AI tool recommendations, 2026 editorial selection of practical tools collection

AI tools keep coming out, but the genuinely good ones are few. This list is a curated collection of tools our editorial team uses daily and has validated again and again, organized by use case so you can quickly find the one that fits you.

AI Conversation Export and Backup Tools

The content generated from conversations with AI keeps piling up, and how to properly preserve these conversations is a problem many people overlook but will eventually run into.

SaveAI

SaveAI is a Chrome browser extension that exports conversation records from twelve mainstream AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek with one click. It supports exporting to PDF, Word, Markdown, JSON, and other formats, as well as long screenshots, making it handy for archiving and sharing.

It uses a local-first design, so conversation data isn't uploaded to the cloud, which is fairly reassuring on the privacy front. The free version lets you export a number of times per day, while the Pro version has no usage limit. It also supports syncing conversations to Notion, making it easy to build a personal knowledge base. As things stand, SaveAI is one of the most comprehensive conversation-export tools in terms of AI platform coverage.

Official site: SaveAI Official Site - AI Conversation Export Tool

AI Writing and Content Creation

Writing articles, polishing copy, making summaries—AI writing tools have permeated every aspect of daily work.

ChatGPT

OpenAI's conversational AI, also currently the AI writing tool with the largest user base. It excels at copywriting, article polishing, brainstorming, and multilingual translation, and supports uploading files and images for analysis. The GPT-4o model performs excellently at understanding complex instructions, and its plugin ecosystem is rich too.

Official site: ChatGPT Official Site

Claude

The AI assistant developed by Anthropic, known for its long-text processing ability. It supports feeding in large amounts of documents at once for analysis and summarization, and stands out in academic writing and technical documentation. Its quality of understanding and generating Chinese is quite good too, making it suitable for users who need to handle long-form content.

Official site: Claude Official Site

Notion AI

The AI feature integrated directly into the Notion workspace, which can continue, summarize, translate, and rewrite based on your existing notes and documents. Its biggest advantage is seamless integration with Notion's note system, so you don't need to switch back and forth between multiple tools. It suits users who already use Notion for knowledge management.

Official site: Notion AI Official Site

Miaobi (Metaso Writing Cat)

A Chinese AI writing tool developed by a domestic team, with a fairly solid grasp of Chinese context. It offers article generation, rewriting, error correction, and originality-boosting features, and is especially suited to new-media operations and academic writing. It supports online use with a low barrier to entry.

Official site: Miaobi Writing Cat Official Site

AI Image Generation

Enter a text description and you can generate an image—AI drawing tools make creative expression much easier.

Midjourney

Currently one of the most popular AI image generation tools, known for its visual texture and artistry. Enter a text prompt through Discord to generate images, and it excels at many styles such as illustration, concept design, and photographic styles. The community is active, with a large volume of high-quality work to reference and learn from every day.

Official site: Midjourney Official Site

DALL-E

OpenAI's image generation model, integrated directly into ChatGPT. It has a strong grasp of natural-language prompts, generating decent images without needing to learn complex parameter syntax. It supports editing and extending existing images, suiting scenarios where you need images fast.

Official site: DALL-E Official Site

Stable Diffusion

An open-source image generation model that can be deployed and run locally without relying on cloud services. The community has contributed a large number of fine-tuned models and plugins, making it highly customizable. It suits users with some technical background who pursue a high degree of customization. It has certain hardware requirements; a computer with a dedicated graphics card is recommended.

Official site: Stable Diffusion Official Site

Leonardo AI

An online AI image generation platform with a friendly interface that's easy to get started with. Besides text-to-image, it also offers image style conversion, texture generation, and more, and is fairly popular in the game-asset and product-design fields. Its free quota is fairly generous, suiting light users.

Official site: Leonardo AI Official Site

Lingtu

If you're more used to drawing on the fly on your phone, Lingtu is a domestic AI drawing app worth keeping on your iPhone. Its full name on the App Store is "Lingtu - AI Drawing & Design," and you can download it by searching "灵图" directly in the China region. Its feature is aggregating several mainstream overseas engines into one interface, including a Midjourney-style atmosphere engine, a Flux-style realistic engine, and a Nano Banana-style fast engine, so both realistic and illustration needs can be switched within the same app without hopping between multiple overseas platforms. Prompts support Chinese input, and its localization is smoother than using overseas native tools directly, making it suitable for domestic users who don't find it convenient to fiddle with their network environment but still want to experience multi-engine effects.

Download: Lingtu - App Store

AI Video Generation

From static images to dynamic video, AI video generation tools are evolving rapidly, and the barrier to creation keeps dropping.

Sora

OpenAI's text-to-video model, able to generate realistic video clips from text descriptions. It has clear advantages in visual consistency and the simulation of physical motion, and the generated results are impressive. It's currently open for use, suiting creative shorts and proof-of-concept.

Official site: Sora Official Site

Runway

An online video generation and editing platform offering text-to-video, image-to-video, video style conversion, and more. Its interface is intuitive, and you can get started without professional video editing experience. It's widely used in advertising creative and social-media short-video production.

