a report, debugging a piece of code).
- Try the same prompt in two or three models.
- Compare the outputs in terms of accuracy, Persian quality, and the amount of editing required.
- Choose the model that required the least editing.
To get started, you can see the results of identical prompts on different models in the Prompt Lab and read ready-made comparisons in the Comparisons section.
Summary
If you are still not sure: start with the free version of ChatGPT or Gemini, try Claude for writing and document analysis, and if privacy is important, run an open model on your own computer. More important than choosing the model is learning how to write a good prompt; a skill that will be useful across all models.