Last Updated on March 7, 2024 by Alex Birkett
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard a lot of hype over AI writing software.
There are a stunning amount of tools in this space, many of which I’ve covered on this blog (including Jasper, in detail).
Two of the most popular ones are Jasper and Writesonic. Both products are built on GPT-3 and OpenAI, and both teams went through Y Combinator.
So, which is best? How are they even different?
I’ll walk you through both platforms so you can make an informed decision.
Though, honestly, both have generous free trials and you can probably just kick the tires yourself. If you want to just try ‘em out, here are some links:
- Jasper AI (you get 10k free words with my link)
- Writesonic (you get no special deal with my link, but they have a freemium plan)
In this battle of the bots, I’ll cover:
- An overview of the key features and lack thereof
- User interface and ease-of-use
- Copywriting templates and recipes
- Customization and power / flexibility of use
- Supported platforms and integrations
- Pricing
- AI outputs!
Editor’s note: I’ll be using affiliate links for both Jasper and Writesonic in this piece. If you sign up using these links, I get a little kickback (this doesn’t change my opinions expressed about the tools).
Jasper vs Writesonic Overview
| Jasper AI | Writesonic | |
| G2 Score | 4.8 | 4.8 |
| Pricing | Starts at $29/mo (no free plan) | Starts at $10/mo (free plan available) |
| Templates | 60+ | 70+ |
| Free Form Writer | Yes | Yes |
| Long form content | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | Surfer SEO, Grammarly | WordPress, Semrush |
| Recipes | Yes (community + custom) | No |
User interface and ease-of-use
In this section, I’ll walk through the interface of both Jasper and Writesonic and compare the ease-of-use and learning curve.
Jasper
When it comes to user interface, I find Jasper’s platform much more intuitive and fun to use.
When you first sign in, you’re greeted with a dashboard. Not too cluttered, tons of white space with only a handful of options on the left-hand sidebar.
I like this. Most of the powerful functionality is buried within the product, abstracted away from your initial view.
You can see at a high level view of new product updates, your favorite saved templates, and then below the fold there are links to the Jasper community and a meter to show how many credits you have left.
Starting from the bottom of the left hand sidebar is “AI outputs.” This shows you ALL of your previously generated outputs from Jasper:
You can organize these into folders and themes, but I tend not to go back and reuse these too often. So mine is quite cluttered.
The most important window is probably “Documents,” where your past drafts are saved and where you can begin a new Jasper workflow (we’ll cover the editor later in this section).
The “Recipes” tab allows you to both create your own recipes (which are, essentially repeatable workflows) or to use community recipes that others have posted:
For instance, there’s a recipe here for “product review blog posts,” which perhaps I should be using for this piece 😉
Finally, one of the most important screens for beginners is the “Templates” tab. This one has a bunch of easy-to-use templates built by the Jasper team. They’re wide and varied, from one-shot blog posts to creative stories, Facebook Ads, and more.
These are awesome for getting you started before you learn the full power of Boss Mode (which we’ll cover later).
Now let’s walk through the actual editor. We’ll start from the Documents tab. You can choose to either start from scratch or use the “Blog post workflow.”
The blog post workflow walks you step-by-step through each section of the post, from the introduction, description, titles, and more (and Jasper can generate each of these to get you started).
Then, you’re in the editor:
The bulk of the screen is taken up by a WYSIWYG editor, much like Google Docs, where you can type yourself as well as let Jasper take control.
The left-hand sidebar contains your basic blog post descriptions, but if you switch to power mode, it becomes a command tool.
Jasper’s command tool is a powerful way to give the AI some background information coupled with a command to generate an output. It can be used to help marketers create dynamic and personalized content for their audience. By providing Jasper with information about the target audience, as well as a topic or theme, the tool can generate relevant and engaging content that will capture the reader’s attention.
(That was written by the command tool).
Also neat: they have an integration with Surfer SEO, so you can use that as background information to help you hit all the relevant keywords in a piece to rank in search.
Jasper’s Grade: A+
Now let’s cover the Writesonic interface.
Writesonic
Writesonic’s interface is heavily geared towards using templates and pre-made tools to make creating and working with content easier.
It’s also a lot more colorful.
