7 Top-Rated Affordable AI Software
Not all small businesses have the budget to hire people and form teams for customer support and content generation purposes. As a small business owner, if you too face such an obstacle, maybe it’s time to invest in artificial intelligence software. Today, artificial intelligence goes beyond simply automating recurring tasks. Whether it’s content creation or customer support, generative AI can help you tackle business problems akin to a full-fledged team of professionals. Fortunately, there are affordable options that can help your business achieve its goals without burning a hole in your pocket.
This article lists seven top-rated affordable artificial intelligence software solutions based on verified user reviews and pricing found on vendor websites. Per our research, we’ve considered products with base plans priced less than $26.50 per month as affordable software and arranged them in ascending order of their prices.
The products listed here range from AI writing assistants, content optimization and SEO tools, AI video generators, and customer support solutions. Regardless of the category, all products offer the core features of artificial intelligence software: natural language processing and machine learning.
What is a base software plan?
A base plan is the most affordable pricing tier offered by a software provider. Besides having the lowest price, base plans provide access to all core software features. However, they may have limitations compared to higher-tier plans in terms of the available functionality, storage capacity, number of user seats, support options, etc.
We selected products for this article based on their average ratings between March 2022 - March 2024, which may differ from their current overall average ratings.
1. DeepL Pro
DeepL Pro is an AI writing assistant and translation platform. The software lets you translate an unlimited amount of text and set a formal or informal tone for your text across languages such as Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. You can also maintain a glossary that allows you to specify translations for words and short phrases from one language to another. Deep L Pro also offers a built-in dictionary to look up words from both the source text and translation.
DeepL Pro’s starter plan lets you upload and translate up to five documents every month. It also has a 10MB file size limit for uploads. You can maintain a single glossary with the base plan with up to 5,000 entries. Upgrading to the advanced plan will increase the document upload limit to 20 per month and the ability to maintain up to 2,000 glossaries.
Base plan features:*
Text translation: Conduct unlimited text translation across websites and applications. You can also set a formal and informal tone for multiple languages and create a customizable glossary when working with specialized terminology in fields such as data science, healthcare, and SEO.
File translation: Upload up to five files on DeepL Pro and get editable translations in the language of your choice. All translated documents maintain their original formatting.
Built-in dictionary: Look up words from both the source text and translation using a built-in library. This gives you more context into the translation, as well as examples and potential synonyms
Starting price: $8.74 per user, per month
Cost to upgrade: $28.74 per user, per month
Billing cycle: Annual
Customer support options: Help center, FAQ, and email support
Who should consider DeepL Pro?
Marketing teams with a worldwide audience can take advantage of DeepL Pro’s translation capabilities to create localized versions of their content. Additionally, teams can maintain a glossary with specific phrasal translations helpful for explaining complex topics in their audience’s native language. Translators who work regularly with documents and need accurate translations may also find DeepL Pro beneficial. Its advanced features, such as the ability to translate longer documents, cater well to the needs of professional translators.
Pro tip
Consider the accuracy of AI translation platforms, especially when working in a multi-language environment. Inaccurate translations can damage the brand image and perception, particularly if they are perceived as disrespectful, insensitive, or unprofessional.
2. Texta.ai
Texta.ai is another AI writing assistant that helps you create content for website blogs, emails, and marketing campaigns. The software also offers on-page SEO analysis and helps optimize meta tags, headlines, and readability scores of the content it produces. You can export your content in various formats, such as PDFs, docs, and HTML files directly to your website’s content management system (CMS). The software supports more than 31 languages.
Texta.ai offers writing assistance with up to 300,000 words per month and a single user seat with its base plan. You can also integrate up to two website blogs with Texta.ai and use a built-in dashboard to publish articles on the blogs. Upgrading to an advanced plan will increase the number of words the software can generate to 600,000. An advanced subscription also offers user access for up to five people, internal linking among articles on your blog, and external linking to third-party websites to assist with backlinking processes for your blog content.
Base plan features:*
Blog generation: Use built-in AI blog generation capabilities to create text content and infographics for your blog. You can also integrate YouTube videos into your blog content to increase engagement with your audience.
On-page SEO analysis: Optimize your search ranking with a built-in keyword generator and SEO analysis feature. The solution’s AI algorithms will generate a list of recommended keywords based on your topic. You can customize your list further by choosing the most relevant and high-performing keywords.
Ad copy generator: Create persuasive ad copies with a built-in ad copy generator to maximize your ad’s performance. You can enter an ad topic or a keyword to let the tool produce ad copy and run a plagiarism check. Once created, the software helps publish your ad and track audience engagement.
Starting price: $10 per user per month
Cost to upgrade: $17 per month (up to five users)
Billing cycle: Annual
Customer support options: Help center, FAQ, and email support
Who should consider Texta.ai?
