Alternatives to Cortana
Microsoft's assistant, replaced by Copilot
None of its 12 checklist rows are verified yet.
Microsoft's assistant, replaced by Copilot. Cortana has been discontinued; the active alternatives listed here are maintained products you can switch to.
People who used Windows PCs or Windows Phone devices and wanted a voice-activated virtual assistant for basic tasks and search.
A voice and text assistant integrated into Windows that could set reminders, manage calendar entries, answer questions via Bing search, and control certain device functions. It also existed as a standalone mobile app on iOS and Android for a period. Microsoft discontinued the Windows app in 2023 and had earlier shut down the mobile apps, retiring most of Cortana's consumer-facing functionality as it shifted focus to Copilot.
Cortana used voice or typed input, natural language processing, and Bing-powered search to interpret requests and respond, drawing on user data like calendar and location to personalize answers.
Why people leave Cortana
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Ranked alternatives
Ordered by Alt Score. Click any score to see the breakdown.
DeepSeek is a free web and mobile AI chat assistant from the Chinese lab of the same name, offering its R1/V3-class reasoning models with no subscription.
Grok is xAI's standalone AI chat assistant (grok.com and mobile apps), built around real-time access to web and X/Twitter data for current-events answers.
LibreChat is an open-source AI chat platform teams self-host to get a private, fully-controlled ChatGPT-style interface, with agents, MCP server support, code interpreter, and connectors for OpenAI, A.
Meta AI is Meta's conversational assistant, accessible standalone at meta.ai and embedded across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, reaching one of the largest user bases of any chat assistant.
Microsoft Copilot is a general-purpose AI chat assistant available at copilot.microsoft.com, in Windows, Edge, and mobile apps, built on OpenAI models plus Microsoft's own tuning.
Poe, built by Quora, is a chat assistant hub that lets users converse with many underlying models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others) plus community-built bots from a single interface and subscrip.
FAQ
Yes. ChatGPT, Claude and DeepSeek have a free tier or are fully free. Free-tier limits in the comparison table are verified and dated.
DeepSeek and LibreChat — every license claim links its source.