The 6 best AI writing generators in 2024

Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene a couple years back, AI-powered writing tools have been cropping up everywhere. Microsoft, Google, Apple, and near enough every other tech company is adding them to their products. Many dedicated AI writing apps have gone from the cutting edge to irrelevant in the space of a year. Having AI generate text isn’t a groundbreaking product anymore—it’s a feature of countless apps. 

With that said, the best AI text generators can still help you work better and faster, and create more polished and on-brand copy. The bar has just shifted much, much higher. If Microsoft Word and Google Docs can generate decent text, then dedicated apps need to bring a whole lot more to the table. These six apps do.

I’ve been covering this kind of generative AI technology for almost a decade. Since AI is supposedly trying to take my job, I’m somewhat professionally interested in the whole situation. Still, I think I’m pretty safe for now. These AI writing tools are incredibly impressive, but you have to work with them, rather than just letting them spit out whatever they want. Left to their own devices, they tend to produce fairly generic and frequently incorrect content, even if it can pass for something a human wrote.

So, if you’re looking for an AI content generator that will help you write compelling copy, publish blog posts a lot quicker, and otherwise take some of the slow-paced typing out of writing, you’ve come to the right place. Let’s dig in. 

The best AI writing software

How do AI writing tools work?

Search Google for AI writing software, and you’ll find dozens of different dedicated options, all with suspiciously similar features. There’s a big reason for this: 95% of these AI writing tools use the same large language models (LLMs) as the back end. Most are just wrappers for the OpenAI and Claude API with a few extra features built on top—though they really try to hide this in their marketing material.

With a bit of steering, you can get very similar results from ChatGPT and Gemini, which use the same LLMs to work as chatbots. If you wanted to, you could even create your own version of an AI writing assistant without code using Zapier’s OpenAI integrations.

This is why apps from Microsoft Word and Google Docs to Notion and Coda have been so quick to add their own AI text generation features. They aren’t having to create a new LLM from scratch—just to partner with one of the major players. (Or in Google’s case, use the LLM its lab has been developing for years.)

As for the underlying LLM models themselves, they work by taking a prompt from you, and then predicting what words will best follow on from your request, based on the data they were trained on. That training data includes books, articles, and other documents across all different topics, styles, and genres—and an unbelievable amount of content scraped from the open internet. Basically, LLMs were allowed to crunch through the sum total of human knowledge to form a deep learning neural network—a complex, many-layered, weighted algorithm modeled after the human brain. Yes, that’s the kind of thing you have to do to create a computer program that generates bad poems. 

If you want to dive more into the specifics, check out the Zapier articles on natural language processing and how ChatGPT works. But suffice it to say: GPT and other large language models are incredibly powerful already—and because of that, these AI writing tools have a lot of potential. 

What makes the best AI text generator?

We know that most AI text generators rely on the same handful of large language models, so no apps are going to stand out because of some dramatic difference in the quality of their output. Creating effective, human-like text is now table stakes.

As I was testing these apps, here’s what I was looking for:

• Tools that were specifically designed for generating great AI-generated text. Dozens of apps can generate text, but dedicated AI text generators make the whole workflow a lot more seamless and repeatable. Unless generating text was a major selling point of a particular app (and it had the features to back it up), you won’t find it on this list.  

• An interface that gives you a lot of control over the text output. The more options you have to influence the tone, style, language, content, and everything else, the better. I didn’t want tools where you just entered a headline and let the AI do the rest; these are all tools that you collaborate with so you can write great copy quickly. The best AI writing tools also let you set a default brand voice that’s always on and create a knowledge base that it can use as a source of truth.

• Ease of use. You shouldn’t have to fight to get the AI to do what you want. With AI writing software like this, there will always be some redoing and reshaping to get the exact output you want, but working with the AI shouldn’t feel like wrangling a loose horse. Similarly, great help docs and good onboarding were both a major plus. 

• Affordability. ChatGPT is currently free, and all these tools are built on top of APIs that cost pennies. There was no hard and fast price limit, but the more expensive tools had to justify the extra expense with better features and a nicer app. After all, almost every app will produce pretty similar outputs regardless of what it costs. 

• Apps that weren’t designed to make spam content. Previous text-generating tools could “spin” content by changing words to synonyms so that unscrupulous website owners could rip off copyrighted material and generally create lots of low-quality, low-value content. None of that on this list.