Writers, journalists, and bloggers can use Texta.ai to summarize articles, generate content outlines, or extract key points from research papers. It can save time and effort in the content creation process while ensuring accuracy and relevance. Professionals working in market research, competitive analysis, or business intelligence can also use Texta.ai to analyze customer feedback, survey responses, or social media data. It can help them identify trends, sentiment, and relevant information for decision-making.
3. My AskAI
My AskAI is an AI solution that focuses on customer support. The platform is built for businesses that use live chat on their website to interact and provide help to their customers. The software uses AI algorithms to learn about your products and services from your websites and available documentation. It then creates an AI chatbot that answers customer queries directly from the live chat pop-up on your website. In situations where customer queries require human support, the software creates a quick summary and shares it with the assigned customer support executive to provide them context.
With My AskAI’s base plan, you get up to 200 conversations every month with the ability to add and sync unlimited web pages where the AI chatbot can be deployed. You can also feed custom answers for certain queries that require detailed explanations. Upgrading to the advanced plan will increase the number of available conversations to 1,000 every month along with priority chat/email and web conferencing support. Additionally, you can customize the tone and answer style of deployed chatbots with the advanced plan.
Base plan features:*
AI-based live chat assistance: The tool learns about your products and services from your website and available documentation and answers users’ questions via live chat. You can also enable the software to hand over support to a team member if the customer wishes to speak to an agent.
Insights dashboard: Extract actionable insights from customer conversations mentioning software issues, bugs, and feature requests. You can share gathered insights with team members via email.
AI email assistant: Reply to customer support emails with an AI assistant. The software uses AI algorithms to analyze customer queries and shares a resolution with the customer by going through your website’s help section.
Starting price: $13.30 per user, per month
Cost to upgrade: $66 per month
Billing cycle: Annual
Customer support options: Help center, FAQ, and email support
Who should consider My AskAI?
Ecommerce and SaaS businesses that witness a heavy inflow of online customer queries and support requests can benefit the most from My AskAI. The software’s ability to create customized chatbots that can address customer queries helps free up team members’ time to focus on improving service quality.
Pro tip
Define the specific use case and objectives for implementing an AI chatbot. Determine whether the chatbot will be used for customer support, lead generation, internal automation, or other purposes. Understanding your goals will help you choose a platform that can fulfill your requirements.
4. AISEO
AISEO is an AI solution that goes beyond writing assistance and helps with content generation and content optimization. The software provides various features to increase the experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (Google’s EEAT quality rater guidelines) of your content and help scale your content production. This includes a built-in assistant that helps craft structured SEO-optimized long-form pieces, such as guides, whitepapers, and market reports. The software also provides a dashboard that helps you discover relevant topics to produce content on and find fact-based statistics and research on the internet to increase your content’s trustworthiness and authority.
With AISEO’s base plan, you receive 500 in-app credits that can help craft up to 50,000 AI words. You can also enhance your content’s relevance and expertise by choosing 10 topics related to your industry for which AISEO helps you find key topics to produce content on. Upgrading to the advanced plan gives you access to unlimited AI detection bypass capabilities, a feature that helps your content not get flagged as AI-generated, and the option to adopt an infinite range of brand voices for your content.
Base plan features:*
One-click blog creation: Create detailed and comprehensive blog posts with just one click after providing a topic, title of the blog post, keywords, and tone of voice.
Content humanization: Create unique, AI-detector-proof content with AISEO bypass algorithms that help convert generic articles into relatable and insightful content. You can select from multiple humanization modes, such as standard, shorten, expand, and improve writing to tailor it according to your requirements.
AI paraphrase: Rework the structure of your existing content while keeping relevant details intact with the help of an AI paraphraser. You can simply upload your content into the paraphrasing dashboard, adjust the level of paraphrasing that you want, and let the tool provide you with the final output.
Starting price: $15 per user, per month
Cost to upgrade: $29 per user, per month
Billing cycle: Annual
Customer support options: Help center, FAQ, and email support
Who should consider AISEO?
Content marketing teams that need to scale their content production while maintaining their brand tone and voice can opt for AISEO. The software helps maintain a consistent brand tone while helping you publish original content that doesn’t get flagged as AI-generated. Additionally, the software offers its services in 26 languages to support content localization for a worldwide audience.
5. Scalenut
Similar to AISEO, Scalenut is an AI content planning and optimization tool that helps businesses with editorial content planning and publishing. The software helps generate content briefs, conduct keyword planning and research, and research SEO topics that are relevant to your business. The software also lets you create research-backed and SEO-optimized long-form articles within five minutes with the help of natural language processing and machine learning algorithms.
