The world of AI has boomed since Novermber 2022, with Chat GPT changing the game for content generators. But Chat GPT isn’t the only AI writing tool in town, with a number of great alternatives available. One of these, Copy AI, was one of the early choices before Chat GPT – so how does it stack up now that Chat GPT is on the scene?
We’ve been using Copy AI to generate content for both this website, and also for some of our clients (we also run an SEO and content marketing agency). So in this post we’re going to review Copy AI and find out if its worth paying the extra money for a paid AI tool.
What is Copy AI?
Copy.ai is a platform that uses the power of artificial intelligence to generate content. It offers a solution to content creators, marketers, and anyone else who needs to produce high-quality text material in quantity.
Key features of Copy.ai include:
- Chat GPT style chat function where you can train the content generator to deliver exactly what you want, in theory.
- In built prompts to make it easier for you to generate exactly what you need. From blog posts to email marketing flows; to product landing pages, video scripts, social media outreach and recruitment documents.
- Save your own prompts in your prompt template library.
- A new brand voice feature, where you add content in your brand style and Copy AI will attempt to generate content in that style (when prompted).
- Workflow templates, where you can create multiple articles and processes as part of one prompt.
To put it very simply, Copy.ai is very much like Chat GPT but with a bunch of added benefits. Sounds good right?
Take a look at the full features of Copy.ai here
Is Copy AI better than Chat GPT?
This is a tricky question to answer, because while Copy AI certainly has a bunch of additional features, Chat GPT still has its benefits. To find out if Copy AI is better that Chat GPT, lets ask one question.
What do you need your AI content for?
If you’re building a campaign of content for a specific brand then there are some very good reasons to use Copy AI instead.
For example, the option to add brand voice as a short cut means you can quickly add a command to write in a specific tone without needing to create a bespoke prompt.
You can also add product details and highlights so that you can ask CopyAI to include product details using a #. This is called the infobase, which is shared across your team – if you have one. Talking of which…
Another cool benefit of the pro version of Copy.ai is that it comes with 5 free seats for your team. So if you’re managing a team across the globe (as am I), you can assign your team logins and they can manage their own workload using your prompts (if you want them to).
What about if you’re a one-person creator who wants to create long or short form content?
Actually, there is value for you here too.
Some of the old school features of Copy.ai included options to generate book outlines, character ideas, social media inspiration and a ton more. While these have mostly been superseded by the updates to GPT 3.5 and 4.0, they still have some pretty cool functionality.
And actually, there is one more feature that Copy.ai has over Chat GPT…
Live access to the internet
One major difference between Copy.ai and Chat GPT is that Copy.ai has access to the open internet. This opens up a huge range of possibilities, many of which I have been using myself.
For example, you can paste in a Linkedin profile and offer the prompt ‘write a note to this contact offering my service’.
Or, you can paste in a live job listing and ask Copy.ai to write a cover letter that will help you win the role. Or, summarise the key points of the role so that you can better write your own cover letter from scratch.
Want to get headhunted? Ask Copy AI to analyse your Linkedin profile and suggest some improvements?
Got a website that you want to steal their content secrets? Ask Copy AI to suggest 10 ideas for blog posts that would resonate with their readers.
I’ve also been using Copy.ai to summarise findings in research and academic documents, which saves me countless hours of skim reading PubMed articles for my clients.
You can also ask Copy.ai to summarise whats happening in a specific industry, or in the news, or even ask what is happening this weekend in your town!
Is there any reason to sign up for a paid Copy.ai subscription in place of using the totally free Chat GPT? Before we ask that, lets quickly look at some of the negatives.
Are there any negatives about Copy AI?
While there is lots of good stuff to get stuck into with Copy AI, there are a couple of negatives that I’ve experienced.
First up, I have found Copy AI to be a little glitchy. There have been numerous occasions where I’ve gone to use it and it just does something weird, or doesn’t respond as I expect. On a few occasions this has rendered it unusable for a few days, and I’ve had to revert back to Chat GPT.
And this brings me to the second negative about Copy AI, which is…
Customer support is inconsistent. Very. Maybe it’s because they got bored of my messages fuming about outages, but they stopped responding after probably the second time I contacted them.
One more point is that the results of prompt training sometimes seem a little random, especially when compared to Chat GPT. While with Chat GPT you can ask it to do something and kinda expect a standard response, Copy AI responses can vary. It’s like it sometimes misinterprets the prompt and it generates something totally random.
This can sometimes be fixed with a simple, ‘try again’ or other corrective prompt as required. But sometimes not.
Saying all of that, these glitchy elements do seem to be ironed out quite quickly and rarely last more than a few days at worst.
And in defence of Copy AI, they do offer some good video and tutorial support to really improve your AI content game.
Whatever the negatives of Copy AI, there is no question that it is one of the best tools for solopreneurs and online professionals.
Is Copy AI worth it?
While Chat GPT is completely free (with that optional $20 a month to upgrade), Copy AI is either free for up to 2000 words per month, or starts from $36 per month.
So is it worth the investment? If you consider the fact that you can create and save your own prompts, workflows, tone of voice and add team members within the dashboard of Copy.ai, you start to see why it makes sense for professional content creators.
The fact that it also has access to ‘live’ internet has also been incredible for me. And with many of the legacy features also being very useful, the actual use cases for Copy AI are kinda endless.
If you thought Chat GPT was the pinnacle of AI content writing, I do think Copy AI might just make it that bit better.
Find out for yourself and try out Copy AI here.
While this is a totally independent and honest review of Copy AI, this article does contain affiliate links. Meaning: we get a small commission if you do sign up.