The 22 Best Generative AI Tools for SMBs to Stay Competitive in 2025

The top 22 generative AI tools for SMBs

1. Writing and proofreading (Claude, Jasper, and Grammarly)
2. Image generation and editing (Bing Image Creator, Adobe Firefly, and Picsart)
3. Video creation and editing (Runway Gen-4, Animoto, and Google Vids)
4. Audio generation and editing (Suno and ElevenLabs)
5. Presentation design (Beautiful AI, Pitch, and Gamma)
6. Website and app building (Wix, Framer, and Anything)
7. Research (Perplexity and Elicit)
8. AI assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, and Microsoft 365 Copilot)

To thrive in today’s competitive landscape, businesses must leave their abacus and ancient tools behind. Need convincing? Data shows that 67% of top-performing organizations reap the benefits of generative AI use for innovating their products and services.

This is your sign to look at the best generative AI tools you can use in 2025 to grow your SMB. In this blog post, we look at the different generative AI tools that SMBs can use, sorted according to these categories:

• Writing and proofreading
• Image generation and editing
• Video creation and editing
• Audio generation and editing
• Presentation design
• Website and app building
• Research
• AI assistant

The best generative AI tools for writing and proofreading

AI-generated content will never be as good as human-written pieces. That’s why we at WebFX don’t recommend using AI-generated content as your business’s final output.

By now, we’ve all been exposed to a lot of low-quality AI-generated content that we can sniff one from a mile away. That’s why relying heavily on AI-generated content will make your brand look less authentic.

So why do we have a list of generative AI tools for writing? You can use these apps as writing assistants to help you do the following:

• Generate blog post outlines
• Create writer’s briefs
• Get initial headline ideas
• Rephrase your sentences
• Check your tone and voice
• Proofread your content

Let’s look at the generative AI tools that can do these tasks for you:

1. Claude: Best for content ideation and quality outlines

Pricing: Starts at $17 per month (billed annually)

Free trial or version: Free version available

Claude is a generative AI tool from Anthropic. Trained to provide safe and accurate answers, Claude makes for an excellent AI companion that can:

• Brainstorm content topics with you
• Create content outlines and writer’s briefs
• Summarizing and analyzing documents

This generative AI tool can handle multi-step requests and respond accurately after multiple follow-up prompts. In our example below, we prompted Claude to give us blog topic ideas for a small business in Austin, Texas, that sells socks for running and Pilates.

The follow-up prompt informed the generative AI tool that the business’s target customers, which are millennial and Gen Z women. Claude tweaked its blog topics with additional information.

For the third prompt, we gave Claude a sense of urgency to pick two topics to get started with and give us an outline. It then identified two important blog posts and provided the outline we asked, without losing context of the business and the intended customers!

2. Jasper: Best for streamlining content creation

Pricing: Starts at $39 per month per seat (billed annually)

Free trial or version: 7-day free trial

Jasper is a suite of AI tools for marketers. It can perform a variety of marketing tasks—from writing and editing content to building AI apps.

This generative AI tool made it to our list because it can generate blog drafts and social media posts with your brand voice in mind. You can customize the tone and brand voice, and you can also get the help of Jasper’s templates for different content types.

Try it for free for seven days to see if it’s a solution that you can maximize. After all, a paid subscription costs more than Claude’s lowest-tiered plan and other generative AI tools, and starts at $39 per month per seat.

Although pricier than the other writing tools, Jasper can help you with other marketing tasks, including the following:

• Creating and editing images
• Product marketing
• Performance marketing

3. Grammarly: Best for checking for AI content and detecting tone

Pricing: Starts at $12 per month (billed annually)

Free trial or version: Free version available

Grammarly is known as a proofreading tool, but it does more than check for grammatical and typographical errors.

One of its handy generative AI features is writing tone detection, which is available in the free version. The paid versions can do more than detect tone — they can help you adjust your copy to sound business-like or more casual.

You can set goals when you use this generative AI tool to get custom suggestions based on these aspects of your content:

• Goal: Will your content be used in a business or academic setting? Grammarly gives you six options — academic, business, general, email, casual, and creative.
• Intent: What is your content trying to accomplish? Choose among inform, describe, convince, and tell a story.
• Audience: Who is your intended audience? Grammarly will tweak its recommended revisions and adjust their readability based on your audience.
• Formality: How formal should your piece sound? Choosing one will tell Grammarly whether colloquialisms or slang language are suitable for your copy.

