The Best FREE AI Tools Right Now (2026)

0:00Did you know there's actually a way to use the most powerful AI tools out there without paying a single dollar? Well, tens of thousands of people are already doing exactly that with open-source models. So, in this video, I'm going to show you the five best open-source AI tools you can install on your own computer and run anytime completely free and without giving up your privacy the

0:16way you often do with the online ones. So, let's start with the first tool, which is one of the most powerful areas in the entire AI industry. And of course, I'm talking about chatbots. You've probably heard of Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini before, but you also know they start at $20 a month and can get to even for the bigger tiers. But there's one open-source tool that gives you almost the same results as those paid versions completely for free, and it's called Jan. Installing it is actually quite simple, so let's just head over to jan.ai and download the app for Windows or Mac, depending on what operating system you have. Once that's

0:45done, you'll see this list where we can choose the exact model we want to run. Now, if you've never used an open-source AI before, you might be wondering what it even means to pick a model. Well, with Jan, you can basically choose whichever AI model you want to run, but for this time, Jan gives me its only recommended model, Jan V3.5, so I'm going with that. Now that Jan has finished the setup, I can jump straight in and start chatting. So, let's test it out with this prompt to see if it actually works. As you can see, it gives us this nice response back, and it

1:11honestly sounds extremely similar to what you'd get from something like Claude or ChatGPT. Then I'll give it another prompt, a quick follow-up, and paste this one in. I really like the hook it gave me. So, when it comes to performance, it's getting pretty close to the paid models, but what makes this really different from them is that it runs completely locally. And that means two things. First, you don't need any internet connection to run it, which can come in handy sometimes. But what really matters is the second reason, you get full control over the model, and your privacy stays completely yours. Here's a perfect example from just a few weeks

1:40ago. Claude released a brand new closed model called Fable, and within days, the US government had it shut down over a security issue. So, for a while, nobody could use it at all. But this can never happen if you have an open-source tool on your own machine, and that's not just true for Jan, which is easily the best open-source pick for chatbots. It also goes for every single tool I'm about to show you. By the way, I made a free document with all the names and things you need to know about today's open source tools. [music] So, if you want to check it out, I'll leave a link to it in

2:06the description down below. So, the next open source tool might look similar to Jan, but it actually does one thing way better, and that's going out and searching the internet for you. It's called Vain, and it's basically the free version of Perplexity. But, that doesn't mean it's any worse, [music] and I'll actually show you how close it gets in terms of performance. Now, if you don't know what a research tool even is, it's

2:25basically Google with superpowers. Compared to the normal chatbots that sometimes just invent details out of their own head, a research tool like this actually goes onto the internet and looks for the real answers without making anything up. So, let's get it installed. And, compared to Jan, the setup's a bit more technical because it

2:41runs through something called Docker. But, honestly, the way I did it was to open up a chatbot like Jan, and ask it for all the steps to install it. It gave me a few lines of code, I ran them in my command prompt, and it just worked. But, I'm going to leave all the setup steps inside the free document, too, so you can just copy them straight [music] from there. Now, let's actually look at how it performs. I'm opening Vain, and right away you can see it looks like a search engine. But, instead of just giving me a page of links, it reads through everything and hands me back one full

3:05answer. It's got a few modes, speed for quick questions, and quality for deeper research. And, since I actually care about the sources here, I'm switching it over to quality mode. Then, I type in a real question I genuinely want answered. What I like is that the answer comes backed by a whole stack of sources sitting right next to it, instead of just being a block of text you have to trust blindly. So, to prove it's not just making things up, I click straight into one of those sources, and you can see where it's actually pulling that information from, which is the whole difference between this and a normal

3:32chatbot. And, there are a few other things I really like here. You can point it at specific websites if you only trust certain sources, you can upload your own files to search through, and it even saves your search history locally. And, that makes it perfect for research. But, if you're a developer, or you just want to vibe code something yourself, there's actually a much better tool for that. And, that tool is called Open Code, which basically works as a coding assistant, like the ones you've probably

