The top 20 AI tools of 2025 - and the #1 thing to remember when you use them

Want to know which AI tools businesses and creators are flocking to? Here's 2025's ZDNET Index of AI Tool Popularity and how ChatGPT, Canva, Gemini, Copilot, and more stack up in market share.

Popularity in the tech world is hard to measure. I've talked at length about this in my discussions of programming language popularity. It really comes down to what you use to measure popularity -- and how available those metrics are to those doing the analysis.

It's difficult to generically define popularity, especially when you're including tools that do wildly different things. For example, is a general-purpose text-to-image generator like Midjourney inherently more popular than a tool that removes backgrounds from images like Remove.bg?

Also: Microsoft is offering free AI skills training for everyone - how to sign up

Over the past few years, I've been carefully refining my ...