The 6 best AI writing generators in 2026

Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene a few years back, AI-powered writing tools are everywhere. Microsoft, Google, Apple, and near enough every other tech company have added them to their products, whether it’s a document suite, email app, or even just a social messaging app. Most dedicated AI writing apps went from the cutting edge to irrelevant in the space of a year or two and have had to pivot to different business models and feature sets. 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?

The big secret about AI writing generators is that large language models (LLMs)—the AI models that power every chatbot, every AI document suite, and almost every AI feature in any other app—are AI writing generators. Every other feature they have, from searching the web and translating text to using apps through APIs and solving puzzles, is based on their ability to generate human-like text. All the bells and whistles hide it, but at the core of things, generating emails and blog posts is exactly what these models were built to do. 

LLMs work by taking a prompt from you or the app you’re using, and then predicting what words will best follow on from the 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. 

This is why there were so many AI writing generators available a few years back. Most were just wrappers for the OpenAI and Claude API with a few extra features built on top—though they really tried to hide this in their marketing material.

Of course, this is also why apps like Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and Notion have been easily able 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.)

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 kinds of large language models, so no apps are going to stand out because of some dramatic difference in the quality of their output. Unlike a few years ago, 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 for thousands of words. 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 quality 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 OpenAI 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

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Best AI writing generator for businesses

Jasper (Web)

Jasper pros:

Jasper cons:

Jasper 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 over the past couple of years, and while it now includes lots of additional features, at its core it’s still an AI text generator.

If you have a business and budget isn’t your primary concern, Jasper should be one of the first apps you try. It’s mostly focused on marketing campaigns and business communications rather than just generating generic AI content. That’s not a bad thing, but it means that plans now start at $69/month. 

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 grouped under Jasper IQ so that your content matches your brand. 

These include Brand Voice, Audiences, a Knowledge Base, and a Style Guide. They work by tailoring Jasper’s output to suit you and your business. For example, Jasper created a Brand Voice for me that’s “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 that I could edit it to fit—and someone not as familiar with my writing might not notice the difference straight off.

Things are similar with the Knowledge Base, Audiences, and Style Guide features, as well as the content generation controls that allow you to add examples and references to use. When combined, these 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 chatbot that can create content (for example, generate social posts from your blog post draft) and an AI art generator (though, again, lots of other apps have both), 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: Pro plan starts at $69/month

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’s content creation tools 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. There’s a long-form editor that makes it easier to generate blog posts and web copy, and a short-form editor that’s aimed at social posts and ads. 

This short-form editor is especially handy as it allows 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:

• While not a concern for most businesses, Writer’s AI tools are designed to be safer, legally compliant, and free from controversy

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

Writer cons:

Writer originally launched at a time when it seemed like LLMs came with quite a lot of baggage. Nearly every AI company was facing some kind of lawsuit over the use of copyrighted material in its training dataset, and no one was sure how things would shake out. OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and other AI companies weren’t denying that protected materials—potentially from pirated databases—were used to train their models; the question was whether or not it falls under fair use.

Well, a few settlements and dismissals later, and it seems AI models are firmly over this kind of scrutiny. No one is arguing that GPT-5 or Claude are unsuitable for most business communications. But there are still situations where an AI text generator with a focus on safety is key, like financial services and healthcare. This is where Writer still earns its place on the list. 

Of course, the changing market has massively changed Writer’s marketing. Now it’s an AI agent platform, though in reality, the same text generation features are at the core of what Writer does best. 

Its attention to corporate compliance, both from a policy and legal perspective, make it more suitable for enterprises that have to ensure that every email, blog article, and social post meets certain standards. Writer 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. 

And the AI agent features really exist. Writer is now a lot more automatable and deployable in different contexts. If you want to, you can automate it using its agent-building features. And 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: Starter from $39/user/month for up to 20 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 a 10-step article creation process. It takes a few minutes, but it guides you through creating high-quality AI-generated content that still aligns with your brand and message. Alternatively, you can upload content you’ve already written and use its SEO tools and Google Docs-like editor to make it more likely to feature in search. 

On top of this, Writesonic can perform an SEO audit of your site and create an AI-powered content strategy based on what your competitors are doing. You can also create writing styles. While none of this is a replacement for full-featured SEO tools, it’s still handy to have. 

But like many of the other apps on this list, Writesonic has also pivoted. In its case, it’s aiming to be a generative engine optimization (GEO) platform—which is like SEO, but for chatbots, AI search engines, and Google’s AI answer boxes. These features are locked away on higher plans, so if you’re just interested in generating search-friendly content, you won’t really see them. But if you’re curious, it enables you to track how your content features on AI platforms like ChatGPT and Google Gemini based on prompts instead of searches. 

As AI search continues to compete directly with non-AI search, this kind of approach is likely to be increasingly necessary for brands looking to maintain their online presence. It’s a little out of scope for this comparison, but if GEO is on your radar, Writesonic is well worth a look. 

Otherwise, on its lower tiers, Writesonic is another competent AI writing tool. It integrates 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: Lite plan from $49/month for SEO and content generation; Professional from $249/month includes GEO 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. Writer starts at $39/month, Writesonic and Anyword start at $49/month, and Jasper starts at $69/month. 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-4. While still very 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. (And I’d argue its recent FTC settlement only backs my point that Rytr is easy to use and accessible.)

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, that kind of defeats the purpose of writing fiction. Instead, its assistive tools are what make it more likable and useful.

Sudowrite helps you create a Story Bible with the plot, characters, beats, and style all mapped out. While it can then use the information for generating a draft, it also allows you to get the details straight in your head. Just having a structure and some guidance goes a long way when you’re staring at a blank page. 

Then there are features like Describe and Brainstorm. They can generate a few suggestions for the sight, smell, taste, sound, and touch of something or come up with character names and dialogue ideas.  If you’re the kind of writer who struggles to add sensory depth to your short stories or gets stuck when they can’t come up with the name of a random character, it can help you through. 

Throw in Muse, its custom LLM designed for fiction writing that understands viewpoints; a visual canvas for outlining everything; and an extensive collection of user-created plugins that can give you feedback or up the…intensity of romantic scenes; and Sudowrite really has a lot to offer.

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, and they can generate text as you need it.

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

• Email apps, texting apps, and countless others. Honestly, AI text generators are everywhere.

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 November 2025.