With Scalenut’s base plan, you can craft up to 10 articles every month and generate 100,000 words with AI. The software also offers AI image generation for blogs and 40+ copywriting templates. Upgrading to an advanced plan will let you generate an unlimited amount of words with AI, up to 60 articles every month, and unlock the auto-optimization feature for generated content that adds relevant keywords to help increase its SERP ranking.
Base plan features:*
Traffic analyzer: Monitor search engine results page (SERP) shifts and track visitor traffic and rankings of your website content. You can get country-level and page-level traffic insights along with the ability to discover untapped keyword opportunities for which you can create content.
Content optimizer: Analyze your content and get specific recommendations on how to improve your SEO score, including keyword density and meta tag assessment, along with URL optimization to achieve higher search engine rankings and increased engagement with your audience.
Content planning: Remove content silos and discover topic clusters with the help of AI-based keyword cluster recommendations. The software also provides insights into keyword density and difficulty to help you prioritize topics that are easier to rank for.
Starting price: $17 per month
Cost to upgrade: $35 per month
Billing cycle: Annual
Customer support options FAQ, live chat, and email support
Who should consider Scalenut?
SEO strategists and content planning managers looking for a tool that helps with content and SEO strategy, identify keyword clusters, and create content templates can benefit the most from Scalenut. The software also conducts competitive analysis and helps you identify key topics that competitors have missed in order to outrank them.
6. Synthesia
Synthesia is an AI video generation tool that turns text prompts into videos. The software helps businesses create AI avatars and voiceovers they can use for product launches, customer support, and internal training videos. You can also create high-quality sales-enablement videos by using your own scripts or customizable video templates available in the software.
Synthesia’s base plan gives platform access to one editor and three guests. You can create up to 120 minutes of videos every year and 70+ AI avatars. The software supports more than 120 languages and voices for voiceovers along with 60+ video templates you can use as per requirement.
Base plan features:*
AI video assistant: Transform ideas, documents, PDFs, and websites into videos using AI and pre-designed templates. You can submit a brief and select a specific voice from the voiceover template library, and the software creates the video based on the presets you have selected.
Video triggers: Use simple triggers to control elements in your video. For instance, you can highlight your brand logo or product in the video by setting the trigger for it on a specific word in the voiceover so it naturally fits in during the narration.
Smart updates: Update your videos and create new versions to keep your content up to date. You can replace the avatar in a video, change its voice, and add closed captions to help your audience better understand the video content.
Starting price: $22 per month
Cost to upgrade: $67 per month
Billing cycle: Annual
Customer support options FAQ, live chat, and email support
Who should consider Synthesia?
Sales and marketing teams that cater to audiences from different countries can take advantage of Synthesia and its ability to create videos with voiceovers in different languages. Marketers often need to keep cultural sensitivity in mind when creating content for campaigns or developing explainer videos for a product. They can use Synthesia to create avatars from specific cultural backgrounds to help promote their products and services in a specific geography.
Pro tip
Determine the types of input sources supported by the platform, such as images, videos, text, audio, or data feeds. Compatibility with various input formats enables you to incorporate diverse content into your videos, increasing your visibility and helping engage with a more diverse set of audiences that may follow different content formats.
7. AI Studios
Similar to Synthesia, AI Studios is an AI video generation platform that caters to businesses looking to scale their video production process. The software helps generate explainer videos for internal purposes, such as team training and learning and development workshops, and external projects, such as sales enablement, media production, and marketing campaigns.
With its base plan, AI Studios offers up to 10 minutes of video generation every month with up to six scenes in every video. You can use the AI avatar library consisting of 100+ avatars that support 80+ languages and 100+ voiceovers. Upgrading to an advanced plan will let you create up to 90 minutes of video generation per month and up to 20 minutes and 25 scenes per video. You also get priority video processing and API access to enable integration with third-party workflow automation and data processing platforms.
Base plan features:*
Text-to-speech videos: Convert text into lifelike AI voices to add dialogue to your videos. With over 80+ text-to-speech (TTS) languages and 100+ lifelike AI voices, you can create natural-sounding, studio-quality voiceovers.
Video templates: Start your video project with customizable video templates on topics ranging from education, sales, news, and entertainment. You can customize the video template to include your brand logo, custom video title, and language of your choice.
PowerPoint-to-video: Import your presentations, select an AI avatar for the video, choose a language, and the software generates an explainer video for you.
Starting price: $24 per month
Cost to upgrade: $180 per month
Billing cycle: Annual
Customer support options FAQ, live chat, and email support
Who should consider AI Studios?
Businesses looking to create explainer videos and AI-avatar-led videos through scripts and presentations can opt for AI Studios. The software also offers integration with third-party prompt-based platforms to streamline your video content creation process. You can use the software to generate and refine video scripts and perform grammar and translation checks.
