ChatGPT review: Pros and cons in 2024

When OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, it felt as though the entire landscape of the internet and possibly even modern technology had yet again made a significant leap forward. ChatGPT has become popular with millions of diverse users, offering creativity and content generation as well as data analysis and custom-built GPTs.

But it does come with limitations for small businesses, some specific to ChatGPT and others just facts of life when it comes to present-day artificial intelligence. We’ve put it to the test to give you our ChatGPT review, including first-hand experience with ChatGPT’s most advanced 4o model.

ChatGPT overview

ChatGPT is a chatbot that is built on a large language model (LLM) and is designed to talk to users like a human. It can hold conversations, recall and provide information and analyze voice, images and data. For businesses, when it comes to performing simple tasks like generating basic content or improving productivity, it can be a useful, powerful and time-saving tool.

A small business owner can use it to create content calendars, social media posts or travel itineraries and, on paid plans, generate images and interactive tables and charts.

However, while it might be the pioneer in AI chatbots, it does have its drawbacks. Its knowledge cut-off point — the most recent data it is trained on — was October 2023 at the time of this review. However, users report this changing frequently. While advanced models can browse the web and cite sources, sometimes they can offer inaccurate information. The chatbot can also struggle with complex tasks involving ethics, ambiguity and specialized knowledge.

ChatGPT pros and cons

Pros

If you’re an SMB looking to use ChatGPT as a convenient and customizable personal assistant for basic tasks, like boosting productivity or creativity, it’s a great tool — particularly if it doesn’t require specific factual information. 

It offers efficiency and scalability and is able to handle simultaneous queries, reducing the workload for human staff. Its voice and vision features make it accessible to a wide range of users.

You can even push it to more advanced tasks like data analysis, browsing the web in real-time and uploading files for analysis and feedback. 

While it might take a bit of practice, trial and error will create the right prompts for what you need. You can also provide custom instructions across all chats and create your own “GPTs” to serve specific purposes. This can help your small business if there are specific tasks you need help with.

Cons

ChatGPT, like any machine pretending to be a human, does have noticeable flaws. Some of these are problems common to most AI chat models, especially when we’re still so early on in its technology. Most significantly, ChatGPT can sometimes provide inaccurate information, a fact acknowledged by OpenAI itself, so you won’t be able to solely rely on it for factual knowledge. You don’t want to put your business at risk due to misinformation.

With OpenAI’s ChatGPT product, all but the Enterprise plans have limits on usage. The most recent information available shows that Plus users are limited to 80 messengers every three hours on ChatGPT-4o and 40 on GPT-4. This might be an issue for small business owners who rely on ChatGPT to create social media posts or help with other types of content.

Additionally, there are limits on model quality for all, except on the Enterprise plan, and the free plan only has limited access to features like browsing, data and vision. Finally, only Enterprise users will have access to advanced customer service features, while other users have complained of poor overall support.

ChatGPT pricing and value

ChatGPT’s free plan is a good introduction to what the chatbot offers, and while it’s fairly limited compared to paid plans, it’s useful for quick and basic tasks. However, the prospect of image generation and the ability to create GPTs might tempt business owners toward upgrading once the constraints of the free version become apparent. The frustration of hitting your message cap can be reminiscent of the Wi-Fi going down. And, if your business is relying on it, interruptions can cost time and money.

At $20 per month, we think it can be a worthwhile investment for individuals or small teams. Other improvements to web browsing, data analysis and vision are game changers for productivity. If it proves to be a positive investment, particularly as a tester for small teams, then upgrading to the Team plan gives you a dedicated workspace, analytics and management for GPTs and bulk member management for $30 per user per month. 

Custom pricing is available for those who want to unlock ChatGPT’s full potential, but it’s worth considering alternatives before you do. Anthropic’s Claude offers a similar pricing structure, with a free plan, a base plan of $20 per user and a Team plan of $30 per user per month, but its free version is a little more advanced with image and document processing, and it offers a far bigger context window of 200K.

Microsoft also offers its Copilot chatbot as a free version and a $20 per user per month paid version, with useful integrations into its Office platform — its chatbot itself is built on OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 model. It also offers a more business-oriented solution in its Azure Bot Service, allowing businesses to create chatbots powered by Microsoft’s Azure App Services, with base pricing for its Premium channels at $0.50 per 1,000 messages.

Finally, another alternative for businesses looking for an AI solution lies in IBM’s Watson Assistant, with its base pricing starting at $140 per month and offering over 1,000 monthly users and 30 days of analytics data.

Using ChatGPT

One of the most striking things about ChatGPT’s debut is the chatbot’s flexibility — businesses of all types and sizes have been able to put it to use. We’ve looked at some of its most common usages and how they correspond to the features available.

