MacAI Chat Apps

Claude and ChatGPT are the two apps most people already have an account for, and both follow the same shape: a free plan that covers standard chat, with the desktop-specific extras gated behind a paid tier. Claude, from Anthropic, adds Claude Code — run and monitor agentic coding sessions without a separate terminal — and Claude Cowork, which hands off multi-step tasks across local apps and files (the desktop app has to stay running for a Cowork task to finish); both sit on top of the free plan but lean on Pro, Max, Team, or Enterprise for heavier use. ChatGPT, from OpenAI, answers with screen-and-file context, Codex’s coding-agent tools, and ChatGPT Work’s delegated tasks — the last of those needs Plus, Pro, Business, or Enterprise. One detail worth knowing before you download: OpenAI links two separate Mac apps from the same download page, the current ChatGPT app and a simpler “ChatGPT Classic” build, so it’s worth checking which one a link actually points to.

Microsoft Copilot and Sider both cost nothing to start, and both come with a naming wrinkle worth untangling first. Copilot, Microsoft’s own free-standing consumer chat app per its Mac App Store listing, does text and voice chat plus AI image generation — but it’s a different product from “Microsoft 365 Copilot” (a paid add-on Microsoft bundles into some Office and Teams plans) and “Copilot Pro,” and the app’s own store page doesn’t say whether either changes anything once you’re inside it. Sider, from Vidline Inc., takes the opposite approach to the market entirely — instead of one model, it’s a sidebar front end for four at once (Gemini, Claude, Grok, and DeepSeek), with shortcut-triggered translate/rewrite/summarize actions on selected text and a Safari-integrated sidebar alongside the standalone Mac app. It’s free to use, but the usage limits on those bundled models for the free tier aren’t detailed on the App Store listing itself — check sider.ai/pricing before counting on heavy daily use.

FreeChat is the outlier of the five, and the only one built around not sending anything to a server at all. Made by developer Peter Sugihara and open source on GitHub, it runs GGUF models — CodeLlama, Mistral 7B, and Llama 3 among them — entirely on-device via llama.cpp, so once a model is downloaded it needs no account, no subscription, and no internet connection to keep working. The trade is the obvious one: local-model quality against a hosted frontier model, plus the 8GB+ RAM its own App Store listing calls out as a requirement. For anyone who wants an AI chat app that provably can’t phone home, it’s the only one of the five built for that.