Before writing this piece, I reviewed a number of top-ranking posts about AI marketing tools and software. And honestly, most of them just throw together long lists of tools.
That’s not what I want to do here.
Instead of giving you another generic list, I’m sharing my real experience using AI tools for digital marketing needs.
You’ll find case studies, practical examples, and clear insights into how these AI tools actually work and how they can help you automate your marketing tasks.
This is my personal list of the best AI marketing tools, and, of course, it’s subjective, but it’s based on hands-on experience.
Let’s get into it.
Best AI Marketing Tools in 2026 (Paid & Free)
Here’s what I actually look at when I test AI marketing tools:
- Pricing first. I always start with the cost because budget matters. I want to see if the price matches the value you’re getting.
- What they promise vs. what they deliver. The sales pages can sound impressive, but I care about what the tool actually does once you log in.
- Talking to the team. I often reach out to people building the product. Getting answers straight from them helps me understand how things really work behind the scenes.
- Reddit deep dives. I love checking Reddit. People are honest there. You quickly see what users genuinely like and what frustrates them.
- Hands-on testing. I’ve personally used every tool mentioned below. I test the core features and run reports, so I’m not just repeating marketing claims.
1. AI SEO Tools
| Tool | Pricing |
|---|---|
| Semrush One — An all-in-one AI marketing tool with traditional SEO solutions and AI visibility tracking. | Combines Semrush’s SEO toolkit with new AI search features to help your brand be found in AI. MCP access. 500 keyword tracking. Free trial: 14 days. |
| Indexly — Combines an AI search visibility toolkit with technical SEO solutions. | Starts at $99/m for 1 website. There’s also a 14-day free trial. To access AI visibility tracking for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, brand mentions on Reddit, and more, try the Growth plan for $299/m |
| Otterly AI — AI search monitoring platform that can help you track brand mentions across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot. | From $29/month for 15 prompts. Free trial: 14 days |
2. AI Marketing Agents
| Tool | Pricing |
|---|---|
| Gumloop — It’s a powerful AI agent builder with over 100 app integrations (my go-to tool for building AI SEO automations) | There’s a free plan with 5,000 credits/m, so you can use it for free. Paid plans start at $37/m. |
3. AI Newsletter Tools
| Tool | Pricing |
|---|---|
| beehiiv — My favorite newsletter platform for content creators to grow and monetize their audiences and build websites code-free. | Pricing starts at $49/m. There’s a 30-day free trial. There’s a beehiiv MCP that you can use to connect the tool to any LLM for data analysis and content creation. |
| Kit — Email marketing automation platform | Starts at $39/m. There’s a 14-day free trial. You can connect any LLM to Kit (Convertkit) with Kit MCP. |
4. AI Content Marketing Platforms
| Tool | Pricing |
|---|---|
| Holo. ai — Turns your product pages into ads, emails, and social media posts. | Starts at $19 per month. |
| Orshot — It lets you automate image generation for content marketing with templates, API, and integrations. | Free plan, then from $20/month |
| Blaze AI — AI marketing platform that builds a content strategy, writes content, and auto-publishes it across channels. | Starts at $79/month. A 7-day free trial is available if you want to test the platform before committing. |
| Canva AI — It’s an AI marketing assistant to help you visualize your ideas, generate text and images, produce video content for your social media accounts, and more. | Canva Pro costs $18 per month if paid month-to-month, or $144 per year ($12 per month) if you choose annual billing. There’s also a Canva for Business pricing plan for teams that starts at $25 per seat. |
5. AI Tools for Image Generation & Editing
| Tool | Pricing |
|---|---|
| Photoroom – It lets you create, edit, and optimize professional-looking images with AI without needing advanced design skills. | Offers a free plan with paid options for more advanced AI features. Pricing starts at $12.99/month (billed monthly). |
| Gemini — You can create and edit images with AI, whether you need visuals for blog posts, websites, social media, or marketing campaigns. | Gemini’s image generation features are available through Google AI plans. Starts at $4.99/month. |
| Claude — My top free tool for giving content a natural, human touch, digging up information, writing social media posts, and brainstorming catchy titles. | The personal plan is free to use, but the Plus version is $17 monthly, or $200 if you purchase an annual subscription. |
6. AI Voice Transcribers & Note Taking
| Tool | Pricing |
|---|---|
| Granola — Record conversations, get accurate transcripts, and turn meetings or events into organized notes. | Offers a free plan with paid plans starting at $14/month. |
| Gemini AI Note Taker — Automatically take notes, summarize meetings, and capture important details during Google Meet calls. | Available as part of paid Google Workspace plans. |
| Alice Recorder — Record conversations, transcribe audio, and turn voice recordings into organized notes in 100+ languages. | Pricing starts at $9.99 per one-hour package. |
7. AI Writers & Content Editing
| Tool | Pricing |
|---|---|
| Koala AI — Helps generate blog posts in almost 100 languages and lets you customize tone of voice and outline. | Starts at $9 monthly for 15,000 generated words, which is about three long-form articles. Plus, you can try it out by generating one article for free. |
| Semrush Content Toolkit — An AI tool for blog post generation where you can customize an outline and the tone of voice and choose different languages for content generation. | $60/month |
| Grammarly — Improve your writing, fix grammar and spelling mistakes, and get AI-powered suggestions as you write. | Free plan available. Premium plans start at $12/month. 7-day free trial. |
8. AI Website Builders
| Tool | Pricing |
|---|---|
| Figma AI — Lets you generate full designs by simply writing prompts, which makes the entire process much faster and more beginner-friendly. | Figma has a free Starter plan, which is suitable for personal projects and basic design needs (with limited AI credits). For bigger projects, the Professional plan costs $20/month per full seat and gives you unlimited files, team libraries, an advanced Dev Mode, an MCP Server, and 3,000 AI credits/month. There are also Organization and Enterprise plans if you need more. |
Let’s review every tool in detail.
