How often is the list updated?

A new edition ships every quarter. Within an edition, individual entries get re-checked on a rolling 90-day cadence. If a tool’s pricing or status changes substantively between editions, we update the entry inline with a dated "Updated" line.

Are featured placements paid?

No. The Top 100 list is entirely editorial — no tool can pay for placement, tier promotion, or a higher numerical rank. Sponsored slots exist elsewhere on the directory (Featured cards on the home page, newsletter sponsorships) and are always marked with an amber "Sponsored" stamp. None of those affect the Top 100.

How can I submit a tool for review?

The submission flow lives at /submit-tool. Submissions go into a weekly editorial review meeting — the team triages everything that came in, and tools that pass first-look get assigned to one of the editors for a full review. Most reviews ship within four weeks of submission.

What does the editorial score mean?

The number out of 5 is a weighted blend of editorial verdict (50%), sustained user ratings (30%), and re-check freshness (20%). It is a publication-grade signal, not a benchmark — two tools with the same score can be very different fits. Read the methodology page if you want the exact rubric.

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Home/Top 100 AI tools

The Top 100 AI tools worth your attention.

Editor-curated and grouped into four tiers — flagships, category leaders, rising stars, and hidden gems. Positions 1–100 are assigned by tier order (flagships → category leaders → rising stars → hidden gems), then by community likes within each tier. Re-checked every quarter for active maintenance, accurate pricing, and currency.

Tools

100

Categories covered

Last review

September 2026

Edition

No. 16

Curated by Jake Snider & Sydney Weiss · Re-checked quarterly · How we review →

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TIER 01

Peak tier

Flagships

The household-name AI tools defining the category. If you only learn a handful, start here.

Editors’ noteThe bar here is "default pick at global scale" — each of these is the tool we would hand someone with zero context. New this edition: Microsoft Copilot.

Tools

Avg rating

4.91

TIER 02

Category leaders

Best-in-class for what they do — the safe pick in their niche.

Editors’ noteEdition 16 seats Qwen, Nano Banana, Grammarly, and Hugging Face here — and retires Jasper and Copy.ai, the copywriting leaders of 2023 that the market has since moved past.

Tools

Avg rating

4.92

TIER 03

Rising stars

Newer tools with strong traction — worth knowing before everyone else does.

Editors’ noteWhere the momentum is: coding agents and app builders take most of the new seats this quarter, and Decagon and Wispr Flow graduate here from the hidden gems.

Tools

Avg rating

4.89

TIER 04

Hidden gems

Strong tools most people miss — under-the-radar picks our editors keep coming back to.

Editors’ noteTrimmed to 23 this edition — nine older picks that stopped keeping pace made way for CodeRabbit and Plaud Note, and every remaining entry was re-verified as shipping and worth a look.

Tools

Avg rating

4.83

#ToolCategoryPricingRatingLikes

DescriptDescript offers all-in-one video & podcast editing with AI, making editing as easy as working with documents

Video Creation

178

Changelog · Edition No. 16 · September 2026

What changed in Edition No. 16.

Thirteen tools joined, twelve left, and six changed tier this quarter. Every entry was re-checked for active maintenance, ownership changes, and current pricing.

In — 13 additions

Microsoft Copilot · Flagship — The assistant built into Windows, Edge, and Microsoft 365 — the most glaring absence from past editions.
Qwen · Category leader — Alibaba’s model family: 167M monthly users in China and one of the most-used open-weight lines worldwide.
Nano Banana · Category leader — Google’s image model, now the default inside Gemini — a billion Nano Banana Pro images in under two months.
Grammarly · Category leader — The writing assistant 40 million people use every day, now the anchor of the Superhuman suite.
OpenClaw · Rising star — The open-source personal agent that became the most-starred project on GitHub.
Kimi · Rising star — Moonshot AI’s assistant; the Kimi K3 model carried the company to a $35B valuation in July.
OpenEvidence · Rising star — The clinical answer engine used by more than 40% of US physicians.
Emergent · Rising star — An agentic app builder that reached $100M in annual revenue eight months after launch.
Comet by Perplexity · Rising star — The leading AI browser, and the main one left after OpenAI shut ChatGPT Atlas in August.
Factory Droid · Rising star — Enterprise coding agents; Factory tripled its valuation to $5B in five months.
Google Antigravity · Rising star — Google’s agent-first development platform, which replaced Gemini CLI in June.
CodeRabbit · Hidden gem — AI code review that raised at a $1.5B valuation in August on 5× revenue growth.
Plaud Note · Hidden gem — The pocket AI notetaker: 2M+ devices shipped and $100M+ in software revenue.