But you can immediately see that the core emphasis of the dashboard screen is their recommendation templates, notably the “instant article writer,” “article rewriter,” and “AI article ideas.”
As we’ll cover later, the tool definitely indexes heavily on templates, sometimes limiting your ability to customize inputs.
While this can be limiting for more advanced users, it makes getting started simpler if you’re new to content marketing. The interface is built on GPT-3, which means there are plenty of options available for customizing your content.
Okay, so stepping into the interface, they’ve got tabs like ‘saved’ for your saved recipes, history, and bulk upload. Like Jasper, they also have an AI image generator (full section on that later).
One thing ultra-apparent to me as I walk through the interface: there are A LOT of templates. Here’s a zoomed out pic:
In some ways, this is cool. If there’s a use case, they’ve probably got it covered.
But for me, it’s just a bit confusing to get started. And the main thing they’re missing: a free form writer. Something where I can just do commands and generate copy without a “template.”
But I will say: their templates and functionalities are top tier. We’ll cover those in the next section
Writesonic Grade: D+
Copywriting templates and recipes
Next up, we’ll cover the embedded and ready-to-use recipes and templates each AI writing assistant has to offer.
Jasper
First up, Jasper.
They’ve got a solid amount of templates. In order of priority, you can see that “documents” and “commands” are the first two listed. These are the most “generic,” meaning they don’t have narrowly prescriptive workflows to generate outputs.
Instead, they are more free form and allow you the flexibility and creativity to tweak the inputs to get your desired output, whether that’s long form content, website copy, social media copy…whatever.
As you scroll, though, you’ll note they do also have more prescriptive templates, including copywriting frameworks like PAS (Problem – Agitation – Solution). Let’s give that one a spin as an example:
As you can see, you just have to give Jasper a little overview of your product and product description, as well as a tone of voice, and it will generate 3 outputs using the PAS framework.
The quality of your outputs depends on the quality of your inputs. That’s a fact of nature with all AI writing tools. In my opinion, the outputs above aren’t great (but my product descriptions could have been better).
I like using Jasper’s Boss Mode to write new long form content, but I also like using it to create content that is clearer and simpler. I tend to write in convoluted, technical terms, so their “Explain it to a Child” template is great for me.
Here I copy and pasted a section from my article on “bandit testing” and spit out a 7th grade reading level version. Not bad!
Jasper also showcases community recipes, which are more complex formulas and workflows you can incorporate into their document and command features.
As you use Jasper more, you’ll come up with your own recipes that you’ll want to save. But they’ve got some made for you, such as the Hero’s Journey Outline.
Honestly, one of the biggest downsides of Jasper is also its biggest upside: it takes a lot of time to learn how to get the most value out of it. They index much less on prescriptive formulas and templates, and instead give you much more free will on choosing how you use the AI writing tools.
Jasper’s Grade: B-
Writesonic
If you’re looking for a tool that offers a wide variety of templates and recipes to help you write better copy, Writesonic is the tool for you.
With over 100 templates and recipes to choose from, you’ll be able to create high-quality content with ease.
Their templates are divided into six main categories: articles and blogs, ads and marketing tools, general writing, ecommerce, social media, and website copy (plus an Other category and some mystery category that is covered up by their search bar).
Clearly featured up front, in their “recommended” section, are the Instant Article Writer, the Article Rewriter, and AI Article Ideas.
I’ve written a whole piece covering article rewriters (and I’m not a huge fan of the category in general). But their Instant Article writer is pretty good.
This is the key long form content tool that Writesonic offers, and it’s much more structured than Jasper’s approach.
You start out by coming up with blog post ideas, which Writesonic helps you develop.
Then, you title the piece and choose different blog post introductions:
This forms a content outline, which you can tweak yourself. Once you’ve chosen the content outline and the structure of the piece, Writesonic then creates a full long form blog post for you (1500 words).
Lots of limitations here, but for straightforward articles and use cases, this makes the process pretty simple.
I actually really like their article ideas template. They differentiate here by integrating directly with Semrush to give you SEO-driven topic suggestions.
Outside of the recommended templates, they’ve got just a stunning amount of use cases. One of the most impressive is their landing page generator.
I’ll use the same “GA4 for content marketers” product example.