Top 3 artificial intelligence software features users rate as highly important
All the products listed in this article include the features mentioned below. To identify these, we asked users to rate, on a scale of “low importance” to “critical,” how important different features are for artificial intelligence software. The features showcased are those that the highest percentage of reviewers rated as “highly important” or “critical” over the past two years (as of March 21, 2024).
Feature name | Criticality rating (%) | Description |
Natural language processing | 88% | Enables machines to understand, interpret, and generate human language in a way that is both meaningful and contextually relevant |
Machine learning | 85% | Enables computers to analyze and learn from data to make decisions or predictions without being explicitly programmed |
Multi-language support | 70% | Enables AI platforms to interact with users in their preferred language, accommodating diverse linguistic needs |
How much does artificial intelligence software cost?
Artificial intelligence software solutions can cost as low as $8.74 per month or up to $349+ per month, depending on various factors—features, number of users, infrastructure requirements, business size/type, training availability, deployment options, integrations, and customization options. Most artificial intelligence solutions typically include the following pricing plans:
Free trials: Range from seven to 30 days and give users access to either all or limited features of the software. These no-cost trial plans are ideal for businesses that wish to try out a tool before purchasing it.
Free versions: Offer perpetual access to limited software features. These free plans are ideal for small businesses or individuals on a budget.
Entry-level plans: Start at $8.74 per month and offer access to standard features. These are suitable for small businesses or teams with basic AI feature requirements, such as writing assistance, optimization, and basic reporting.
Mid-tier plans: Range from $14.99 to $180 per month and offer advanced features such as unlimited AI optimization, image generation, customizable dashboards, and advanced reporting. These are suitable for businesses that have outgrown entry-level artificial intelligence solutions but don’t require the full range of functionality offered by enterprise-level tools.
High-end plans: Cost more than $349 per month and offer a range of advanced features, including unlimited access to entry-level and mid-tier features, priority customer support, and integrations with third-party systems. These are suitable for large businesses with multiple team members and departments and extensive AI customization needs.
Hidden costs associated with artificial intelligence software
Besides the software license, additional costs can include:
Training expenses: Initial training for new users and ongoing training for updates or new features can lead to additional costs.
Data migration costs: Migrating data from your existing system to the new tool may require expert assistance, adding to the software implementation cost.
Software upgrades: Additional costs may be incurred for software upgrades to access the latest artificial intelligence features and security patches.
Frequently asked questions when selecting affordable artificial intelligence software
Does the vendor include a feedback loop and iterative development process?
Some AI tools incorporate feedback mechanisms that allow users to provide input or corrections, which can help improve the tool's performance over time. Ask vendors whether such a feature exists in their product and how frequently they make feedback-based changes.
What kind of scalability limitations does the base plan have?
Base plans often come with usage quotas or limits on the number of users, content generation, or data volume that can be processed within a given time period. Exceeding these limits may result in additional charges or service interruptions. Make sure to ask vendors about the usage and scalability limits, especially if you’re working with generative AI tools.
What kind of regulatory and ethical compliance do you follow?
Ensure that the AI tool complies with ethical guidelines, regulatory requirements, and industry standards governing AI usage. Consider factors such as data privacy, fairness, transparency, accountability, and compliance with relevant laws and regulations in your industry and jurisdiction.
Methodology
To be considered for this list, products had to:
Have at least 20 unique product reviews published on Software Advice within the past two years, with an average rating of 3.0 or higher (as of March 21, 2024).
Include the core features of artificial intelligence software: natural language processing and machine learning.
Meet our market definition for artificial intelligence software: “Artificial intelligence software mimics human behavior and learning patterns. It can be utilized in a variety of business areas, from customer service and sales (in the form of chatbots) to data analysis and IT task automation.”
For products that met the first three criteria, we assessed the monthly subscription price of the base plans and found the average price to be $26.50—we considered only products with publicly available pricing information. We then shortlisted products with a monthly base price lower than $26.50 for this article.
*Our research team identified these features from vendor websites (as of March 21, 2024) based on their analysis of what users find valuable in or expect from artificial intelligence software. This list is not exhaustive. For additional features, refer to the vendor's website.
We select and rank products based on an objective methodology developed by our research team. While some vendors may pay us when they receive web traffic or leads, this has no influence on our methodology.
Note: Products evaluated for the pricing calculation were taken from Software Advice’s artificial intelligence software directory. The pricing ranges exclude freemium versions of the products. The features highlighted were identified based on their relevance and the percentage of products in the Software Advice directory that offer them. Only products with publicly available pricing information, as of March 21, 2024, were considered for the pricing calculation.