P.S. This post includes a few affiliate links. If you decide to try any of these tools, I might earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Just being upfront about it! I’m only recommending tools I’ve used myself and truly believe in. 
Semrush One
- Why use: It’s an all-in-one digital marketing tool that you can use for SEO work and tracking AI search visibility
- Pricing: Starts at $199/month and includes the traditional SEO Toolkit + AI Visibility Toolkit. 14-day free trial.
Semrush One combines Semrush’s traditional SEO toolkit with new AI search visibility into one solution.
With Semrush One, you can track and improve your brand’s visibility in AI search results, including AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and more. You can monitor up to 50 prompts and 500 keywords per day across five domains, which is pretty solid.
I signed up for the Semrush One Starter plan shortly after it launched in mid-2025.
At the time, I was already using Semrush Pro, but I was also curious about the AI Visibility Toolkit. AI and SEO were becoming one of the hottest topics in the industry, and I wanted to understand how AI search was changing the way people discover websites and brands.
Alongside working on SEO for my own website, Behind Rankings, I started digging deeper into AI search visibility and looking for ways to track my site’s presence across AI platforms.
Here’s what you can do with Semrush One:
- Check AI visibility for various domains across popular platforms, like AI Mode, AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, and ChatGPT (up to 300 daily reports).
- Check brand mentions, citations, and cited pages.
- See where LLMs find information about your brand.
- Track both organic search visibility and AI visibility based on your target keywords and prompts.
- Research and monitor prompts relevant to your niche.
- Analyze AI sentiment around your brand.
- Run AI site audits.
- Compare your AI search visibility against competitors.
- Measure your AI share of voice.
- Access personalized keyword difficulty scores and topical authority insights tailored to your domain.
- Benefit from the Semrush MCP connector that lets you link your Semrush account to any LLM
- And more!
I published a detailed Semrush One review in case you are interested in learning more about how the tool works. I also shared my experience using Semrush to connect to Claude and automate my SEO work, such as SEO content strategy.
The input data comes directly from Semrush and GSC, which makes the results data-driven and saves time. I highly suggest giving it a try and seeing how these new solutions work for you.
Indexly
- Why use: You can track AI search visibility and monitor brand mentions in LLMs to improve content visibility across Google and AI platforms.
- Pricing: Starts at $99/m for 1 website. There’s also a 14-day free trial. To access AI visibility tracking for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, brand mentions on Reddit, and more, try the Growth plan for $299/m
When Indexly first launched, it was mainly an indexing and technical SEO monitoring tool. While those features are still available, the platform has evolved into a much broader AI SEO solution.
Today, Indexly helps businesses understand how visible their brand is across LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, and Google AI Overviews.
You can track brand mentions, citations, sentiment, competitor visibility, and AI referral traffic from one dashboard, making it easier to see where your brand stands and uncover opportunities to improve.
One feature I find particularly useful is the ability to see which websites and sources AI models cite when answering questions in your niche. This can help you identify new websites to target for digital PR, guest posting, partnerships, and brand mentions if your goal is to increase AI visibility.
Beyond tracking visibility, Indexly includes AI-powered Content Agents that help create and optimize content for both search engines and AI search platforms.
The platform also offers Reddit Monitoring and LinkedIn Presence features, helping brands build visibility on platforms that increasingly influence AI-generated answers and recommendations.
Indexly still includes its original indexing and technical SEO capabilities, allowing you to monitor website health, discover technical issues, and help search engines find new content faster. As a result, it can replace several separate SEO and AI visibility tools with a single platform.
Pricing starts at $99/month for one website. While it’s more expensive than many indexing tools, the platform offers a much broader set of AI visibility, content optimization, brand monitoring, and SEO features. If AI search is becoming an important traffic source for your business, the investment may be worth considering.
Otterly AI
- Why use: AI search monitoring platform that can help you track brand mentions across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot.
- Pricing: From $29/month for 15 prompts that you can track across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and MS Copilot.
Otterly AI is one of the more affordable AI visibility tools on the market. Not everyone is ready to spend $100–$300 per month just to test AI visibility, and this tool offers a much lower entry point.
For $29/month, you can track one domain using 15 prompts across major platforms like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot.
Here’s what you can do with OtterlyAI:
- Track brand mentions, sentiment, and website citations across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot
- Monitor brand visibility over time with metrics like Brand Visibility Index and Share of Voice
- Compare your visibility against competitors across AI search platforms
- Use the AI Prompt Research Tool to discover the prompts and conversational queries your audience is likely asking AI tools
- Run a GEO Audit to evaluate crawlability, content readiness, and on-page factors that may affect your chances of being cited in AI-generated answers
- Use Workspaces to manage multiple brands or clients under one subscription (especially useful for agencies)
- Export data and build custom dashboards with API access or Looker Studio integrations on higher plans
Gumloop
- Why use: It’s an agent builder platform with over 100 app integrations that lets you create AI marketing automations.
- Pricing: There’s a free plan with 5,000 credits/m, so you can use it for free. Paid plans start at $37/m.
