AI assistants and AI agents: all the profiles

Assistant, agent, chatbot: what’s the difference?

People often use these three words interchangeably. They mean different things, though, and the difference matters when you choose.

• A chatbot is a program that chats. It’s a broad term: it covers everything from customer service bots following a fixed script to the latest AI tools.
• An AI assistant is a chatbot powered by a language model, a program trained on huge amounts of text to understand and produce language. You type or talk, it answers: it drafts an email, explains a concept, summarizes a document, suggests ideas. It works inside the conversation, and you’re the one who acts afterward.
• An AI agent takes actions for you. You give it a goal (“find me some train times and fill in the booking form”), and it chains the steps on its own: browsing sites, clicking, filling in forms, comparing, sometimes booking. It can save you time, but it can also make mistakes with real consequences.

The line keeps moving: more and more assistants offer an agent mode as an option. That’s why every profile spells out what the service can do on its own, and what stays in your hands.

What each profile covers

Every profile follows the same structure, so you can compare them easily:

• A dated price: the plans and their prices, taken from the provider’s official page, with the date they were checked.
• What it can do on its own: web search, reading files, creating images, voice, memory, and possibly actions in a web browser.
• Language quality: how comfortable it is understanding and writing in your language.
• Privacy: the available settings (chat history, whether your conversations are used for training) and the provider’s country.
• A “who is it for?” verdict: the kind of person and use it suits best, and when you’d be better off looking elsewhere.

The data is re-checked every month. How we collect it is described on our methodology page.

How to choose

Start with a simple question: do you need something that helps you think and write, or something that does things for you? In the first case, an assistant is more than enough. In the second, look at agents, starting with low-stakes tasks.

Then:

• Set your budget. Many services have a free tier; check what it limits before paying.
• Start from your main use, not from the longest feature list.
• Think about your data. If you plan to share work or personal documents, read the privacy section of the profile.
• Try before you commit. Test two services on a real task and keep the one that suits you.

For a shortcut, the “Which AI is right for me?” quiz recommends an assistant in 6 questions, and the AI assistants comparison lays out every criterion in a filterable table. Before handing a task to an agent, run it through our Can I trust an agent with this? tool. And if a term puzzles you, the glossary explains it simply.