If you want to ensure your piece doesn’t read like it’s AI-generated or plagiarized, you can run it by Grammarly to check. In the example below, we ran an AI-generated text through its AI and plagiarism checker.

Grammarly detected text matches online. It also estimated how much of the text matches online sources and resembles AI writing.

The top generative AI tools for image generation and editing

Need help with editing your photos or brainstorming for images for your next ad? We shortlisted the best generative AI tools for the job. Some of them even offer free versions!

4. Bing Image Creator: Best for intuitive image creation

Pricing: Free for Microsoft Account users

Bing Image Creator is a free generative AI tool. Under its hood is OpenAI’s Dall-E model, which enables it to create images from a user’s text prompt.

Available for free, Bing Image Creator is also accessible through Microsoft Copilot, making it a user-friendly option, especially for Microsoft users. It’s embedded as the “Create an Image” feature.

Today, Bing Image Creator can now generate videos based on your text prompt, too.

5. Adobe Firefly: Best for generating brand-safe images for commercial use

Pricing: Starts at $9.99 per month

Free version or trial: Free version available

The brand Adobe is a trusted name in professional design and illustration. In today’s generative AI era, it also has a contender — Adobe Firefly.

Adobe Firefly lets you create images, vector graphics, audio, and video. It’s on our list of the best generative AI tools because its generated images are safe for commercial use.

That’s because Firefly is only trained with content that Adobe has permission or rights to, ensuring that it doesn’t violate copyright or intellectual property rights.

Another handy feature of Adobe Firefly is its mood board generator. Called Firefly Boards, this feature lets you visualize ideas with generative AI.

Firefly Boards is especially useful for creative professionals like graphic designers to develop concepts and set a project’s aesthetic themes. Businesses can also use it in product design!

6. Picsart: Best affordable image editing tool

Pricing: Starts at $5 per month (billed annually)

Free version or trial: Seven-day free trial and free versions available

Picsart is a generative AI tool that can help you with image creation and editing. Its AI features let you:

• Create images
• Remove or add backgrounds to your images
• Create ads and social media posts

It’s an affordable and flexible tool. Picart’s free version gives you access to free images and templates. To access its generative AI features, you can subscribe to its Plus plan, which you can try for free for seven days.

Picsart is available as a web app that you can access on desktop and as a mobile app, which lets you edit or create images on the go.

Like most generative AI tools, Picsart starts off by asking you a few questions about what you’ll use it for and your goals. That way, it can prioritize showing you the tools that you’ll need the most.

Generative AI tools for video generation and editing

Video is an engaging content format that can convert your audience. In fact, video marketing can increase conversions by as much as 80% on ecommerce websites.

If you’re looking for tools to help you with generating or editing videos, check out our list!

7. Runway Gen-4: Best for text-to-video content creation

Pricing: Starts at $12 per month (billed annually)

Free version or trial: Free version available

You can generate videos using text prompts with Runway Gen-4. This tool also lets you create objects (and even characters!) and place them in different scenes with various lighting conditions.

It’s on our list of the top generative AI tools, because it can generate and also edit videos. In the example below, we prompted it to create a five-second video about two dog best friends.

It’s not exactly the best depiction of two dogs running after each other. We could’ve refined it with follow-up prompts. Instead, we tested its editing features using the same video.

Using the green screen feature, you can select an object in the video to keep and not show the rest. It works best for subjects that are not moving in and out of the frame and with still subjects, as shown in our results below.

While the output was rough, it only took us a few clicks to achieve this. You can also use Runway Gen-4’s inpainting tool to refine the output.

Runway Gen-4 also has image and voice tools. Its chat mode also accepts image input and turns it into an animation!

8. Animoto: Best for drag-and-drop video creation and editing

Pricing: Starts at $9 per month (billed annually)

Free version or free trial: Free version

SMBs looking for a versatile video generation and editing tool should consider Animoto. Using drag-and-drop features, you can create and edit videos that you can use for various purposes, including:

• Marketing collaterals
• Social media
• Sales pitch
• Internal communications
• Training

Animoto lets you create engaging videos using screen recordings, video clips, and photos. You can even add other elements, including simple graphics and visual effects from its library.