Even with these criteria, I had more than 50 different AI writing tools to test. Remember: it’s relatively easy for a skilled developer to build a wrapper around the GPT API, so I had to dig deep into each one to find out if it was any good or just had a flashy marketing site.

I tested each app by getting it to write a number of different short- and long-form bits of copy, but as expected, there were very few meaningful quality differences. Instead, it was the overall user experience, depth of features, and affordability that determined whether an app made this list.

The best AI writing generators at a glance

Best AI writing generator for businesses

Jasper (Web)

Jasper pros:

• One of the most mature and feature-filled options on the list 

• Integrates with Grammarly, Surfer, and its own AI art generator

Jasper cons:

Jasper (formerly Jarvis) is one of the most feature-filled and powerful AI content generators. It was among the first wave of apps built on top of GPT, and its relative longevity means that it feels like a more mature tool than most of the other apps I tested. It’s continued to grow and develop in the months since I first compiled this list.

If you have a business and budget isn’t your primary concern, Jasper should be one of the first apps you try. It’s pivoted to mostly focus on marketing campaigns rather than just generating generic AI content. That’s not a bad thing, but it means that plans now start at $49/month for individual creators and $69/month for features like a knowledge base and AI image generation.

Jasper claims to intelligently combine “several large language models” so that “you get the highest quality outputs and superior uptime.” While I can’t say that I noticed a massive difference between Jasper’s output and any other app’s, it does give you a few solid controls so that your content matches your brand. 

For example, you can create a brand Voice by uploading some appropriate sample text. Based on a few examples of my writing, Jasper created a style that is “knowledgeable, straightforward, and slightly irreverent, with a clear focus on providing in-depth, accurate information. It’s authoritative yet approachable, using humor and a conversational style to make complex topics more digestible.” I don’t think that’s a bad summary of the content I fed in, and its output for a few test blog posts was significantly closer to my writing than when I asked it to use a generic casual tone of voice. It still used a few words I wouldn’t, but it was close enough.

Similarly, there’s a Knowledge Base where you can add facts about your business and products so Jasper gets important details right. When combined, these two features make creating good AI-generated content significantly easier. For a large organization that’s concerned with consistent messaging across multiple departments and platforms, I suspect Jasper can be really handy.

Otherwise, Jasper rounds things out with some nice integrations. It has a built-in ChatGPT competitor and AI art generator (though, again, lots of other apps have both), plays nice with the SEO app Surfer, and there’s a browser extension to bring Jasper everywhere.

You can also connect Jasper to thousands of other apps using Zapier and kick off Jasper’s AI generation from wherever you spend your time. Learn more about how to automate Jasper, or try one of these pre-built workflows.

Jasper pricing: Creator plan from $49/month with one brand voice. Pro plan starts at $69/month for three brand voices and 10 knowledge assets.

Best AI writing assistant for advertising and social media

Anyword (Web)

Anyword pros:

• Makes it very easy to generate content for social media and ads

• Engagement scores and other metrics are surprisingly accurate; plus, it integrates with various ad platforms

Anyword cons:

If you’re as concerned with click-throughs, conversion rates, and CPM as you are with generating AI text, then Anyword is the app for you. It’s designed with performance marketers in mind. 

Anyword has two main content creation tools: The Blog Wizard for longer-form content marketing and the Data-Driven Editor for ads, social media captions, marketing emails, and the like. Both allow you to set what talking points you want to hit, indicate the features you want to highlight, use your brand voice and vocabulary, and target your content toward specific audiences. 

The Data-Driven Editor, in particular, is targeted at social media and ads. In addition to allowing you to create content with specific platforms in mind, Anyword analyzes everything it generates (or you create) and gives it an engagement score that compares how it stacks up to the content it has in its database. While I certainly can’t confirm the validity of any of these scores, they at least pass the sniff test. I generally thought the AI-generated content that Anyword scored higher was better—and even when I disagreed, I still liked one of the top options. 

With all this focus on marketing, it should probably be no surprise that Anyword integrates directly with Google Ads, Meta ads, HubSpot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and all your social media accounts—including LinkedIn. Depending on the channel, it can use historical data or posts to help create new content.

While Anyword isn’t as broadly useful as Jasper, if you’re more focused on advertising and social content than anything else, it’s well worth a look. 