General usage

One of ChatGPT’s most popular functions is as a virtual assistant, offering an array of basic capabilities with a customizable conversational bot. With a library of general knowledge, it can help a business owner create personal trainer templates or recipe guides for customers and give general recommendations on how to better market their goods and services to potential clients.

Its free version is perfectly capable if this is all you need from your AI chatbot, although upgrading removes limitations and increases performance as well as offering access to GPTs.

Content creation

ChatGPT offers a useful tool for content creation — but we think it serves better as an assistant rather than a source of actual content. It offers an efficient way to research and brainstorm ideas thanks to its ability to browse the web and provide citations.

Its advanced language processing capabilities mean it excels as an editing and proofreading tool — and it might even be useful for producing generic short-form copy. But for businesses that want to produce high-quality content, human input will definitely be required to reach publishing standards.

Its ability to craft compelling copy could be described as hit-and-miss — it can often lean on stereotypes and tropes, and users have found alternatives like Google’s Gemini to be a better creative assistant. ChatGPT also uses many different emojis when crafting social media posts for businesses, so it might not be the best thing to use if you’re wanting something a bit more professional. 

ChatGPT’s paid plans also offer access to its integrated image generation tool known as Dall-E, which is powerful but not without its flaws. It might put mobile phone wallpaper creators out of business soon, but it lacks the subtlety of human artistry and photography.

Reading files

We were impressed by ChatGPT’s ability to read file uploads from images and videos to text and data. It offers useful criticism of examples of writing, art and photography, and its ability to read and organize data as well as offer visual representations will be valuable to many. We asked it to critique a child’s painting and some nature photos we took, and we also uploaded a small dataset which we asked it to analyze.

Its ability to read images is excellent, providing accurate analysis and useful feedback on the art and photography presented. And while it did take a few seconds to analyze the dataset, it was able to produce a neat bar chart using the figures provided.

As a source of feedback and general advice, we think it’s a powerful and convenient tool, and it’s likely worth paying for full access for those who will make regular use of the software. But it can make mistakes, so it’s important to understand that while insights can be useful it’s still no substitute for human input and quality assurance.

Creating GPTs

GPTs are a fascinating development of ChatGPT’s initial offering, allowing paying users to tailor their own chatbots to their personal requirements. While this comes with limitations — you can’t grant ChatGPT magic abilities that it didn’t have before — it can offer convenience and an overall more immersive experience.

The GPT store gives you access to GPTs created by other users, and you can also upload your own creations for others to use. There are GPTs available for writing, productivity, research and analysis, education, programming and general lifestyle applications. 

GPT-4o

GPT-4o was an intriguing development in the ChatGPT story. It was made available as the most advanced version of the software for all users, including free users. Users are split on its overall performance improvements, with some saying it has become more generic and simplified compared to previous models and others praising its boosted speed. 

What is quite revolutionary is its human-AI interface, with voice chat now available in real-time. It can be a surreal experience, speaking with a machine for the first time, and it feels like a genuine conversation. However, this voice feature might not help business owners as much, unless they prefer speaking their requests instead of needing to type them.

ChatGPT vs. top competitors

While ChatGPT might’ve been the first, it isn’t the only chatbot in town — tech giants like Google, Microsoft and IBM have launched their own services, and depending on what you need from your AI chatbot, it’s worth considering everything available. 

ChatGPT vs. Gemini (previously Google Bard)

Google’s Gemini, previously known as Bard, is an alternative chatbot that offers similar functionality at the same base price point of $19.99 a month, though it doesn’t offer extra tiers for teams and enterprises. 

Since Chat GPT’s latest update, both offer similar abilities in the way of web browsing, file reading and data analysis, but Gemini offers a greater context window of one million, and users online seem to prefer its ability for creative writing and feedback. 

ChatGPT vs. Microsoft Azure Bot Service

If you’re looking for an AI chat service to run a chatbot for your business website, you might consider Microsoft’s specialist Azure software. It lets you design and build conversational AI bots to interact with your customers and employees, and you won’t need any coding knowledge to set up. 

Microsoft’s Azure Bot Service offers unlimited free messages on its standard channel and 10,000 free messages per month across premium channels. Extra messages cost $0.50 per 1,000 messages.

ChatGPT vs. IBM Watson Assistant

IBM’s Watson Assistant is another solution for enterprises more so than everyday users, allowing you to create AI assistants for customers across various channels and devices. It offers a free version that lets you create chatbots for web chat, SMS, MMS and multiple integrated messaging channels. 

Voice add-ons and custom channel API are only available on paid plans. These start at $140 a month and also offer more assistants, more days of retained analytics data and longer sessions. 

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)