With Gumloop, you can build almost any AI workflow you can think of, including AI marketing automations, SEO workflows, reporting dashboards, lead generation agents, and more.
If you’re looking to automate your digital marketing processes, here are just a few things you can build with Gumloop:
- Automate keyword research
- Generate SEO content briefs
- Build AI content creation workflows
- Monitor your competitors
- Automate lead generation and lead research
- Enrich leads with additional company and contact data
- Pull marketing data into automated reports
- Summarize customer feedback with AI
- Connect your favorite marketing tools into one workflow
- Build email marketing workflows
- Analyze survey responses with AI
- Generate weekly or monthly marketing reports
- Repurpose blog posts into LinkedIn posts, X posts, or email newsletters
- Analyze engagement metrics across social platforms
- Research influencers for partnership campaigns
- Collect competitor content from social media
- And more!
Recently, I used Gumloop to build my first Content Decay agent. The workflow identifies blog posts on my website that have lost 25%+ of clicks or impressions and automatically groups them based on how serious the decline is.
Since I manage my website myself, my goal is to eventually create AI-powered automations for different parts of my site using Gumloop. That’s why I decided to upgrade to the annual plan ($360) and continue experimenting with what the platform can do. I’m also planning to share a detailed Gumloop review based on my hands-on experience.
If you want to try Gumloop, you can start with the free plan, which gives you 5,000 monthly credits. Just keep in mind that credits can disappear quickly, especially when testing more complex workflows. I’d recommend either building your own automations or exploring the pre-built agents available in their library to see what works best for you.
beehiiv
- Why use: My favorite newsletter platform for content creators to grow and monetize their audiences and build websites code-free.
- Pricing: beehiiv is free for up to 2,500 subscribers, but if you want to benefit from its powerful audience growth and monetization features, the monthly plan starts at $49. There’s a 30-day free trial.
Here’s how beehiiv can support your online marketing efforts:
- Build a professional website without coding using beehiiv’s no-code website builder
- Optimize your content for search with built-in SEO features
- Turn your newsletters into blog posts and make them discoverable in Google
- Grow your email list with free and paid growth tools like Recommendations, Referral Programs, and Boosts
- Track your newsletter and website performance with detailed analytics, including top-performing content, open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and subscriber sources
- Improve your campaigns with audience segmentation and optimization features
- Use AI tools to brainstorm topics, write newsletters, and create better subject lines
I’ve been using beehiiv for my newsletter since December 2024. Before that, I used both Kit and Mailchimp.
What made me switch was that beehiiv felt like an all-in-one marketing platform built specifically for creators who want to grow their audience and turn their content into a business. I was especially interested in trying out its monetization features and seeing whether I could generate revenue from my newsletter without creating and selling my own products.
Here’s what I achieved with beehiiv in 2025:
- Newsletters sent: 75
- Average open rate: 68.8%
- Average CTR: 3.3%
- Email subscribers: 1,300
- Subscription revenue: $392
- Ad revenue: $138
- Boosts revenue: $328
- Partner Program earnings: $6,516.89
And this doesn’t even include any product or service sales that came from my newsletter.
beehiiv offers a free plan, so you can test the platform without paying anything. However, many of the more advanced features, especially audience growth and monetization tools, are only available on paid plans.
The cheapest paid plan starts at $39/month for up to 1,000 subscribers.
I’ve spent a lot of time testing different features and sharing my real experience using the platform. If you’re looking for a way to grow and monetize your audience, check out my detailed beehiiv review where I break down what worked, what didn’t, and whether it’s worth it.
Kit
- Why use: Kit is an email marketing platform made for creators, bloggers, and small businesses who want to grow their audience and build a community around their content.
- Pricing: Free for up to 10,000 subscribers with one automation and Kit branding on your emails. The Creator plan starts at $39/month for up to 1,000 subscribers and scales with your list size. There is a 14-day free trial on paid plans.
Kit, formerly ConvertKit, is one of the platforms I used before switching to beehiiv, and it is still a solid pick if selling digital products is your main goal. It is built specifically for creators: unlimited landing pages, tagging and segmentation, and the ability to sell digital products and paid subscriptions directly, even on the free plan.
It gives you all the essential tools to create newsletters, manage your subscribers, and grow your email list without making the process overly complicated.
One of the newer features that caught my attention is the Kit MCP connector. It connects your Kit account with AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and other MCP-compatible assistants, allowing you to work with your email data through simple conversations instead of manually digging through dashboards.
With Kit MCP, creators can ask AI to analyze newsletter performance, find insights about their subscribers, review campaign results, create segments, draft emails, build sequences, and even help manage parts of their email workflow. It basically turns your AI assistant into a helper that can work directly with your Kit account.
Holo AI
- Why use: Turns your product pages into ads, emails, and social media posts.
- Pricing: $39/month or $19/month (if billed annually at $228). Comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee.
Holo AI is an AI-powered marketing tool that can help you create branded marketing campaigns in 95 different languages, including ad creatives (text and video), social media posts, and email campaigns, to name a few. It’s said that Holo is trained on 10M+ creative assets and 19,000+ top-performing ads.
The company behind Holo AI comes from Lithuania. Their team is young and ambitious, full of energy and creativity. I always love seeing how the drive of young founders can turn into such powerful tools like this one!
Here’s a quick overview of the Holo AI features:
- AI Ad Generator — This feature can help you create ad visuals and copy in minutes.
