If you were a fan of Forefront AI, you probably loved it for giving you a direct line to powerful open-source models. Its chat and AI assistant features were a hit with developers and AI enthusiasts who wanted to play with the latest tech. But the AI world moves fast, and with Forefront shutting down its popular chat service, many users are now looking for solid, reliable Forefront AI alternatives.
The good news? The AI market has grown up. The conversation has shifted from “What model can I access?” to “What problem can I solve?” This article will cut through the hype and give you a straightforward look at the top 7 alternatives for 2025. We’re here to help developers, product managers, and support leaders find the right tool, whether you’re building a custom app from the ground up or need a ready-made AI agent to solve actual business problems.
What are Forefront AI alternatives: AI development and agent platforms?
Let’s quickly break down what we’re talking about. AI development platforms are essentially toolkits that let you build, tweak, and launch AI models for specific tasks. Think of them as a workshop where you can create your own intelligent tools. An “AI agent” is one of the most common things people build in that workshop, it’s an app designed to do things on its own, like answer customer questions, sort through data, or handle internal workflows.
These platforms come in a few flavors. On one end, you have the raw, foundational models you access through an API, which is what Forefront AI was known for. This gives you a ton of control but requires serious coding skills. On the other end, you have fully integrated, business-ready solutions designed to fix specific problems right out of the box, like taking over your entire customer service queue.
Comparing different types of Forefront AI alternatives.
Our criteria for selecting the best Forefront AI alternatives
We didn’t just pull names out of a hat. This list was put together based on a few key factors to make sure these alternatives are genuine upgrades that solve real-world problems.
- Integration capabilities: How well does the tool connect with the systems you already use, like your help desk, CRM, or internal wiki? We focused on platforms that fit in smoothly, because nobody wants to deal with a messy “rip-and-replace” project.
- Use case specialization: Does the platform actually solve a business problem? We looked for tools that provide clear value, especially for customer service, ITSM, and internal support, where smart automation can make a huge difference.
- Ease of use and deployment: How quickly can you get it working? We chose tools with a simple setup, clear instructions, and smart features like sandboxed testing that let you see the results before going live.
- Performance and scalability: The platform has to be reliable and accurate, even when things get busy. We picked tools that can handle a growing number of requests without slowing down.
- Transparent pricing: No one likes surprise bills. We looked for clear, predictable pricing models that offer good value and don’t hide extra costs behind confusing per-agent fees.
The top 7 Forefront AI alternatives for 2025
With those points in mind, let’s get into the best alternatives on the market.
1. eesel AI: A Top choice among Forefront AI alternatives
Description: eesel AI is built for businesses that want to put AI agents to work right where they already are. Instead of making you build things from scratch, eesel is a practical, ready-to-use solution that plugs directly into your help desk (like Zendesk or Intercom), chat tools (like Slack or Microsoft Teams), and knowledge sources (Confluence, Google Docs, past tickets, and more). It’s designed to automate frontline support, draft replies for agents, and sort tickets without making you change a single tool.
Why it’s a great alternative: Forefront AI gave you access to powerful models, but eesel AI’s platform turns that power into a practical business tool. It’s perfect for teams that need to solve actual problems, like automating customer service or internal support, not just tinker with APIs. Its unique ability to learn from past support conversations gives it a deep understanding of your business that generic models can’t match. Plus, its multi-bot setup lets different departments (Support, IT, HR) create and manage their own specialized agents from one central hub.
Pricing: Plans start at $239/month (billed annually) and are based on interactions, not a costly per-agent fee. This makes your costs predictable and easy to manage as you grow.
Pros:
- Integrates smoothly with over 100 tools you already use.
- Learns from your real-world content, including past tickets, for very high accuracy.
- The “simulate before you scale” feature lets you test its impact without any risk.
Cons:
- It’s focused on business automation, not a general-purpose tool for developers to build with.
- It works on top of your existing help desk or collaboration tools, so you need those set up first.
eesel AI integrations dashboard.
2. Google Gemini: A powerful option for Forefront AI alternatives
Description: Google Gemini is a family of seriously powerful, multimodal large language models from Google. It’s made for developers who need access to raw AI power for complex thinking, writing code, and handling text, images, and audio all at once.
Why it’s a great alternative: If you were using Forefront to get your hands on the latest models, Gemini is a direct and powerful replacement. Its huge 1 million token context window is a big deal for analyzing massive documents or understanding long, complicated conversations.