You just enter your description, the product title, and three benefits, and it generates an entire landing page using artificial intelligence:
So dope!
Many of these templates, however, are not available on the free plan (but the landing pages feature totally is). Makes sense, though, and if you’re hoping to generate tons of long form content, it’s probably worth it to get on one of the starter pricing plans.
Another thing I like: Writesonic gives you the ability to suggest a new feature:
Writesonic Grade: A-
Customization and power / flexibility of use
Next, we’ll explore the more advanced use cases of Writesonic vs Jasper, including how flexible the AI tool is and how much control you have over the inputs.
I’ll also cover AI image generators in this section, which both Writesonic and Jasper AI offer.
Jasper
Power and flexibility are truly where Jasper thrives. Obviously every AI tool will have its pros and cons, and this power comes with increased complexity. But if you want a free range AI writing assistant, Jasper beats all the other tools in the market.
Most of this flexibility, however, only kicks in on the Boss Mode plan.
Boss Mode plan unlocks the Google Docs style editor, which allows you to co-write alongside your AI tool, using commands and context along the way. This is pretty much the only way I use the tool nowadays (using it to help me write this article for instance):
Their editor also includes a plagiarism checker as well as a Grammarly integration.
I will say, these free form tools take time to learn. The templates really do help you get started and generate usable copy. But the real power comes in when you learn how to master inputs and direction. This unlocks a world of creative use cases.
Jasper also just launched an AI image generator. I love AI image generators, and I’ve gotten some pretty solid results using theirs. Just note that it does cost a little extra to get access to this tool:
Jasper Grade: A
Writesonic
Both Writesonic and Jasper are built upon GPT 3 technology. But Writesonic gives you much more rigid frameworks by which you can use it.
There are pros and cons to this. On one hand, it’s easier to use. On the other hand, you simply have less flexibility when it comes to potentially creative use cases.
For example, I’ve used Jasper to write love letters and poems. There may be a way to do this in Writesonic, but I have no idea how I’d do it.
Sure, you can use their ready-made article generator to produce a full piece in minutes. But sometimes, I like to write alongside the tool, to tweak and iterate my inputs as I go along.
This is, in my opinion, Writesonic’s greatest weakness. Unlike Jasper, you have to sort of stick to the script with Writesonic.
They do have a free form editor, but the input options are limited to the context you provide within the draft (i.e. no ability to integrate commands and SEO tools into your inputs):
Writesonic also has an AI image tool (called Photosonic). In my opinion, it’s pretty similar to Jasper’s. Solid, but not as good as Stable Diffusion or Midjourney:
Writesonic Grade: D
Supported platforms and integrations
Integrations aren’t usually a core consideration of an AI copywriting tool. Sometimes, however, having an integration with another SEO tool in the stack can dramatically accelerate the content creation process. We’ll compare Writesonic and Jasper AI when it comes to integrations here.
Jasper
Jasper is actually not great when it comes to integrations. They only have one integration, in fact, but it’s an important one (at least for me): Surfer SEO.
Surfer SEO is a content optimization tool that helps you outline, plan, and optimize content for a given search query.
This integration, along with Jasper’s flexibility when it comes to writing long form blog posts, make it the best solution for SEO and long form content marketers.
However, like I said, this is the only integration they offer. So if you don’t use Surfer (even if you use Clearscope, MarketMuse, or another Surfer alternative), you’re kind of screwed.
So I have to give the victory to Writesonic on this one (with the caveat that I, personally, really love the Surfer integration)
Jasper Grade: D
Writesonic
Writesonic is only slightly better than Jasper when it comes to integrations, but it definitely has a better diversity of connections.
On the publishing side, you’ve got WordPress (.com and .org). This is obviously huge for publishers, as you don’t have to waste the extra minutes to hours uploading content to WordPress.
They’ve also got a differentiator in their integration with Semrush, a powerhouse SEO platform. This helps inform keyword research and ideation as part of many of their AI tool templates.
Finally, they integrate with Zapier. This one is a little bit blurry, as technically pretty much everything integrates with Zapier (uhhh Zapier is an integration and automation platform).
So in my opinion, Writesonic and Jasper both have a long way to go building out connectors and integrations with the rest of the content marketing tool stack.