- Socials Generator — Generates posts for platforms like LinkedIn, X, and Instagram.
- Emails Generator — This one generates email sequences and newsletters.
- Videos Generator — This feature can help you turn your ideas into video ads and clips.
- Brand DNA — It’s where Holo learns your brand’s voice, visuals, and product details.
When you first sign up with Holo, you’ll go through a setup process. Holo will ask you to share details about your brand, like your logo, colors, tone, and the products you sell. These details are essential for generating content that feels like you.
Therefore, I suggest taking some time to do it wisely. You can always update or add new information later, for instance, uploading a content mood board or refining your brand story inside the Brand DNA tab.
How Holo AI works
Once you’re set up, Holo gives you a few ways to generate content:
- Post Swipe (most popular)
- Concept
- Scenes
- Calendar
I tested the Post Swipe feature because it seemed like the most popular way to get started.
I wanted to create eye-catching LinkedIn posts promoting my SEO ebook. I uploaded a few images from the ebook and gave Holo a short prompt. The rest was up to the AI.
After hitting “Generate,” it takes 50 seconds for Holo to generate a creative based on your requirements. While Holo is working, you can grab a coffee or scroll through a few reels.
Holo then generated several creative variations based on my input. I could easily pick my favorites, edit them if needed, and download them for promotion.
All your favourite creatives are saved in a content library, which makes editing and reusing them super convenient.
To help you better understand how the feature works, I’ve created an animated image below.
My experience
In my experience, Holo is much more effective when generating content related to your products that you’ve earlier added to your Brand DNA, especially if your products are described in detail.
Holo isn’t flawless, though. Sometimes, it misunderstands my prompts, mixes languages, or makes tiny spelling mistakes. To avoid this, I recommend clearly specifying the language you want to use for content generation.
I’ve also reached out to the Holo team about these issues. Here’s their response:
If you happen to have spelling or any other errors on the generated images, you can simply use Holo’s “Edit” feature to improve your content. Their AI-powered agent understands pretty well what needs to be done.
In my case, I requested to change the copy on the banner image since it had spelling errors. Holo did a great job fixing it!
Overall, Holo AI does what it promises. It can help you quickly generate branded visuals and written content for your products.
It works well if you want to speed up your content creation process or if you’re running multiple campaigns and need a creative boost.
Keep in mind that it can take a bit of time to generate visuals, and the results occasionally miss the prompt’s intent. But given its potential and solid output quality, these are minor issues, in my opinion, for an evolving product.
Holo AI pricing is $39/per month or $19/month (if billed annually at $228). There’s no free trial, but you get a 14-day money-back guarantee, which is a nice safety net if you want to test it out risk-free.
Orshot
- Why use: It lets you automate image generation for content marketing with templates, API, and integrations.
- Pricing: Starts at $20 per month for hobbyists, which includes one user seat, 1,500 renders (aka credits), 10 AI requests, customer support, and more. There’s also a free plan that includes 100 renders to help you test the tool. No credit card required to get started.
Orshot is an AI marketing automation tool that can help you create visuals like social media posts, blog banners, product mockups, and more using customizable templates.
Before adding Orshot to this post, I did a bit of research to understand what the tool is all about and what users think.
Turns out, it’s been growing steadily! Here’s a tweet from Rishi from May 2025, sharing some updates:
- “Rendered 10k+ images
- Average render time from 6.1 → 4.5 seconds
- Crossed $$$3-digit MRR”
Actually, Rishi is quite active on Twitter, sharing the latest updates on Orshot. Definitely worth following him if you’re curious about the tool’s progress.
That’s a great sign that the product is growing and users find it helpful:
After learning what others say about the tool, I’ve also created my own account with Orshot to share my personal opinion and experience with you.
After you sign up with Orshot, you’ll land right on the dashboard. If you’ve used Canva before, it’ll probably feel pretty familiar.
From there, you can choose from a bunch of templates made for all kinds of projects. Or, if you want, you can even create your own templates using the AI Template Generator.
There’s so much you can do with Orshot.
Honestly, the possibilities are endless thanks to their powerful tools. Here are just a few things that you can do:
- Remove backgrounds from images with just 1 click (I used to do it with Canva Pro)
- Resize images automatically to fit any new canvas
- Dynamically generate images from your Airtable data without leaving your Airtable account
- Auto-post your Tweets from X to Instagram
- Auto-generate dynamic images from your Figma designs
- Generate design templates from prompts and existing designs
- And there’s more!
For example, I recently used their AI Template Generator to make a design for expert quotes. It literally took me 30 seconds. All the elements are customizable and can be adjusted to your own brand’s kit with Orshot’s Assets Library. There you can store your brand’s assets for quick designs like logos, icons, custom fonts, and brand colors.
Once your template is ready, you can start connecting it with different tools.
For instance, if I were working on a website redesign in Figma, social media templates, or marketing banners, I could use the Orshot Figma Plugin to import my designs into Orshot and use them as templates
You can connect Orshot with your favorite services using major automation tools like:
- Zapier
- Make
- Airtable
- N8n
- SDKs (Software Development Kit)
- Pipedream
- MCP Server
For example, you can integrate Orshot with n8n to automatically generate course completion certificates from Google Sheets. How awesome is that? I remember back in 2019, when I was helping run both offline and online design courses, this was something a designer had to do manually. Now, you can automate it easily and save a ton of time and effort.
