Directory/AI assistants
An AI assistant is a general chat tool such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Microsoft Copilot or Perplexity. Recruiters use them to draft outreach and job ads, build Boolean strings, summarise intake calls and interviews, research companies and analyse spreadsheets. They are not recruiting systems: none of them holds your candidates or finds contact data, so they work alongside your ATS, CRM and sourcing tools.
Start with where you already work. Teams on Outlook, Teams and Excel get the most from Microsoft Copilot, and teams on Gmail, Docs and Drive get the most from Gemini. ChatGPT has the widest set of everyday features, Claude is strongest on long documents and connects to many recruiting tools through MCP, Grok adds live search across X, and Perplexity is best for cited company and market research.
All six have a free plan. Personal paid plans run from about $5 to $30 a month, with power-user tiers from $100, and business seats start around $20 per user per month. Each card below shows the starting price with the date we checked it on the vendor site.
Check the data settings first. Several personal plans can use your chats to train models unless you opt out, while business and enterprise plans generally do not. For candidate personal data, use a business plan your company has approved, and read our guide to what candidate data you can put into ChatGPT.
AI assistants
Microsoft's AI assistant inside Outlook, Teams, Word and Excel, as a free app or with Microsoft 365.
Free plan, paid from $9.99/mo
AI assistants
AI answer engine with cited sources, handy for company research and market mapping.
Free plan, paid from $20/mo
Your next step
6. Each listing records its starting price, free plan, free trial, MCP and API support the same way, so the cards can be compared line for line.
6 of the 6 list a US dollar starting price, and the median of those is about $17. Units differ by vendor (per seat, per month, per check or credit pack), so compare the unit on each card, not just the number.
6 of them have a permanent free plan rather than a timed trial. 1 offer a free trial.
The tools we use ourselves are marked as picks and listed first, then everything else runs A to Z. There is no paid ranking: a sponsored slot is labelled as such and never changes a listing, its category or its position.
Counted from every published listing in this category, so the numbers move with the directory.