There are now several thousand products calling themselves AI tools. Almost all of them are a thin interface over four or five underlying models. The useful question is not which tool is smartest, but which layer of the stack you are actually buying: a model, an assistant, or a workflow.
Buy the layer, not the logo
Most procurement mistakes come from comparing products that sit at different layers. A model API and a chat assistant are not substitutes, even when the same company sells both. Decide which layer you need first, then compare inside that layer only.
- Model API — you are building. Optimise for price per token, latency and context window.
- Chat assistant — your team is doing knowledge work. Optimise for breadth, file handling and admin controls.
- Coding tool — your engineers ship code. Optimise for repository awareness and review integration.
- Answer engine — you research. Optimise for citation quality and recency.
Where each option wins
Claude leads on sustained coding and long-document reasoning. Gemini wins on context size and price at the fast end. ChatGPT is the broadest single surface and the safest default when you can only buy one thing. Mistral is the answer when data has to stay in your own network or in the EU. Perplexity replaces search rather than your assistant.
The gap between the frontier models is now smaller than the gap between a good prompt and a lazy one.
The cost trap
Seat pricing looks cheap and token pricing looks expensive, until you measure. A twenty-dollar seat used twice a week costs far more per useful output than a metered API call inside an automation that runs a thousand times. Instrument usage before you scale a contract.
How to run a two-week evaluation
- Collect twenty real tasks from your own backlog — never synthetic prompts.
- Run each task on two or three candidates with identical inputs.
- Score for correctness, edit distance to shippable, and time saved.
- Weight the score by how often that task actually occurs.
- Re-run the same set every quarter; rankings move fast.
Do this once and the vendor question answers itself. Skip it and you will be relitigating the decision every time a new benchmark chart circulates.
The aiz.to editorial team
We buy every subscription at retail price, run the same task suite across providers, and publish the scores unedited. Read the full methodology on our about page.
How we test