Writesonic Grade: C+
Pricing
Of course, we have to talk about pricing. Jasper and Writesonic both have different pricing models
Jasper
Jasper’s pricing model is pretty straightforward.
Basically, you’ve got three tiers:
- Starter
- Boss Mode
- Business
The business tier is just their ‘custom’ or ‘enterprise’ option for extremely high scale teams.
The starter pricing tier begins at $29/mo when paid monthly, and this gets you 20k words per month (supporting 20+ languages). Swap to annual, and it comes out to about $24/mo for the same word count. This plan lets you invite 5 users to your account.
Now, your pricing will scale with your word count needs. For instance, on the starter tier, if you need 75,000 words, then you’re looking at $82/mo.
Boss Mode is a totally different product in some ways than the starter plan, and this is something you’ll only learn after using it.
The starter plan basically just gives you access to their templates, whereas Boss Mode unlocks the Google Docs style editor, compose and commands features, and all of the most powerful free form AI writing tools.
In my opinion, if you’re going to go with Jasper AI, you’ve got to go with Boss Mode.
For 50k words per month, it’s going to cost you about $59/mo. This is the pricing tier I use. Also note: 50K words is A LOT. That’s like 20-30 long form blog posts per month.
One downside to Jasper’s pricing model is there is no freemium plan (though they do have a 5-day 100% money back guarantee).
Jasper: B+
Writesonic
Writesonic’s pricing model is more complicated, but ultimately a bit more flexible and inclusive of many use cases.
Like Jasper, Writesonic has three general pricing tiers: free trial, short-form, and long-form. Long-form unlocks the tools above that I showcased like the Instant Article Generator.
These are feature based plans, but then you have three more toggles that alter your pricing:
- Writing quality
- Word count
- Annual vs monthly billing
The free trial account is fairly straightforward (really it’s a freemium plan, with no credit card required). How many words you get on the free account depends on the witing quality you choose: premium, good, average, or economy.
Here’s where the plans confuse me: I’m not totally sure what premium, good, average, and economy mean. It’s hard for me to tell the tangible difference between the outputs based on those descriptions, but they change your pricing and word count dramatically.
I also don’t understand why anyone would choose a lower quality output. For me at least, I’m obviously going to choose the “premium” tier (honestly, I don’t even understand how OpenAI / GPT 3 technology can toggle between quality outputs).
Anyway, the pricing options that Writesonic offers are much more inclusive of free plans and low price points. You can see above that on the “Good” quality writing tier you can get 30k words per month for only $10/mo.
So my verdict is this: Writesonic’s pricing plans win on inclusivity of multiple pricing options, but are much more confusing than Jasper’s
Something else I find strange: you seemingly get access to their Google Docs style editor on the free plan, but not the short-form plan that is paid. Doesn’t really make sense to me:
Writesonic: B+
AI outputs! Which is ultimately more effective?
Finally, the real moment of truth: which AI tool is more effective at producing good copy?
Sorry to disappoint you: they’re both built on the same GPT 3 technology. They both have the same potential to produce good content.
Here’s the thing with AI copywriting tools: they depend entirely on the input, training, and editorial skills that you provide.
Jasper has some benefits in terms of flexibility. Writesonic has some benefits in terms of better structure and templates.
It’s really your preference as to which one makes YOU a more effective writer. And that’s where it comes down to use choice. Given all of the above info on their respective interfaces, templates, and copywriting tools, it’s down to you to find the one that best fits your use case and the skills of your team.
Conclusion
Which is better? It depends on your use case.
Put simply, Jasper allows more flexibility and Writesonic has more templates that are easy to use.
Jasper has a higher starting price, and Writesonic has a free plan as well as basic pricing options starting at $10 per month.
Personally, I prefer and use Jasper AI because I primarily write long-form SEO-driven content like this article.
But if I used it to create short form content like ads, I’d probably prefer Writesonic.
Also, Jasper seems to be stronger for multiple users and teams, where Writesonic might be better to start out for solo creators.
Both are built on the same technology, both have awesome customer support, and both have high quality outputs.
Of course, there are also many other Writesonic alternatives as well as Jasper alternatives you can explore outside these two options.
Your call. But hopefully this guide helped you understand the nuances.