Pricing: It’s usage-based, priced per 1,000 characters or tokens. This can be very affordable for certain tasks, but you’ll need to keep an eye on your usage.
Pros:
- An enormous context window allows for incredibly deep analysis.
- Top-notch multimodal capabilities (text, image, video).
- Backed by Google’s world-class tech and research.
Cons:
- It’s a foundational model, not a business app; you’ll have to do a lot of development work to make it useful.
- It can be tricky to set up and manage if you aren’t a developer.
Google Gemini interface analyzing text and an image.
3. Anthropic’s Claude: A safe option among Forefront AI alternatives
Description: Claude is a family of LLMs from Anthropic, known for its focus on AI safety and its impressively large context window. It’s built from the ground up to be helpful, harmless, and honest, which makes it a safe bet for any customer-facing app.
Why it’s a great alternative: Claude offers a developer-focused experience similar to what Forefront provided. Its 200,000 token context window is great for tasks that need a lot of context, like summarizing long support chats or dense legal documents. Its focus on AI safety also gives you peace of mind by lowering the risk of it generating weird or off-brand replies.
Pricing: Token-based pricing that changes depending on which model you use (the speedy Haiku, the balanced Sonnet, or the powerful Opus).
Pros:
- Excellent for analyzing and generating long-form text.
- A strong focus on AI safety and ethical guidelines.
- Very capable and natural in conversations.
Cons:
- Like Gemini, it’s a raw API that you need to build into a complete application.
- It doesn’t have the pre-built integrations and business workflows you’d get from a platform like eesel AI.
Anthropic's Claude summarizing a long document.
4. Hugging Face: An open-source choice for Forefront AI alternatives
Description: Hugging Face is more than just one tool; it’s an open-source platform and community for everything related to machine learning. It gives you access to thousands of pre-trained models, datasets, and libraries (like the well-known Transformers library) so you can build, train, and launch your own AI apps.
Why it’s a great alternative: For developers who loved Forefront for its access to open-source models, Hugging Face is your new playground. It offers incredible flexibility and control, letting you fine-tune models with your own data and host them wherever you want.
Pricing: The platform itself is free. You only pay for infrastructure costs if you use their hosted services, like Inference Endpoints.
Pros:
- A massive, unmatched library of open-source models.
- An extremely high degree of flexibility and customization.
- A strong, active community for help and collaboration.
Cons:
- Requires deep technical knowledge to manage well.
- The total cost, including infrastructure and maintenance, can add up fast.
Hugging Face's open-sourced model hub.
5. DeepSeek: A coding-focused option for Forefront AI alternatives
Description: DeepSeek is an AI model that has built a reputation for its powerful skills in coding and technical problem-solving. It’s often praised as a very cost-effective model that performs as well as much larger and more expensive options.
Why it’s a great alternative: If you mostly used Forefront AI for generating code or solving technical problems, DeepSeek is one of the best Forefront AI alternatives you can find. It’s reportedly up to 90% cheaper than other models for similar work, making it a very budget-friendly pick for developers.
Pricing: A pay-as-you-go, token-based model with pricing that is much lower than many of its competitors.
Pros:
- Great for coding, debugging, and other technical jobs.
- Extremely cost-effective, helping keep project budgets under control.
- Open-source versions are available for those who want more control.
Cons:
- Less focused on general chats or customer service tasks.
- It’s a model API, so it doesn’t have a user-friendly interface or business integrations.
DeepSeek generating python code with NLP prompt.
6. Cohere Command R+: An enterprise-grade choice for Forefront AI alternatives
Description: Cohere’s Command R+ is a powerful LLM built specifically for enterprise-level applications. It’s designed for scale and reliability, with features made for business workflows like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and tool use.
Why it’s a great alternative: For bigger companies that need to build custom, scalable AI solutions, Command R+ is a very strong option. It’s optimized for production environments and offers solid multilingual support, making it a great choice for global businesses.
Pricing: Usage-based, with pricing tiers aimed at enterprise clients.
Pros:
- Built for enterprise-level performance and reliability.
- Advanced features like tool use and RAG are built-in.
- Strong performance across many languages.
Cons:
- Can be more expensive and complicated than other options.
- Requires a dedicated development team to put it into action.
Cohere Command R+ dashboard for RAG.
