ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot: what's the difference and do you need to pay
Three names you hear everywhere, all doing much the same thing. What actually separates them, when the free version is enough, and when a subscription earns its money.
- Level
- principiante
- Time
- 15 minutes
- What you need
- Nothing, a browser will do
People talk about them in the pub and at the office. Three names keep coming back: ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot. All three do roughly the same thing, which is answer questions written in ordinary language, and all three have a free version and a paid one. What’s left to work out is what you need, for the things you actually do.
AI assistant: a program you write a request to, which answers with a piece of text. It does not look the answer up in an archive: it builds it word by word, which is why it sometimes gets things confidently wrong. Model: the "engine" underneath. Each company has several, some faster and some better, and paid plans give you access to the better ones.
What really separates them
Less than you would think, on answer quality. A lot, on where you already find them.
ChatGPT started it all and is the best known. It is a website and an app in its own right. You go there on purpose, ask your question, leave. It is also the most neutral of the three, because it is not tied to anything else you use.
Gemini is Google’s, and that is where the whole difference lies, because it sits inside the things you already have. You find it at the top of search results, in the Android app, inside Gmail and Google Docs. If your digital life revolves around a Gmail address, this is the one you meet without looking for it.
Copilot is Microsoft’s, and it comes in two different forms that are worth not confusing. There is the assistant proper, inside Windows and on the website, free like the other two. And then there is the one built into Word, Excel and Outlook, which is a separate licence and has to be bought for a workplace. If the button is there in the top bar at work, it means somebody has already paid for it on your behalf.
Answer quality across the three is very close, and it moves about, because every few months one overtakes another. Asking which is best gets you little, given how fast the answer expires. Look instead at where you would use it, because that doesn’t change.
What the paid plan gives you
The free versions of all three answer normal questions perfectly well. What a subscription buys, with personal plans sitting around twenty euros a month, cheaper middle tiers having appeared recently and prices changing often, is roughly this.
The better engine, with no usage limits. On the free version, after a certain number of complex questions, you get moved to a simpler engine for a few hours, until the count starts again. If you ask two questions a week you will never notice. If you work with it daily you notice immediately.
Reading your files. Uploading a forty-page PDF and asking for a summary, or a spreadsheet and asking it to read through. The free versions do this in a limited way, or not at all.
And image generation at volume, along with some voice and deep-research features.
When the free version is enough (nearly always)
The free version is enough if you use it to have something explained, write or fix an email, summarise a text you paste in, translate, get an idea for a recipe or a gift, work out what a piece of officialese actually says.
These are what the vast majority of people open an assistant for, and all of them are within reach of the free version. Before subscribing, use it free for a month. If you never run into the limit, then the limit isn’t your problem.
You do not need to subscribe to all three to compare them. Put the exact same question to two of them, see whose answer helps you more, keep that one. They are free: the comparison costs ten minutes.
When a subscription earns its money
In three specific cases. If you use it for work every day and the limit stops you mid-afternoon. If you need it to read long documents, contracts, accounts, manuals. If you need a specific feature the free tier lacks, generating a lot of images for instance.
Outside those three cases, a subscription is money that gives you nothing back. One thing to check before you pay, though: if your workplace has Microsoft 365, Copilot may already be included in the company subscription.
There is no winner, and it is best to start from whatever is already within reach: Gemini if you live inside Google, Copilot if you live inside Office, ChatGPT if you would rather not live inside either. Start free with that one, for a month. Pay only when you hit a real limit, not before, and pay for one subscription, not three.
The thing to keep in mind
Whichever of the three you pick, and even paying, it stays true that they make things up. They don’t do it out of malice. They build the answer word by word, and when they don’t know something they build it anyway, in the same confident tone. Dates, figures, names of laws, newspaper articles: if the answer contains a fact you are going to rely on, check it at the source.
We explained the mechanism in what a language model is and why it sometimes invents answers, and for better answers the place to start is writing better requests.