Official site: Runway Official Site

Pika

An AI tool focused on short-video generation, supporting text-to-video and image-to-video. Its generation speed is fairly fast, and its visual style leans toward animation and creative expression. The interface is clean, suiting fast production of social-media content and creative material.

Official site: Pika Official Site

Jimeng

An AI video generation tool launched by ByteDance, with a fairly good grasp of Chinese prompts. It supports text-to-video and image-to-video, and performs decently in character motion and scene transitions. Domestic users get a better network experience and don't need a VPN.

Official site: Jimeng AI Official Site

AI Coding Assistants

Writing code, debugging, refactoring projects—AI coding assistants have become standard in a developer's toolbox.

GitHub Copilot

An AI coding assistant launched by GitHub in collaboration with OpenAI, integrated directly into mainstream editors such as VS Code. It can auto-complete code based on context and supports many programming languages. It significantly reduces repetitive work in daily coding and helps a lot with development efficiency.

Official site: GitHub Copilot Official Site

Cursor

An AI code editor deeply reworked from VS Code, fusing AI conversation and code editing into one. It supports context-aware code generation and modification across an entire project, and performs especially well when handling complex cross-file changes. Once you get used to it, it's hard to go back to an ordinary editor.

Official site: Cursor Official Site

Cline

An open-source AI coding plugin in VS Code that supports autonomously executing multi-step programming tasks. It can read project files, run terminal commands, and create and edit files, like a coding partner living inside your editor. It supports connecting to multiple large models, with high flexibility.

Official site: Cline Official Site

Claude Code

The command-line AI coding tool launched by Anthropic, running in the terminal and able to directly read and modify project code. It excels at understanding the structure of large codebases and is very capable at code refactoring, bug investigation, and project analysis. It suits developers used to a command-line workflow.

Official site: Claude Official Site/code

AI Translation Tools

Cross-language communication is more and more frequent, and a good translation tool can save you a lot of time.

DeepL

An AI translation tool known for translation quality, standing out on academic papers and business documents. It supports translation between many languages, and the naturalness and accuracy of its output are generally better than traditional machine translation. It offers a web version, desktop client, and browser plugin, covering use cases comprehensively.

Official site: DeepL Official Site

Google Translate

The free translation service provided by Google, supporting the most language varieties, covering over a hundred languages. It's good enough for everyday colloquial translation and quickly understanding foreign-language content, and works great paired with Chrome's web translation feature. The mobile app also supports photo translation and voice translation.

Official site: Google Translate Official Site

Youdao Translate

A translation product under NetEase, with deep accumulation in Chinese-English translation. Its dictionary features are rich, suiting English learning and everyday word lookup. The desktop client supports select-to-translate and screenshot translation, with fast response in the domestic network environment, making it a must-install on many people's computers.

Official site: Youdao Translate Official Site

AI Learning and Productivity

Using AI to improve learning efficiency and information-processing ability is one of the most worthwhile directions to invest time exploring right now.

Perplexity

An AI-powered search engine that gives an answer with source citations for each question. You no longer need to click open each search result one by one to find the answer, making it especially suited to research-type information lookup. Answers come with the original links, making it easy to verify the reliability of the source.

Official site: Perplexity Official Site

NotebookLM

An AI note-taking tool launched by Google that lets you upload documents, papers, web pages, and other materials, then ask questions and summarize based on these materials. Its biggest feature is that answers are strictly grounded in the materials you provide, with no making things up, making it very suitable for academic research and deep reading. It can also automatically generate podcast-style content summaries.

Official site: NotebookLM Official Site

Gamma

An AI-powered presentation creation tool—enter a topic or paste content and it automatically generates slides. The layout and color quality are good, saving a lot of time on formatting. It suits fast production of reporting materials and project showcases, and supports exporting to PPT format.

Official site: Gamma Official Site

Webmaster and Ops Tools

CF Toolbox

A Cloudflare batch management platform supporting unified management of DNS records across multiple domains, batch modification of SSL certificates, one-click cache purging, and more. For webmasters managing a large number of domains at once, there's no need to log into the Cloudflare dashboard and operate one by one—all domains are handled in a single interface.

Official site: CF Toolbox - Cloudflare Batch Management

New-API

A unified AI model API management panel supporting integration with multiple large-model providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. It suits developers and teams who need to switch calls between different models, offering practical features like usage statistics, key management, and load balancing.

Official site: New-API - AI Model Interface Management

Douyin Content Assistant

An AI-powered short-video content analysis and creation assistant tool that helps creators quickly understand trending topics, generate copy ideas, and optimize publishing strategies. It suits the daily use of self-media operators and content teams.

Official site: Douyin Content Assistant

AI Video Tool

An online AI video generation and processing platform offering text-to-video, video editing, subtitle generation, and more. It suits creators and marketing teams who need to quickly produce short-video content.

Official site: AI Video Tool

All of the tools above have been personally tested and used or deeply experienced by our editorial team, and we'll keep updating this list. If you have a handy AI tool to recommend, feel free to leave a comment and let us know.