7. Perplexity AI: A research-focused option for Forefront AI alternatives
Description: Perplexity AI is a conversational search engine that gives you straight answers to your questions, complete with citations and sources. It’s great at pulling information from all over the web to give you accurate, up-to-date answers you can trust.
Why it’s a great alternative: If you mainly used Forefront for its chat and web-browsing features for research, Perplexity is a much better choice. Its main strength is providing factual, sourced answers, which is critical for any research-heavy work.
Pricing: A freemium model with a Pro plan ($20/month) that gives you access to more powerful models and higher usage limits.
Pros:
- Excellent for research, brainstorming, and fact-checking.
- Provides citations and links to sources for all its answers.
- Clean, user-friendly interface.
Cons:
- It’s not a development platform; you can’t build custom apps with it.
- It’s limited to conversational search and isn’t designed for things like support automation.
Perplexity AI results with sources.
Comparison of the top Forefront AI alternatives
Here’s a quick summary of how these alternatives compare to help you find the right fit at a glance.
| Platform | Best For | Pricing Model | Key Differentiator | Target User |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| eesel AI | Customer Service & IT Automation | Interaction-based subscription | Seamless integration with existing business tools | Support/IT Leaders |
| Google Gemini | Raw AI power & multimodal apps | Pay-per-token/character | 1 million token context window | Developers |
| Anthropic’s Claude | Safe, conversational AI | Pay-per-token | Large context window & focus on AI safety | Developers |
| Hugging Face | Open-source model experimentation | Free (pay for infrastructure) | Access to thousands of open-source models | AI Researchers/Developers |
| DeepSeek | Coding & technical tasks | Pay-per-token (low cost) | High performance for coding at a low price | Developers |
| Cohere Command R+ | Enterprise-grade custom solutions | Pay-per-token (enterprise) | Scalability and reliability for production | Enterprise Developers |
| Perplexity AI | Conversational search & research | Freemium/Subscription | Answers with citations | Researchers/General Users |
How to choose the right Forefront AI alternative for your business
That’s a lot of options. So how do you pick the right one? It really comes down to asking a few simple questions about what you need.
- Do you need a platform or a programming interface (API)? If you want a ready-made solution to a business problem like automating support, a platform like eesel AI will get you there much faster. If you want to build a completely custom application from scratch, a raw API like Gemini or Claude is your best bet.
- What is your main use case? Are you automating customer support, writing code, doing research, or just messing around? Pick the tool that specializes in what you need. A tool that tries to do everything often excels at nothing.
- What is your team’s technical skill level? Platforms like Hugging Face and Cohere require serious technical know-how. In contrast, eesel AI is designed for business users and support leaders to set up powerful automations without writing a single line of code.
- How important is integration with your current tools? If you can’t afford to ditch your help desk or internal wiki, choose a solution that integrates deeply with the tools you already have.
Choosing between Forefront AI alternatives.
Forefront AI alternatives: Move beyond experimentation to implementation
The AI world has definitely moved on. Forefront AI was a great playground for trying out different models, but the best Forefront AI alternatives today are specialized tools for real-world use. The right choice depends on your goal. If you’re a developer building from scratch, the powerful APIs from Google and Anthropic are your best friends. But if you’re a business trying to solve a real problem like customer support overload, an integrated platform is the smarter, faster way to go.
For teams ready to get real business results from AI, eesel AI is the logical next step. It offers a powerful, integrated, and affordable solution designed to automate support and make your whole team better at what they do.
Ready to see how a dedicated AI agent can transform your support workflows? Start your free trial of eesel AI or book a demo with our team today.
Frequently asked questions
Many users are seeking Forefront AI alternatives because its popular chat service was discontinued. This has prompted a search for more stable and specialized solutions that solve concrete business problems, rather than just providing access to various models for experimentation.
For developers, Hugging Face offers free access to a massive library of open-source models, making it a top choice. For research, Perplexity AI has a capable free version, but most business-ready solutions require a paid plan for full features, security, and support.
Developer-focused options like Google Gemini and Claude integrate via APIs, which requires custom coding. In contrast, business platforms like eesel AI are built for immediate integration with tools like Zendesk, Slack, and Confluence right out of the box.
Yes. Technical platforms like Hugging Face offer tools for fine-tuning models on your data. For a simpler, no-code approach, solutions like eesel AI automatically learn from your existing knowledge bases and past support tickets to provide highly relevant answers.
Ready to see how an AI agent can give your existing support setup a boost? Message support