3:53heard of, maybe Cursor or Claude Code. With this, you can fix any bug in your code or just generate new code from scratch. But instead of copy-pasting your code back and forth with a chatbot, Open Code runs right inside your project, reads your files, and can make the changes itself. And because it's open source and runs locally, you don't have to worry about it stealing any of your data. Now, to set it up, it really

4:11just takes one line from their site. Then you open your project folder and type Open Code. But like with all the other tools, I'm giving you all the setup steps inside the free workflow document in the description down below. So, go ahead and grab it if you haven't yet. Now, let's actually put it to the test. I've got this tiny broken script here. It's supposed to take 10% off the total, but the math is wrong. So,

4:29instead of 180, it gives me 199.9. So, I'll run Open Code and ask it to find and fix the bug in my program. Right now, it's reading through the file, and once it finds it, it points me to the exact line and explains the error. What's really cool is that it then asks me before applying the fix and testing the result. Though, you can turn that off in the settings. And now it comes back with 180, exactly the result it should be. And of course, this is a very basic problem. But with Open Code, you can fix and build pretty much anything. However, if you're going to be

4:55using all of these AI tools all day long, you'll actually run into a pretty annoying problem. And that's actually typing the prompt. It may not seem like much, but after using AI for the last 3 years myself, I know just how much you end up having to write. But luckily for us, there's actually an unconventional way around that. And that's using a speech-to-text tool. You might have heard of tools like Super Whisper, but those cost quite a lot of money for what is basically just a dictation tool. So, the free alternative is WhisperX, which is fully open source. Now, for the setup, it does take a few commands

5:23because you [music] first need to install Python and then WhisperX. But you don't have to worry about any of that. I've put all the commands inside the free document. Now, if I run it and just say something out loud, "Write a YouTube intro about five free open-source AI tools that beginners can install on their own computer." You'll

5:40see it types out the exact text I said. You also don't need to worry about speaking perfectly because the AI models are so good now that they'll understand anything you want to say, no matter the accent. And just like that, you can write any prompt you want three times faster. However, there's one AI category where the prompt structure really matters, and that's the one place you might not want to use WhisperX. That's the image generation category, where every single word matters. And because even the most powerful tools in the space, like GPT or Nano Banana Pro, need a properly structured prompt, I'm going to show you exactly how to create one,

6:09completely for free, in just a second. But before that, let's set up our open-source image generator. And this time, there are actually two things we need to install. The first is Invoke AI, which gives us a simple interface for creating and managing our images. And the second is Flux 2, which is the open-source AI model [snorts] that actually generates them. So first, we download Invoke AI. Then we open the model manager, search for flux.2, and install the recommended version directly inside the app. Now, one thing worth mentioning is that because these run locally, they use your own computer to do all the work. So if your computer

6:37isn't that powerful, it can sometimes take a while. To get around that, you can go with the Flux 2 Klein model instead of the heavier Flux 2 Dev 1. Once the model has finished installing, we can open the generation screen, select Flux 2 Klein 4B, and start creating an image. And compared with some other local image generation tools, the interface here is much easier to understand. You don't need to connect a complicated set of nodes just to generate your first image. Now, we paste in the prompt, but like I told you earlier, we can't just write a normal sentence here. There's actually another free tool you can use that writes a

7:04high-quality prompt for you in a couple of seconds, and it's called Vito Prompt Studio. All you have to do is add your Gmail to get access, [music] and after that, it's completely free. There's no paywall or anything. What this tool does is you write a simple sentence like this, then pick the type of image you want, and in my case, that's a cinematic one. And the trick here is that you can choose between a normal prompt, which just looks like plain English, or a more structured one, which works way better for image generators. Then I press enter, copy the prompt it gives me, and paste it straight back into our image

7:31generator. It takes a couple of minutes to generate, but here's how it looks once it's done. Honestly, I really like the mood it has. And the cool thing here is that the better your computer specs are, the better your results get, because you can run bigger and more powerful image models. Now, all of these open-source tools are really cool, but they barely cover 10% of what AI can actually do. [music] That's why I made a free school community where I post everything I learn about AI in way more detail. So, go join using the link in the description below, and I'll see you inside. Thanks for watching. [music]