If you are interested in the tool, you can try Orshot for free with their free plan that doesn’t require you to link a credit card. Once you create an account, you’ll get 100 renders (aka credits), one workspace, one user seat, and five AI requests for image generation.
If you like the tool and need more capacity, you can upgrade to one of their plans, starting from $20 per month for a solo plan.
Blaze AI
- Why use: Best for creators and small businesses that want to plan, create, and publish content in one place without juggling multiple marketing tools.
- Pricing: Starts at $79/month. A 7-day free trial is available if you want to test the platform before committing.
Blaze AI is an AI marketing assistant that can help you plan, create, and publish your content.
You can give Blaze information about your industry, audience, and goals, and it can help you build a content strategy, write blog posts, social media posts, and emails in your brand voice, and schedule everything across your connected channels. You still have full control, meaning you can review, edit, and approve content before anything goes live.
I haven’t tested Blaze AI as extensively as some other tools in this category, but from my early experience, it solves a problem that many AI tools don’t: helping you get your content published consistently.
Instead of using one tool to create content and another tool to schedule and publish it, Blaze combines everything into one workflow. If your biggest challenge isn’t coming up with ideas or writing drafts, but staying consistent across channels like LinkedIn, Instagram, and your blog, Blaze AI is built specifically for that.
Canva AI
- Why use: If you need help creating professional visuals, videos, reels, shorts, and more for your online store, website, or social media accounts.
- Pricing: Canva Pro costs $18 per month if paid month-to-month, or $144 per year ($12 per month) with annual billing. There’s also a Canva for Business pricing plan for teams that starts at $25 per seat.
Canva was the first content marketing platform I ever used.
I remember discovering Canva back in 2015, when I was just starting my marketing career. I was looking for a tool that would help me plan a month of social media content without having to ask a designer for every single visual.
Back then, I relied heavily on Canva templates and stock images. Today, I still use Canva regularly, but now I also rely on its AI marketing features to create content for the Behind Rankings social media accounts.
Canva still has all the tools you’d expect, including 3.6M+ templates, including premium ones, plus 141M+ premium photos, videos, graphics, and audio files.
That’s already enough to create pretty much any type of content you need for social media, your website, an online store, or other digital channels.
But Canva has also added a growing set of AI features for marketers. You can use them to turn ideas and rough drafts into visuals, Reels, Shorts, carousels, and other types of content.
Below is a screenshot from my Canva dashboard showing some of the designs I’ve created.
How I use Canva today
Here are some of the things I use Canva for:
- Creating reels for the Behind Rankings Instagram account. Canva AI doesn’t always follow my instructions perfectly, but it often creates useful design elements that I can reuse in my Reels.
- Creating custom visuals for my website posts, such as AI SEO tool comparison charts.
- Designing the cover for my AI SEO ebook with Canva AI.
- Creating and storing all my featured blog post images in Canva.
- Creating Reels for my personal Instagram account.
- Designing Instagram and LinkedIn carousel posts.
- And plenty of other smaller design tasks.
For me, the biggest benefit is that I can do most of this myself and the reels look professional even though I’m a complete beginner.
How much does Canva cost?
Canva has a free plan, which is enough if you only need basic design tools and free templates and assets.
If you want access to premium templates, stock content, AI features, Brand Kits, and social content scheduling, Canva Pro costs US$18 per month when billed monthly. Canva Business costs US$25 per seat per month and adds more advanced brand management, collaboration, marketing, and AI features.
For a solo marketer or content creator, Canva Pro is probably the plan I’d start with. If you’re working with a team or need more advanced brand and collaboration features, Canva Business may be a better fit.
Canva also offers annual billing at a lower effective monthly cost, and prices can vary depending on your location. Taxes are not included in the prices shown on Canva’s pricing page.
Photoroom
- Why use: Create, edit, and optimize professional-looking images with AI without needing advanced design skills.
- Pricing: Offers a free plan with paid options for more advanced AI features. Pricing starts at $12.99/month (billed monthly).
Photoroom is one of those AI image tools that makes professional-looking visuals much easier to create.
It can help marketers, creators, and business owners remove backgrounds, generate new backgrounds, edit images with AI, create product-style visuals, and polish existing photos.
I personally use Photoroom for all my website images. Every visual on my website has been edited and polished with Photoroom. I also used Photoroom to generate the logo for my website, Behind Rankings, and I honestly couldn’t be happier with the result. It has become one of my favorite AI tools for creating clean, professional visuals without spending hours in traditional design software.
Photoroom offers a long list of AI marketing tools inside its dashboard. Here are the ones I find most useful for content and brand marketing specifically:
- Logo — generates a logo from a prompt, which is exactly how I created the Behind Rankings logo
- Create any image — a general AI image generator for social graphics, blog headers, and campaign visuals
- Edit with AI — makes targeted edits to an existing image using a text prompt instead of manual retouching
- AI Backgrounds — swaps or generates a new background behind your subject or product
- Background Remover — one-click, pixel-perfect background removal for product shots and graphics
- Product Staging — drops a product into a lifestyle scene for more natural-looking marketing visuals
- Product Beautifier and Retouch — polish product photos and portraits without a full editing pass
- Instagram Story — formats a visual directly for Stories, no separate resizing tool needed
- Resize — instantly reformats one image for every platform, from Instagram to a blog header
- Studio Shot — turns a plain product photo into something that looks shot in an actual studio
- AI Images — a broader AI image generation tool for anything outside the product-photo use case
Gemini
- Why use: Gemini is another tool you can use for creating custom images for blog posts, social media, websites, and marketing campaigns.