Getting started with using new tools can be overwhelming, but Animoto makes the first step easy, even for beginners. It starts by asking you what you’ll use the tool for and which department you’re from.

Then, Animoto will guide you to get started with a template or starting from scratch. As you get more familiar with this generative AI tool, you can save your custom templates, colors, and fonts, for a consistent look and feel.

9. Google Vids: Best text-to-video content generation for Google Workspace users

Pricing: Google Workspace Starter Plan starts at $6.30 per month (billed annually)

Free version or trial: 14-day free trial available

Google Vids is an excellent text-to-video generative AI tool. Powered by the Veo 3 model, this generative AI tool can help you structure your video.

It can assist you with storyboarding and provide script suggestions. Google Vids also comes with pre-built templates that you can use, so you don’t start from scratch.

Type in your prompt, and Veo will generate the clip for you. Add the generated clip to your video along with screen recordings, stock videos, or other AI-generated videos.

You can also generate a voiceover through Vids to complement your video. Music, stickers, and images are also available to make your videos more engaging.

Google Vids is available in Google Workspace Business Starter and higher plans. Because it’s in your Workspace ecosystem, team members can collaborate on these projects by sharing, editing, and commenting on video files.

The best generative AI tools for audio

Creating engaging content for your audience requires the right audio. Get music inspiration to set the mood or voiceover samples with these generative AI tools.

10. Suno: Best for text-to-music generation

Pricing: Starts at $8 per month (billed annually)

Free version or trial: Free version available

Suno is a generative AI tool that lets you create royalty-free music with a text prompt. SMBs looking for original music (with or without lyrics) for their content can use this generative AI tool.

Start by typing in your text prompt. This user-friendly tool will then generate a song based on your input, so provide valuable details, such as a theme and key marketing messages or slogans you want included.

In the example below, we asked Suno to create a K-pop-inspired song about laundry and chores. We’d probably change a few words in the lyrics, but Suno generated a song that suits the theme.

Make sure you provide musical inspiration that resonates with your target audience. You can also pick from its list of suggested musical inspiration.

11. ElevenLabs: Best for text-to-speech generation

Pricing: Starts at $5 per month (billed annually)

Free version or trial: Free version available

If you’re looking for a text-to-speech generative AI tool, consider ElevenLabs. You can choose from its library of voices to speak the text you input without sounding robotic.

Want a customized speech output? Adjust the speed and stability of speech. You can also generate or use sound effects from its library.

ElevenLabs’s paid version starts at $5 per month and gives you commercial license.

Generative AI tools for creating presentations

Need help creating a deck with cohesive storytelling and captivating visuals? Get the help of these generative AI tools for making presentations:

12. Beautiful AI: Best for slide deck creation with a design assistant

Pricing: Starts at $12 per month

Free version or trial: Free trial available

Beautiful AI is a generative AI tool that you can use to create professional-looking slide decks.

This platform asks you a few questions before you get started, such as your department and the work you do. Your answers will give Beautiful AI contextual information on how to assist you with slide creation.

Then, you can access its templates that you can customize with your brand colors, fonts, and logos. Simply add content, and the slides will adapt to your content.

It’s like having a design assistant helping you make impactful presentations. You still get some degree of control over the slides, as you can edit their elements to your liking.

Because creating presentations is often a team effort, Beautiful AI lets you share your presentation with other team members. Share draft presentations via email, link, or embed code.

Beautiful AI comes with a free trial, but you need to input credit card details to test it out.

13. Pitch: Best for deck creation and collaboration

Pricing: Starts at $17 per month (billed annually)

Free version or trial: Free version

Pitch is another generative AI tool for creating presentation decks. You don’t have to start from scratch — it has hundreds of templates for different purposes.

You can also start with a prompt and let its generative AI feature kickstart your presentation, like in our example below. Add blank pages, a page from its template, or tweak a template with your own data.

You can share your slides with team members so you can delegate some of the pages or collaborate in real-time.

Subscription starts at $17 per month (billed annually), but you can use the free version to try it out.

14. Gamma: Best for presentation outlining and generation

Pricing: Starts at $8 per month (billed annually)

Free version or trial: Free version available

Gamma is a user-friendly generative AI tool for creating decks, documents, and even web pages.

