Five things that predict your experience
Compare the answer to your own hardest question, the refusal behaviour, the data policy, the limits and the cost of leaving. Do not compare model names, benchmark scores, feature lists or user counts: all 4 correlate weakly with how the product treats your work.
Most comparisons are built from things that are easy to tabulate. Ease of tabulation and usefulness are unrelated, and the gap between them explains a lot of disappointment.
Your own hardest question
Keep 3 questions from your actual work, including one you know the answer to. Run them on every candidate. This single practice outperforms every published comparison, because it measures the thing you will actually do rather than an average of what everybody does.
Refusal behaviour on your subjects
If your work touches medicine, law, security or anything adjacent, the filter matters more than the model. Test it deliberately with real examples from your work rather than with provocations, because provocations measure the extreme and your work sits in the middle.
The data policy and the limits
Retention, training, account requirement, message caps. All 4 are written down, all 4 are comparable in 10 minutes, and all 4 affect you every day. This is the highest-value reading in any comparison.
The cost of leaving
Can you export? Is your history portable? Does anything you build lock you in? Ask before joining rather than when leaving, because the answer is the same and the timing decides whether it is useful.
What people ask before switching
Why not compare features?
Feature lists converge within months in this category. A feature present in one product today is present in all of them by the next quarter.
Are user counts meaningless?
They predict survival somewhat and quality not at all. Useful for the question of whether it will exist next year, useless for whether it suits you.
How long should a comparison take?
Twenty minutes with your own questions beats 2 hours of reading. The reading is easier, which is why people do it instead.
Bring your own hardest question and compare with that.
Open the chat