- Pricing: Gemini’s image generation features are available through Google AI plans. The most affordable option is Google AI Plus, which starts at $4.99/month, while higher-tier plans offer more advanced features and higher usage limits.
I’ve been experimenting with Gemini for AI image generation and editing, and I like how easy it is to create, adjust, and refine visuals through simple prompts. Gemini’s image generation is powered by Nano Banana, Google’s AI image model that helps users create new images, edit existing ones, combine different visuals, and make changes based on specific instructions.
Instead of using a short prompt like “create a Linkedin image for my AI marketing campaign,” you have to describe exactly what you want, including the style, colors, layout, mood, target audience, and where the image will be used.
If you need multiple images, you have to mention the number of variations you want and explain how each image should be different. This helps Gemini create more unique results instead of giving you several versions that look almost the same.
One thing to keep in mind is that Gemini-generated images are usually saved as PNG files, and the file size can be quite large. Since website speed matters, I recommend converting these images to WEBP format before uploading them. It reduces the image weight while keeping the quality high, which helps your pages load faster.
Claude
- Why use: My top free tool for giving content a natural, human touch, digging up information, writing social media posts, and brainstorming catchy titles.
- Pricing: The personal plan is free to use, but the Plus version is $17 monthly, or $200 if you purchase an annual subscription.
Claude is an AI assistant built by Anthropic that can help you write, vibe code, learn new stuff, generate creative content, solve everyday problems, and a lot more.
This year, I started using Claude for content on my website and for local SEO tasks at my full-time job. I’ve been using it daily since January 2026, and here’s what I’ve trained it to do well:
- Analyzing a domain against competitors
- Reviewing my entire site to understand my writing style and tone
- Mimicking my writing style
- Adding internal links based on analyzing my domain
- Creating templated product and service pages
- Paraphrasing old content in a natural way based on my instructions
- Analyzing SERPs for a target keyword and suggesting better metadata
- Creating schema for site pages
- Improving outputs based on conversations inside dedicated projects
- Repurposing blog content into social posts and building a social media calendar
- Generating newsletters from my templates
- Generating social media images to promote my blog posts
Claude has become my go-to for image generation and editing, not just writing.
I built a dedicated Claude Project with standing instructions for exactly this. Every time I publish a new post, I feed Claude a screenshot of the article, and it generates an Instagram Story promoting it, branded with my logo, headline, and author photo. From that same story image, I have it repurposed into a LinkedIn post graphic, repositioning the text and card so the composition fills the frame instead of leaving empty story-style space at the bottom.
Same source image, two different platform-native outputs, without me opening a design tool for either one.
It works really well, and the image quality holds up even at that level of detail. Having the instructions saved in a Project means I am not re-explaining my brand guidelines every single time. I just drop in the new article screenshot and Claude handles the rest.
Granola
- Why use: Record conversations, get accurate transcripts, and turn meetings or events into organized notes.
- Pricing: Offers a free plan with paid plans starting at $14/month.
Granola is an AI meeting notes and voice transcription tool that helps you capture conversations, create transcripts, and turn discussions into clear summaries.
I use Granola when I attend conferences or have conversations with other experts because it saves me from taking notes manually. It doesn’t just record the conversation, it also creates a full transcript and summarizes the key points, making it much easier to revisit important ideas later.
For example, I used Granola while attending the Google Search Central Live event in Toronto in April 2026.
After the event, I exported the transcripts and used Claude to turn my notes into a detailed event review.
This workflow helped me capture insights I might have missed while listening and focus more on the conversations instead of worrying about taking notes.
Gemini AI Note Taker
- Why use: Automatically take notes, summarize meetings, and capture important details during Google Meet calls.
- Pricing: Available as part of paid Google Workspace plans with Gemini features included.
Gemini AI Note Taker is Google’s AI-powered meeting assistant that helps you capture conversations, create notes, and summarize key points during meetings.
It’s especially convenient for teams that already use Google Meet because everything works directly inside the Google Workspace ecosystem.
I find it useful for keeping track of important discussions without having to manually write everything down during a call. Instead of trying to capture every detail, you can stay focused on the conversation and review the AI-generated notes afterward.
One thing to keep in mind is that Gemini AI Note Taker is not available on the free version of Google Meet. You’ll need a paid Google Workspace plan with Gemini features to use this tool during meetings.
Alice Recorder
- Why use: Record conversations, transcribe audio, and turn voice recordings into organized notes in 100+ languages.
- Pricing: Offers a free trial, with paid plans available for users who need more recording and transcription features. Pricing starts at $9.99 per one-hour package.
Alice Recorder is an AI-powered voice recorder and transcription tool that helps you capture conversations, interviews, meetings, and voice notes without having to manually write everything down. It works globally, supporting more than 100 languages, dialects, and regional variations, so it can recognize voices from different parts of the world.
I find it useful when I need to quickly record ideas or conversations and turn them into searchable text later. Instead of listening back to long recordings, Alice helps summarize the key points and makes it easier to review important information.
Another feature I like is the flexibility of exporting transcripts. You can save your recordings and transcripts in multiple formats, including PDF, TXT, DOCX, RTF, SRT, VTT, JSON, CSV, HTML, MP3, and MP4. This makes it easy to use the content right away, share it with others, or feed it into AI tools for further analysis.
Alice is available both on the web and iOS, making it a convenient option for professionals who need a reliable transcription tool on the go.