Like most tools on this list, you can start with a prompt. Then, it creates a draft outline, which you can then turn into a presentation.

Gamma has a built-in image creator, so you can complement your presentation with eye-catching visuals. You can add illustrations, photorealistic images, line art, and other images using other artistic styles!

Editing the different elements on the page is straightforward — it’s just like editing any slide from a presentation file. You can also share your deck with team members who need to edit or add to the deck.

Gamma also lets you export your deck into different file formats, including PDF and PNG. You can also export your file into PowerPoint or Google Slides. It will inform you if you need to download fonts for the file to display correctly.

Generative AI tools for website and app building

If you want to try vibe coding or build a small website for a passion project, here are some of the generative AI tools you can use. Most of these platforms have free versions, so you can test them out before subscribing to a paid one.

Note that these tools are not meant to replace professional web designers and developers. For big and important projects, make sure you get human experts who can develop websites and apps for you.

That way, these same experts can troubleshoot any problems and help you recover previous data or work.

15. Wix: Best user-friendly website builder

Pricing: Starts at $17 per month

Free version or trial: Free version available

Wix is a user-friendly AI-powered website builder. You can start creating a website either with a template or through its AI chatbot, which asks questions about your business and your website goals.

This generative AI tool then creates a wireframe and website based on your input. Not happy with what you see? Ask it to generate another version to see another option!

A new handy feature of Wix is its app builder. You can create a mobile app based off your website, with no coding required.

16. Framer: Best affordable landing page builder

Pricing: Starts at $5 per month (billed annually)

Free version or trial: Free version available

Framer is a generative AI website builder that creates responsive sites and landing pages

Its most affordable plan is just $5 per month, includes a custom domain, and supports up to two landing pages, making it an excellent tool for simple marketing or online portfolio sites.

In the example above, we used the Wireframer feature to build an online portfolio. Its feature, Wireframer, is like an AI chatbot that you can prompt to build the responsive website you want.

Here are its other AI features:

• Workshop: Available only in the paid plans, Workshop can add customizable website components on your page. Type in your prompt or get ideas from its list of sample prompts, such as adding an analog clock.
• AI Translate: This feature translates your website into other languages with a single click.

17. Anything (formerly Create): Best for building web apps using prompts

Pricing: Starts at $16 per month (billed annually)

Free version or trial: Free version

If you want to build a web app without writing any code, consider Anything (formerly Create). It lets you create online tools without coding.

You start off by describing what your page or app does on the chat. Depending on the complexity of your prompt, it’ll ask you which AI model you prefer. You can choose from GPT-4o, Anthropic 3.5, and others.

Anything will then generate a working preview of your tool. In the example below, we asked it to create a meal planner to help users come up with recipe ideas based on what’s available in their pantry, their cravings, and how many people they’re cooking for.

Because this tool is meant to help people with limited time to cook (and think about what to cook), we wanted to add the feature of selecting prep and cooking times. You can update the app by prompting it with your tweaks or directly editing the code in the preview section. You can even directly edit the copy in the preview section, just like a WYSIWYG editor.

Click the “Publish” button to see your live tool. The free version gets a created.app domain, while paid plans let you create a custom domain.

Anything also lets you collaborate on a project together with a colleague or friend.

Generative AI tools for research

Save a spot for AI tools in your research arsenal. These platforms can review literature, analyze data, and brainstorm with you.

These AI tools typically also use machine learning and natural language processing to synthesize information and generate text. Check out these generative AI tools that can streamline your research process.

18. Perplexity: Best for academic research and complex topics

Pricing: Starts at $20 per month

Free version or trial: Free version available

Perplexity is an answer engine that answers conversational questions and cites its sources. At the end of each response, it presents related topics that you may be interested in to enrich your knowledge about a topic.

Above its responses are links to its top sources and images. You can also click the citations or the “Sources” tab to easily fact-check its responses.

This answer engine lets you choose which resources to check when answering queries. Its default setting is across the web.

You can choose Academic to search peer-reviewed academic papers and research projects. Social is an option to look at online forums, discussions, and social media to better understand customer sentiments.

Enterprise Pro users can also use their own documents as resources. They can use the Internal Knowledge Search feature, where they can upload up to 500 files.

