Compare AI tools
Side-by-side: what they do, what they cost, what Kai actually thinks. Pass up to 4 tools via
?tools=claude,chatgpt,gemini.Pick tools (4 selected)
coding
image
productivity
writing
marketing
Cursor S | Midjourney S | GitHub Copilot B | Elicit S | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tagline | VS Code fork that made AI coding actually work. | The aesthetic gold standard for AI image generation. | Microsoft/GitHub's autocomplete. Deep VS Code + JetBrains integration. | AI research assistant for academic literature. |
| Category | coding | image | coding | research |
| Pricing | Free + $20/mo Pro + $40/mo Business | $10-$120/mo | Free (limited) + $10/mo Pro + $19/mo Business | Free + $12-$42/mo |
| Best for | Developers. Non-developers who want to ship working code. | Anyone who wants beautiful images without thinking about prompts. | Teams with GitHub already. Devs who don't want to change IDEs. | Grad students, researchers, anyone doing literature reviews. |
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| Kai's verdict | S-tier for coding. If you write code of any kind, this pays back the $20 in a day. | S-tier for aesthetics. If you care how it looks more than how it's made, this wins. | B-tier. Solid for autocomplete but the category moved past it. Pick Cursor unless you can't. | S-tier for academic research. Nothing else comes close for systematic reviews. |
| Link | Open → | Open → | Open → | Open → |