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, at the office, on the radio. Three names keep coming back: ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot. All three do roughly the same thing, answer questions written in ordinary language, and all three have a free version and a paid one. There is only one real question: for the things you actually do, what do you need?
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 the most neutral of the three, in the sense that it is not tied to anything else you use.
Gemini is Google’s, and that is the whole difference: 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 sits inside Windows and Office. If you spend the day in Word and Excel, this is the one already under your nose, often as a button in the top bar.
Answer quality across the three is very close, and it moves: every few months one overtakes another. Choosing by “which is best” is the wrong way to look at it, because the answer expires. Choosing by where you will use it is the right way, because that does not change.
What the paid plan gives you
The free versions of all three answer normal questions perfectly well. What a subscription buys, and personal plans sit around twenty euros a month, is essentially this:
The better engine without usage limits. On the free version, after a certain number of complex questions, you get moved to a simpler engine until the next day. 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.
Image generation at volume, plus 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 90% of people do, and all of them are within reach of the free version. Before subscribing, use it free for a month: if you never hit the daily limit, the limit is not 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 daily 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, a subscription is money that gives you nothing back. And it is worth checking one thing before paying: if your workplace has Microsoft 365, Copilot may already be included in the company subscription.
There is no winner, there is the one 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 you pick, and even paying, it stays true that they make things up. Not out of malice: they build the answer word by word, and when they do not 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.