162 AI tools reviewed with real pricing, quickstart code, and honest gotchas
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Suno is currently the heavyweight champion of consumer music generation, capable of producing radio-quality tracks with shockingly good vocals. While v5 pushes duration to 8 minutes and improves fidelity, it remains a 'walled garden' with no official public API, making it useless for developers wanting to build their own apps. Use this if you need finished audio tracks today; avoid it if you need a programmable music engine or commercially 'safe' training data provenance.
Stable Audio is the 'adult in the room' for AI music—it skips the viral, copyright-infringing vocal tracks of Suno/Udio in favor of clean, licensable background music and SFX. It shines for game devs and video editors who need a specific 3-minute instrumental track or want to turn a beatboxed rhythm into a drum loop via Audio-to-Audio. Avoid this if you need coherent lyrics or vocals; use it if you need safe, high-fidelity instrumentals.
Soundraw is the pragmatic choice for content creators who need 'safe' background music without the legal gray areas of Suno or Udio. While it lacks the viral, vocal-heavy creativity of its competitors, its strength lies in its utility: you can generate a track to an exact length (e.g., 3:45) and customize the mood to fit a corporate video perfectly. It feels less like a magic songwriter and more like an infinite, customizable stock music library. Use this if you need hassle-free assets for a project; avoid it if you're trying to write the next radio hit.
AIVA is the 'serious musician's' AI generator. While tools like Suno focus on viral pop hits with vocals, AIVA doubles down on composition theory, offering a piano roll editor and MIDI export that makes it actually useful for game devs and film composers. If you need a fully finished song with lyrics, look elsewhere. If you need a royalty-free orchestral theme you can actually tweak and polish in Ableton, this is your best bet.
Zhipu AI is the pragmatic developer's 'secret weapon' for non-sensitive bulk processing. If you need to summarize 500-page PDFs or run millions of extraction tasks, the free GLM-4-Flash and ultra-cheap GLM-4-Air models are a financial lifesaver. However, due to its Beijing HQ and US Entity List status, it is strictly NOT for enterprises with rigid data residency requirements or sensitive IP handling.
Grok-2 is the rebellious cousin in the LLM family—smart, capable (matching GPT-4 in many benchmarks), and refreshingly less lectured. Its killer feature isn't just the 'uncensored' vibe, but the pipeline to real-time X data, making it the only choice for apps that need to know what happened *5 seconds ago*. However, at $2/1M input, it's not a budget option, and the platform maturity trails OpenAI significantly. Use it if you need 'now' data; avoid it if you need enterprise-grade stability or rock-bottom pricing.
Together AI is the Swiss Army knife for open-source LLMs. If you want to switch between Llama 3.1, Qwen 2.5, and DeepSeek without changing a line of code (thanks to OpenAI compatibility), this is your platform. It offers a 'Zero Data Retention' setting that makes it a safe choice for enterprises wary of data leaks. While not the absolute fastest inference provider on the market (Groq holds that crown), its balance of cost, model variety, and fine-tuning capabilities makes it the better long-term infrastructure partner for most developers.
StepFun is a serious contender in the 'Chinese OpenAI' race, bringing heavy artillery with its trillion-parameter Step-2 model and the surprisingly efficient Step-3.5-Flash. It's an excellent choice for developers needing high-end Chinese language reasoning or cheap, long-context agent loops via the Flash model. However, Western enterprises should tread carefully regarding data privacy and latency; if you need strict US-based compliance or purely English-centric nuance, stick to local shores.
Perplexity's API is the gold standard for developers who need 'grounded' generation without building their own RAG scraper. It excels at answering questions that require knowledge from 5 minutes ago, not 5 months ago. While the 'Sonar' models (Llama 3.1 fine-tunes) are excellent at synthesis, they are specialized tools—do not use them for creative fiction or pure code generation where internet access isn't required. The Deep Research model is powerful but watch the extra 'search query' fees.
OpenRouter is the 'Swiss Army Knife' for LLM developers, solving the headache of managing multiple API keys and SDKs. It is the best choice for developers who want to test models rapidly, enforce privacy via Zero Data Retention, or implement automatic failover without complex infrastructure. However, enterprise teams needing strict first-party SLAs or massive dedicated throughput might prefer direct provider contracts to avoid the middleman risk.
As of Feb 2026, OpenAI remains the default choice for 90% of developers, but the strategy has shifted. You should be building on **o3-mini** for logic/code (it's cheaper and smarter than GPT-4o) and **GPT-5** for general context. Avoid the **o1-pro** model unless you are solving novel physics problems or enjoy burning venture capital—it costs 100x more than standard models. The 'Batch API' is a hidden gem for non-urgent workloads, offering 50% off.
Novita AI is a 'wrapper' style provider that shines by offering rock-bottom pricing for the latest open-source models like DeepSeek V3 and Llama 3.3. It's an excellent choice for developers who want to slash inference costs—often 50-70% cheaper than major providers—without managing their own GPUs. However, enterprise users requiring guaranteed 99.999% uptime or strict data residency agreements might find the infrastructure less mature than Azure or AWS.