Out — 12 removals

ChatGPT Agent — Retired by OpenAI — ChatGPT Work replaced it in July 2026 and the old agent mode was removed in August. It joins Operator in the AI Graveyard.
Jasper and Copy.ai — The copywriting leaders of 2023. Jasper has shrunk sharply, and Copy.ai now lives inside Fullcast’s revenue-operations suite. Both remain in the directory.
Uizard and AdCreative.ai — Owned by Miro and Appier respectively, and overtaken in their categories. Both still operate and stay listed with ownership notes.
Systeme.io, Geekbot, Hypotenuse, Bannerbear, Lavender, Browse AI, and SuperOps.ai — Re-verification against the rubric — still online, but either no longer AI-first or no longer shipping at the pace of their categories.

Behind the list

How 2,800 tools become 100.

The 100 tools above are drawn from more than 2,800 we track across 45 categories — and the churn is the real story. 344 of the tools in our catalog, roughly one in eight, have already shut down or been acquired. That mortality rate is why this list re-ships as a dated edition every quarter instead of quietly aging in place: a “best AI tools” page that was accurate in January can be recommending dead products by June.

The Edition No. 16 turnover tells you where the market went in the third quarter of 2026. The arrivals cluster around three themes: software agents that build and review code on their own (Factory, Antigravity, Emergent, CodeRabbit), Chinese model labs reaching global scale (Qwen and Kimi joining DeepSeek), and AI settling into products people already use every day (Copilot, Grammarly, Nano Banana inside Gemini). The departures cluster around two: the 2023 copywriting generation aging out, and product churn at the very top — OpenAI replaced ChatGPT Agent barely a year after launching it.

Consolidation keeps accelerating. SpaceX closed its $60 billion purchase of Cursor’s parent Anysphere in August — the largest startup acquisition on record — and NVIDIA agreed to buy Hugging Face for nearly $13 billion in September. When an acquired tool keeps shipping, we keep it ranked and note the owner. When it stops, it moves to the AI Graveyard, which now documents 344 shutdowns and acquisitions — the dataset this list’s quarterly re-check exists to stay ahead of. The full scoring rubric lives on the methodology page.

FAQ · Edition No. 16

Frequently asked questions.

Tools are placed into one of four tiers — Flagships, Category Leaders, Rising Stars, Hidden Gems — by editorial judgment, weighted across capability against the rubric, sustained user ratings, category context, and the tie-breaker question of "would we actually pick this if we needed it today." Within a tier, order is set by the editors with input from sustained community ratings; there is no automated leaderboard formula. The methodology page documents the rubric in detail.

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Some outbound links on this page are affiliate links — we may earn a commission when you sign up. This never influences which tools make the list or where they rank.

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The Top 100 AI tools worth your attention.

Flagships

ChatGPT

Freemium

4.88

581

Midjourney

Paid

4.88

530

GitHub Copilot

Freemium

4.93

469

Deepseek

Freemium

4.92

459

Perplexity.ai

Freemium

4.92

423

Cursor

Paid - Inquire

4.93

408

Gemini

Freemium

4.92

397

Claude

Freemium

4.93

383

Category leaders

NotebookLM

Freemium

4.93

511

Devin

Paid - Inquire

4.93

510

Sierra AI

Paid - Inquire

4.93

510

Hugging Face

Freemium

4.87

510

Gamma

Freemium

4.93

510

Suno

Freemium

4.92

509

Glean

Paid - Inquire

4.92

507

Replit

Freemium

4.93

497

ElevenLabs

Free Trial

4.92

495

Rising stars

OpenAI Codex

Freemium

4.93

511

Lovable

Freemium

4.92

508