- Why use: Create, edit, and optimize professional-looking images with AI without needing advanced design skills.
- Pricing: Offers a free plan with paid options for more advanced AI features. Pricing starts at $12.99/month (billed monthly).
Koala AI
- Why use: Helps generate blog posts in almost 100 languages and lets you customize the tone of voice and outline.
- Pricing: Starts at $9 monthly for 15,000 generated words, which is about three long-form articles. Plus, you can try it out by generating one article for free.
Koala AI is a super handy AI tool for marketing needs that helps you create long-form content like blog posts and automatically optimizes them for better results. It makes the process a lot easier.
Before you generate an article, you can adjust a bunch of settings to make sure the content fits your needs.
Here’s what you can tweak with Koala AI:
- Outline (this one’s my favorite)
- Tone of voice
- Article length
- Language (it supports 97 languages!)
You can also set a target keyword for Koala AI to include in the content. Plus, you can ask it to add an FAQ section and even pull in real-time data.
As a content creator and website owner, I mainly use Koala AI for blog posts. But it is great for creating other types of content too, like social media posts, images, and Amazon affiliate posts. It fits into the broader way I plan content, which I laid out in detail in my SEO content strategy, if you want to see how a tool like this slots into an actual publishing workflow rather than being used in isolation.
I’ve shared my full experience using Koala AI, including some examples of posts I’ve created, in my Koala AI review.
Semrush Content Toolkit
- Why use: Create, optimize, and repurpose SEO content faster with AI-powered writing and optimization features.
- Pricing: $60/month as a standalone tool.
Semrush Content Toolkit is an AI content creation and optimization tool that can help you research, write, improve, and repurpose content faster.
It used to be called ContentShake AI, and I also have a separate review where I share my experience using it.
With Semrush Content Toolkit, you can generate full SEO articles in 6+ languages, analyze what’s already ranking, and provide recommendations to improve your content before publishing.
What I like about this tool is that it’s not just an AI writer. It can help you create content in your own brand voice, find new content ideas based on your location, repurpose articles for different channels, and generate social media content. You can also publish directly to platforms like WordPress and Mailchimp, which makes the content workflow much smoother.
The toolkit also includes AI search and SEO optimization features, content scoring, AI-powered optimization suggestions, a Chrome extension that works across websites, AI-generated images, and Canva integration. It also connects with Semrush’s AI Visibility and SEO toolkits, helping you understand how your content performs across traditional search and AI-powered search experiences.
For me, the biggest advantage is having SEO insights, content creation, and optimization features in one place. It helps save time while still keeping the focus on creating content that is useful for readers and has a better chance of ranking.
Grammarly
- Why use: Improve your writing, fix grammar and spelling mistakes, and get AI-powered suggestions as you write.
- Pricing: Starts at $12 monthly. 7-day free trial. There’s a free plan, which you can use to correct your spelling and grammar mistakes.
Grammarly is an AI writing and editing assistant that helps you write more clearly, catch grammar and spelling mistakes, improve readability, and rewrite content when you need a better way to say something.
I’ve been using Grammarly since the early days of my marketing journey, long before the AI boom. I bought my first subscription in August 2020 and have kept it ever since. Over the years, Grammarly has changed a lot. What started as a grammar checker has grown into a full AI writing assistant with features for rewriting, brainstorming, and improving content.
Even though ChatGPT can proofread and edit text, I still use Grammarly every day because it’s built into so many of the tools I work with. Whether I’m writing an article, replying to emails, or posting on LinkedIn, Grammarly helps me improve my writing without interrupting my workflow.
One feature I use quite often is the Grammarly browser extension. Besides checking grammar and clarity, it can also scan content for potential plagiarism and detect AI-generated text. It’s not perfect—you can easily bypass AI detection by rewriting content—but it gives me a quick sense of originality and readability, which is usually all I need when working with large amounts of content.
For me, Grammarly is one of those tools that quietly runs in the background and saves time every single day. It’s become a permanent part of my writing workflow, and I honestly can’t imagine creating content without it.
Figma AI
- Why use: Lets you generate full designs by simply writing prompts, which makes the entire process much faster and more beginner-friendly.
- Pricing: Figma has a free Starter plan, which is suitable for personal projects and basic design needs (with limited AI credits). For bigger projects, the Professional plan costs $20/month per full seat and gives you unlimited files, team libraries, an advanced Dev Mode, an MCP Server, and 3,000 AI credits/month. There are also Organization and Enterprise plans if you need more.
Figma is a cloud-based design tool that can help you create websites, visuals, and UI/UX layouts without any coding.
I first discovered Figma back in 2019 when I joined a user experience design agency. At that time, I mainly used it to create visuals for blog posts.
Since then, Figma has changed a lot and in a really good way.
I’m recommending this AI marketing tool because I redesigned my entire website with Figma AI and saved thousands of dollars I would have spent on a professional designer.
Instead of trying to explain my ideas to a designer, requesting multiple edits, and waiting for different mockups, I simply described my website design ideas using a prompt and watched Figma AI bring them to life within seconds.
And honestly, it did an amazing job!
Overall, it took me about a week to design my website’s core pages, spending roughly 3–4 hours per page.
Below, you can see a screenshot from one of my Figma designs, where I created a brand-new homepage for my website (which is currently in development).
Everything you see there came from a conversation with Figma AI that resulted in a fully designed page. The only thing I couldn’t generate was the logo. I had to use a different tool for that. I also provided specific color codes from Figma’s Color Palette. You don’t have to do this because Figma can generate colors on its own, but I wanted the exact brand colors to be used.