Perplexity offers a Deep Research feature, which reads hundreds of online resources and autonomously writes a comprehensive report. It’s a free, limited feature for non-paying subscribers — they get a limited number of Deep Research queries per day. Meanwhile, Pro subscribers get unlimited Deep Research questions.

Pro users get access to more AI models like Claude and can generate images, while free users have limited access.

19. Elicit: Best academic research assistant

Pricing: Starts at $10 per month (billed annually)

Free version or trial: Free version available

Many professionals and organizations rely on data to inform their strategies and business decisions. Whether you’re a marketer trying to better understand your consumers’ evolving behaviors or a business development professional looking for growth opportunities for the company, you’d like to stay on top of the latest studies in your field.

Elicit is a generative AI tool that works best as an academic research assistant. It can help you summarize papers and extract data.

You start by entering a research query or a prompt. Elicit suggests ways to improve your query so you can get better results.

Elicit then generates a summary based on the top four sources (or eight for paid subscribers). You also get a table that lists the papers along with their abstracts.

If you want to compare the studies’ methodologies at a glance, use the “Manage Column” feature and add “Methodology.” You can also add other columns for other data or remove some of them.

Want to dig deep into a particular paper? Elicit provides a link to the full study, so you can review it, too. Like most generative AI tools, you can have a follow-up query.

With Elicit, a follow-up is a step in the research. You can ask another question, get a list of concepts from the papers, or get an in-depth analysis of select papers.

Elicit claims that its users save up to five hours a week by using its tool.

Best generative AI tools as assistants

SMBs can also turn to general AI tools that they can use for various purposes. They can incorporate these versatile generative AI tools into their workflows or integrate them into existing systems.

Let’s look at these AI assistants:

20. ChatGPT: Best for everyday productivity

Pricing: Starts at $20 per month

Free version or trial: Free version available

Perhaps one of the most popular (if not the most popular) generative AI tools is ChatGPT. Launched in 2022 by OpenAI, this AI chatbot has become a household name.

Early adopters used it to generate content, write code, and for research purposes. Today, it has multimodal capabilities: It can process text, image, and audio prompts.

In August 2025, OpenAI released its most advanced model, GPT-5, which is now available on ChatGPT for all users. Free users have usage limits, though, while paid subscribers get more usage credits.

SMBs can use it as an assistant for various functions, including marketing, sales, customer service, and business development. You can also train it with your brand voice, offerings, and ICP, so it can tailor its responses to your business.

21. Gemini: Best for Google Workspace users

Pricing: Google Workspace plans with Gemini start at $12.60 per month

Free version or trial: Free, limited version available in free Google accounts

Gemini is Google’s AI assistant. It’s now embedded in Google Workspace, so team members get an integrated assistant when doing these tasks:

• Writing emails
• Drafting pieces
• Summarizing meetings
• Analyzing spreadsheets

This integrated AI assistant is also available in free Google accounts in a limited capacity. Gemini can streamline one’s work and improve collaboration between team members.

It features advanced reasoning and Deep Research, so you have a personal research assistant. Deep Research is an agent that can browse hundreds of websites on its own and create reports in minutes.

22. Microsoft 365 Copilot: Best assistant for Microsoft 365 app users

Pricing: Plans with Microsoft 365 Copilot start at $30 per month

Free version or trial: N/A

If your organization uses Microsoft 365, you can make the most of its AI assistant, Copilot, to streamline your work tasks.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI assistant for brainstorming, streamlining tasks, and creating documents. Team members can use it to process information from the web or from their organization.

For example, if a new team member needs to catch up on a project’s details and tasks, they can use Copilot to summarize an email thread forwarded to them and files shared with them.

Because Copilot can also identify important meeting points, these details are also shareable to new team members. This generative AI tool lives in your Microsoft 365 ecosystem, so businesses can make the most of their subscription when they use it to improve their productivity.

FAQs on generative AI tools

Grow your business with the right AI tools and marketing partner

This list summarizes tools that SMBs and marketers can find useful today. Note that generative AI tools are getting better every day, though.

To sustainably grow your business, consider teaming up with a full-service digital marketing agency that’s always on top of the latest tools and marketing trends. Our team at WebFX is dedicated to helping our clients grow their bottom line with the right tools — we’ve helped businesses like yours generate $10 billion in revenue.

Call us at 888-601-5359 or contact us online to speak with a strategist about our AI services!

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