Best AI Model for General Chatbot / Assistant
General-purpose conversational AI for apps, websites, and products. Needs balanced quality, speed, and cost.
Our Verdict
Claude Sonnet 4.6 at $3/$15 is the best quality-to-cost ratio for production chatbots — natural conversation, strong instruction following. GPT-5 at $1.25/$10 is cheaper with slightly less personality. For high-volume budget chatbots, GPT-4o Mini at $0.15/$0.60 handles most conversations well. Gemini 2.5 Flash at $0.15/$0.60 with 1M context is great if your chatbot needs to remember long conversation histories.
Top Picks
Best conversational quality and instruction following at mid-tier pricing
Best for: Quality chatbot experience
Input
$3/1M
Output
$15/1M
Context
200K
Max Output
16K
Strong all-around at $1.25/$10 with audio support
Best for: Multimodal chatbot (text + voice)
Input
$1.25/1M
Output
$10/1M
Context
128K
Max Output
16K
Input
$0.15/1M
Output
$0.6/1M
Context
128K
Max Output
16K
What Matters for Chatbot
Key Factors
- •Response quality
- •Latency
- •Cost per conversation
- •Tool-use
Tips
- ✓Mid-tier models offer the best quality/cost ratio for chatbots
- ✓Claude Sonnet 4.6 and GPT-5 are the sweet spots for quality chatbots
- ✓GPT-4o Mini and Gemini 2.5 Flash are solid budget picks for high-volume
Full Ranking (All Compatible Models)
| Rank | Model | Input | Output | Avg Bench | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | GPT-4o MiniOpenAI | $0.15 | $0.60 | 77.6% | 115 |
| #2 | Gemini 2.5 FlashGoogle | $0.15 | $0.60 | 82.8% | 111 |
| #3 | Gemini 3 FlashGoogle | $0.50 | $3.00 | 84.0% | 105 |
| #4 | Claude Sonnet 4.6Anthropic | $3.00 | $15.00 | 83.3% | 103 |
| #5 | o3OpenAI | $0.40 | $1.60 | 86.9% | 101 |
| #6 | Gemini 2.5 ProGoogle | $1.25 | $10.00 | 85.7% | 99 |
| #7 | GPT-5OpenAI | $1.25 | $10.00 | 85.7% | 96 |
| #8 | o4-miniOpenAI | $1.10 | $4.40 | 84.8% | 95 |
| #9 | GLM-4.7Zhipu AI | $0.60 | $2.20 | 85.0% | 94 |
| #10 | GLM-5Zhipu AI | $1.00 | $3.20 | 77.8% | 92 |
| #11 | Mistral Medium 3Mistral | $0.40 | $2.00 | 81.5% | 88 |
| #12 | Gemini 3.1 ProGoogle | $2.00 | $12.00 | 93.4% | 88 |
| #13 | Gemini 3 ProGoogle | $2.00 | $12.00 | 86.9% | 88 |
| #14 | MiniMax M2.5MiniMax | $0.30 | $1.20 | 86.0% | 86 |
| #15 | GPT-5.2 CodexOpenAI | $1.75 | $14.00 | 86.8% | 86 |
| #16 | GPT-5.3 CodexOpenAI | $2.00 | $16.00 | 88.2% | 84 |
| #17 | Claude Haiku 4.5Anthropic | $0.80 | $4.00 | 78.8% | 83 |
| #18 | DeepSeek R1DeepSeek | $0.55 | $2.19 | 82.5% | 80 |
| #19 | Claude Sonnet 4.5Anthropic | $3.00 | $15.00 | 81.9% | 77 |
| #20 | GPT-4oOpenAI | $2.50 | $10.00 | 78.6% | 77 |
| #21 | Llama 4 MaverickMeta | $0.31 | $0.85 | 85.3% | 76 |
| #22 | Llama 4 ScoutMeta | $0.18 | $0.63 | 80.1% | 75 |
| #23 | Mistral Large 3Mistral | $2.00 | $5.00 | 87.0% | 74 |
| #24 | DeepSeek V3DeepSeek | $0.14 | $0.28 | 83.5% | 71 |
| #25 | Claude Opus 4.6Anthropic | $5.00 | $25.00 | 86.7% | 66 |
| #26 | Grok 4xAI | $3.00 | $15.00 | 83.7% | 65 |