I paid only $20 for a full seat of the Professional plan and designed the following pages:
- Home page
- About page
- Two service pages
- Ebook page
- 404 page
- Contact page
- A blog post template
Later, I had to add two developer seats so my developers could access Figma and implement the designs. That’s why my total bill for the second month increased to $73, which included two developer seats at $30/month, one full seat at $20/month, and an extra $23 in prorated fees for adding the additional seat mid-month.
Depending on your team size, Figma’s cost can add up quickly, so make sure to estimate your budget before you commit to it.
If you’re on the Professional plan like me, Figma says 3,000 AI credits should be enough for 50–70 design prompts. I’m pretty sure I used more than that while designing all my pages. Going over the limit is free right now, but Figma mentioned on their pricing page that they plan to introduce paid add-on credits for heavy users. Until then, they won’t strictly enforce credit limits for full seats.
This means that in the future, Figma will start charging for extra credits. So, AI-generated designs will become more expensive. But even with that in mind, it’s still much cheaper (and faster) than hiring a human designer.
FAQ on AI for Marketing
I came across a few questions about this topic, so I thought I’d jump in and share my thoughts. Feel free to let me know if my tips and the article were helpful in the comments!
What can AI be used for in marketing?
AI has already been widely used in online marketing.
According to Semrush’s AI Content Marketing Survey, conducted with more than 2,600 businesses globally and across many different industries, here’s what marketers actively use AI for:
I have pulled together more numbers like this in my roundup of AI SEO statistics, if you want the fuller data picture.
Search itself is changing just as fast as the tools are. I have written before about how AI is reshaping the future of SEO and about the AI SEO trends I am actually seeing move the needle this year, if you want the bigger picture before diving into individual tools.
As a content creator and solopreneur, I rely on AI marketing tools to help me get things done faster and manage more tasks, especially when deadlines are tight.
Similar to Semrush’s findings, I also use AI tools primarily for rewriting and paraphrasing content. Since I know my field of expertise quite well, I occasionally use ChatGPT and similar tools to do research. I see a lot of potential and like experimenting with different prompts to speed up and improve my research process.
If you haven’t started using AI for marketing, perhaps you can start doing it this year!
What is an AI marketing tool?
It is basically software powered by artificial intelligence that helps you save time and speed up your marketing tasks.
From what I’ve seen, these tools can handle a variety of jobs, like analyzing data, creating blog posts, crafting social media updates, editing content, tweaking tone of voice, and so much more.
I’ve written about AI SEO tools before, where I shared my experiences and results, and put together some AI search optimization tips if you want to go deeper on that specific piece. But AI marketing solutions cover a wider range of tasks and can be helpful for an entire marketing team — whether you’re in SEO, PPC, social media, or PR.
It’s worth mentioning that AI tools aren’t capable of doing your job as a content creator or a marketer well. They are not supposed to.
After trying dozens of solutions over the past few years, I realized that the smartest (and safest for your website) way to use AI tools is to use them as your personal assistant.
This approach lets you keep your creativity, which makes your marketing unique, while leveraging AI to work smarter and more efficiently.
Below, I’m sharing my (admittedly subjective) list of the best AI marketing tools. Whether you’re a solo marketer or part of a team, these tools can help streamline your workflow.
Since I’ve personally tested all these platforms and tools, I’ll also share some of my experiences and show you how AI-generated content ranks on Google.
Let’s dive in!
What are the best AI tools for digital marketing in 2026?
Below you can see some of the digital marketing tools I’ve been using for years that have added AI-powered features:
- beehiiv – You already know this is my top pick for growing and monetizing an audience without touching any code.
- Semrush One – I’ve been using Semrush since 2019 for all SEO tasks. Lately, they’ve released the Semrush One plan that combines SEO, competitor tracking, and AI visibility. I have an in-depth Semrush review post if you want to learn more about the tool.
- Claude – Honestly, one of my favorites for brainstorming, writing social posts, and making content feel genuinely human.
- Canva AI – I use the free Canva plan for creating visuals without needing a designer.
- Notion AI – Great for keeping your content strategy organized and your ideas in one place.
What are the limitations of current AI email marketing tools?
In my opinion, most AI email marketing tools struggle with personalization, sure they can drop in a first name, but writing emails that feel genuinely human is a different story.
The content can also come out pretty generic if you are not feeding the tool strong prompts and clear direction, which is the last thing you want when you are competing for attention in someone’s inbox.
Matching your unique brand voice is another challenge since it takes a lot of fine-tuning to get consistent results. These tools are only as good as the data you give them, so outdated or incomplete audience data will always show in the output.
On top of that, AI does not automatically keep up with regulations like GDPR or CAN-SPAM, so you still need a human to review everything before hitting send.
What are the best AI tools for content creation and marketing?
Here are some AI tools I have been using for content creation and marketing:
- Holo AI – This one is helpful if you run an online store. It can take your product pages and turn them into ads, emails, and social media posts without you lifting a finger.
- Orshot – If you create a lot of visual content, this tool can automate image generation using templates and integrations, keeping everything on brand.
- beehiiv – This is my go-to recommendation for creators who want to grow an audience, send newsletters, and build a website without writing a single line of code.
- Claude – Honestly, this is one of the best free AI marketing tools out there. I use it for writing social media posts, brainstorming headline ideas, and giving content that natural, human feeling that readers actually connect with.
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