Best AI tools for writing and editing

Drafting, editing, tone and style adjustment, summarizing, and long-document work. The free tier includes Artifacts (a side panel for iterating on one document without re-pasting it each turn) and Projects (persistent style/context grounding), both made free as of a February 2026 rollout.

Iterating on one long document — an essay, a cover letter — in place via Artifacts, rather than regenerating the full text from scratch on every turn.

Free tier is restricted to Sonnet-class models, not Opus. Usage resets on a rolling 5-hour window; Anthropic does not publish a fixed message count, only that it depends on demand and message length.

File uploads: 20 files per chat, 30MB max each. No official free-tier-specific context-window figure is published separately from the general 200K figure quoted for Projects.

Conversations are used for training by default unless you opt out (Settings → Privacy → "Help improve Claude"); opting out is not retroactive. Retention is 5 years if training is allowed, 30 days if opted out.

Drafting, editing, brainstorming, and tone shifts via chat. Canvas — OpenAI's equivalent to Claude's Artifacts, a side-by-side editing view — is Plus-and-above only, not available free.

Quick, single-shot drafting — short emails, outlines, social copy — where you don't need Canvas's iterative in-place editing.

No official fixed daily/hourly message cap is published; free users get a "limited number" of top-model messages per 5-hour window before falling back to a lighter model. OpenAI has announced ads coming to the free tier in 2026.

Custom GPTs are usable but not creatable for free; web browsing and search are free. Exact context-window size for the free tier is not officially published.

Conversations may be used for training by default unless opted out (Settings → Data Controls → "Improve the model for everyone"); the opt-out is forward-only, not retroactive. Any message you thumbs-up or thumbs-down can be used for training regardless of the toggle.

Full-sentence and paragraph rewrites, tone adjustment, draft generation from a prompt, and reply/compose assistance — beyond its classic grammar-check, across browser, desktop, and mobile.

Rewriting an already-drafted email or essay to hit a specific tone ("more confident," "more concise") — not long-form drafting from a blank page.

Prompt-capped on every tier, including paid; optimized for short-to-medium rewrites rather than long-form generation.

100 generative AI prompts per month. Premium raises this to 1,000/month; Pro/Business/Education to 2,000/month.

"Product Improvement and Training" is on by default for Free, Premium, and single-user Pro accounts — content can be used to improve models unless manually toggled off in account settings. Off by default for Education/Enterprise.

Two surfaces: the standalone Gemini app for conversational drafting and brainstorming, and "Help me write" — an inline generative tool inside Google Docs for drafting, rewriting, formalizing, elaborating, or shortening text in place.

The Gemini app for brainstorming and outlining outside a document; "Help me write" for polishing text inside a Doc you're already working in.

Google's own support pages frame guaranteed free access to "Help me write" as available mainly through "Google Workspace Experiments" — an opt-in early-access program, rolled out gradually by region and language, that may not be available to every user yet. Reliable access otherwise requires a paid Google AI or Workspace plan.

The Gemini app's free tier is reported at roughly 30 prompts/day and 20 images/day per Google's own limits page, with Deep Research capped at 5 reports/month.

"Gemini Apps Activity" is on by default for most accounts outside the EEA — while on, conversations (including a content sample) may be used to train models, sometimes with human review. Opting out stops future use, though past saved activity persists until manually deleted.