Anyword pricing: Starter plan from $49/month for 1 user and 1 brand voice.

Best AI text generator for AI compliance

Writer (Web)

Writer pros:

• Free of a lot of the controversy surrounding LLMs

• Surprisingly capable as an editor, making sure your team sticks to the style guide and doesn’t make any wild claims

Writer cons:

Most LLMs come with quite a lot of baggage. OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and others have been less than transparent about exactly what data was used to create their AI models. Nearly every AI company is facing some kind of lawsuit over the use of copyrighted material in its training dataset. No one is really denying that protected materials—potentially from pirated databases—were used to train these models; the question is just whether or not it falls under fair use.

For most people, this is a nebulous situation filled with edge cases and gray areas. Realistically, it’s going to be years before it’s all sorted out, and even then, things will have moved on so far that the results of any lawsuit are likely to be redundant. But for businesses that want to use AI writing tools without controversy attached, many AI tools are a no-go—and will be for the foreseeable future.

Which is where Writer comes in.

On the face of things, Writer is much the same as any of my top picks. It can generate on-brand content suitable for any purpose—though if you want more than five users, more control over your brand voice, or the ability to use a knowledge base, you need to sign up for a custom Enterprise plan. (The publicly available Team plan feels almost like a demo.) 

But where Writer stands out is its attention to corporate compliance, both from a policy and legal perspective. It can work like a company-specific Grammarly-like editor, keeping on top of legal compliance, ensuring you don’t make any unsupported claims, and checking that everything matches your style guide—even when humans are writing the text. There are also specific versions of its  Palmyra LLM tailored for medical and financial content. 

In side-by-side comparisons, Writer’s text generations sometimes felt a little weaker than the ones from Jasper or Anyword. Palmyra is definitely a little hamstrung by Writer’s attempts to keep everything above board, rather than just using every available bit of available training data, regardless of copyright. Still, it’s not really meant to be used right out of the box. It’s designed for large enterprises that can configure detailed compliance preferences, add all their own training data, and generally set things up so that they have a writing tool that works exactly as they need it to.

Writer also integrates with Zapier, so you can use Writer to create content directly from whatever apps you use most. Learn more about how to automate Writer, or take a look at these pre-made workflows.

Writer pricing: Team from $18/user/month for up to 5 users; after that, it’s an Enterprise plan.

Best AI text generator for content marketing

Writesonic (Web)

Writesonic pros:

Writesonic cons:

Of all the apps on this list, Writesonic gives the highest priority to generating search-optimized content. Its AI Article Writer tool combines keyword analysis, competitor research, and reference finding into the whole article creation process. You can also use its SEO tools independently. While none of this is a replacement for full-featured SEO tools, it’s still handy to have.

Unfortunately, Writesonic makes things a bit more complicated than some other apps price-wise. Writesonic has three versions of its AI Article Writer available: AI Article Writer 4.0 which seems to use GPT-3.5, AI Article Writer 5.0 which uses GPT-4, and AI Article Writer 6.0, which uses the latest models (and is also available in three quality versions). They also have different levels of automatic web research, and slightly different search research tools. AI Article Writer 5.0 and AI Article Writer 6.0 cost between 5 and 100 AI credits, depending on what quality you want. 

To be honest, AI Article Writer 4.0 is fairly useless at this point. The drop-off in quality from the latest versions is huge. As a result, the $20/month individual plan that includes unlimited generations with it plus 50 credits to use towards the more powerful models is hard to recommend. That’s only 10 uses of AI Article Writer 5.0, and two or three of 6.0.

All this complexity is doubly strange because Writesonic used to have the most transparent model selection process going. It first made this list because it was the only app that allowed you to directly select what LLM it used. I’m optimistic that I’m testing it at a transitional time, and that things will be a lot more streamlined the next time I review it—or when you go to sign up.

Otherwise, it’s another competent AI writing tool. You can create brand voices, work in its Google Docs-style editor, and even integrate it with Zapier, so you can send new copy to any of the other apps you use in your writing workflow. Learn more about how to automate Writesonic, or get started with one of these examples.

Writesonic pricing: Individual plan from $20/month with 50 credits; Standard from $99/month with 1,000 credits and additional features

Best free AI writing generator (with affordable upgrades)

Rytr (Web)

Rytr pros:

Rytr cons:

Most of the apps on this list are aimed at professionals, businesses, and anyone else with a budget. Jasper and Anyword start at $49/month; Writer is $18/month but very quickly jumps to custom pricing. These aren’t exactly hobbyist-friendly sums of money, so if you want to explore AI text generators without spending as much, give Rytr a go.

There’s a basic free plan that’s good for 10,000 characters (around 2,500 words) per month. The Unlimited plan starts at $9/month and adds features like a custom tone. There’s also a Premium plan for $29/month that supports multiple tones and allows you to configure custom use cases, but at that point, I’d probably recommend making the leap to an intro plan with Jasper or Anyword.

Feature-wise, there are some trade-offs. Rytr feels pretty barebones and seems to rely on the cheaper or older LLMs. When I asked it what model it was using, it told me GPT-3. While still good, that’s far from state-of-the-art if true. And because you don’t have as much control over the brand voice or knowledge it relies on, there’s definitely the potential to create less effective content with Rytr than with some of the other options. Still, at just $9/month, I couldn’t cut it from the list. 

Rytr pricing: Free plan for 10,000 characters/month and lots of other features; Unlimited plan from $9/month.

Best AI writing tool for writing fiction

Sudowrite (Web)

Sudowrite pros:

Sudowrite cons:

• It’s still an AI text generator, so it can produce nonsensical metaphors, clichéd plots, and incoherent action

• Very controversial in fiction writing circles

When I saw Sudowrite’s marketing copy, I didn’t think for a second it would make it onto this list. Then I tried it and…I kind of love it. Sudowrite is a totally different tool than all the others on this list because it’s aimed at fiction writers. And with that, comes a lot of controversy. Sudowrite has been called “an insult to writers everywhere” and has been generally dismissed as a tool for hacks by a lot of Very Online writers. And while it’s true that it’s nowhere close to replacing a human author, it’s fun, functional, and can genuinely help with writing a work of fiction. 

While you can use Sudowrite to generate an outline, create all your characters, and basically write the whole story by itself, the results are likely to be very weird. Instead, its assistive tools are what make it more likable and useful.

Let’s start with Describe. Select a word or phrase, click Describe, and the AI will generate a few suggestions for the sight, smell, taste, sound, and touch of the thing, as well as a couple of metaphors. If you’re the kind of writer who struggles to add sensory depth to your short stories, it can help you get into the habit of describing things in more interesting ways.

Then there’s Brainstorm. It allows you to use the AI to generate possible dialogue options, character names and traits, plot points, places, and other details about your world from your descriptions and cues. If you know you want a big hairy warrior with a huge sword but can’t think of a good name, it can suggest a few, like Thorgrim and Bohart.

There’s also an extensive collection of user-created plugins, that can give you feedback or up the…intensity of romantic scenes.

And these are just scratching the surface. Sure, if you over-rely on the AI to solve all your problems, you’ll probably end up with an impressively generic story. But if you use it as a writing buddy to bounce ideas off and get you out of a rut, it’s got serious potential.

Best of all, Sudowrite is super easy to use. The onboarding, tool tips, and general helpful vibe of the app are something other developers could learn from. 

Sudowrite pricing: Hobby & Student plan from $19/month for 225,000 AI credits/month.

Other AI writing tools to consider

AI writing tools are increasingly a feature rather than a dedicated app. Some good AI writing generators didn’t make the list, either because text generation wasn’t the focus of the app or they didn’t meet my criteria in some other way. Here are a few you might consider:

• Every chatbot. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are surprisingly competent and fun to use. And best of all, you can use them for free.

• Every document suite. Both Microsoft Office and Google Workspace are adding lots of AI tools, though most are aimed at enterprises. If you use them, give the AI features a look.

• Wordtune and Grammarly are both great tools for editing and improving your own writing. 

• Lots of notes apps have AI features. For example, Notion AI and Coda AI both add a powerful AI tool directly into their respective apps.

• Surfer and Frase are both AI-powered SEO tools. They fell slightly out of scope for this list, but they can both help you optimize and improve your content—AI-generated or not. 

• Email apps, texting apps, and countless others. Honestly, AI text generators are going to be everywhere soon.

All of the apps on this list offer at the very least a free trial, so I’d suggest trying some of them out for a few minutes until you find the one that seems to work best with your workflow.

Related reading:

This article was originally published in April 2023. The most recent update was in September 2024.