After publishing 213 hand-tested AI tool reviews on saas.pet, I keep getting the same question: which tools should content creators actually use in 2026?
I have been testing these tools in real content workflows — blog posts, video editing, voiceovers, image generation, transcription — since 2015. Here are the 5 I keep coming back to, and why.
1. Midjourney — still the king of image generation
I run saas.pet's review images and blog cover art through Midjourney v7. The text rendering and prompt adherence are the best in the industry. I have generated probably 10,000+ images for saas.pet, and v7's coherence at high resolutions is unmatched.
Midjourney is not free (Standard is $30/month), but if you produce any kind of visual content, the time savings pay for it in the first week. The Discord-first workflow still feels weird to new users, but the quality justifies it.
Read my full Midjourney v7 review.
2. ElevenLabs — the voice AI that actually sounds human
I use ElevenLabs for the saas.pet weekly newsletter voiceover experiments and a podcast I help friends with. The voice quality jumped a generation in 2025 — ElevenLabs voices now pass the "is this a real person?" test for short clips without artifacts.
ElevenLabs Starter is $5/month (1 hour of generation) which is enough to try it. Pro is $22/month for 10 hours and unlimited downloads. If you do any voice work — narration, podcast, video voiceover — ElevenLabs is the default.
Read my full ElevenLabs review.
3. Whisper (via API) — best-in-class transcription
I transcribe all saas.pet review audio notes through OpenAI Whisper. It handles my accent, background noise, and technical jargon better than Otter, Rev, or any paid transcription service I have tested. The API is $0.006 per minute which is roughly 100x cheaper than human transcription.
If you are still paying for a transcription service in 2026, switch to Whisper and save 99% of your transcription budget. The accuracy is genuinely better for technical content.
Read my full Whisper review.
4. Perplexity — my default research engine
I switched from Google to Perplexity for most research queries about 6 months ago. Pro Search pulls from multiple sources and shows me citations inline. I use it 20+ times per day when writing saas.pet reviews.
Perplexity Pro is $20/month. If you are still bouncing between Google search tabs trying to verify facts, Perplexity replaces the entire research workflow — including the "open 8 tabs and synthesize" step.
Read my full Perplexity review.
5. yt-dlp — the only YouTube downloader that works
This one is not AI, but no content creator's toolchain is complete without yt-dlp. 170K GitHub stars, 30+ active contributors, and it still beats every paid YouTube tool I have tested.
yt-dlp is free, open source, runs on every OS, and handles DRM, playlists, subtitles, and the YouTube API changes that break paid tools every quarter. If you do any video content — for research, archival, repurposing — yt-dlp is essential.
Read my full yt-dlp review.
The honest limitation
These 5 tools are not the only ones I use. I also use ChatGPT for quick reasoning, Claude for long thinking, Cursor for code, and several others depending on the project. The point is: most content creators over-invest in tools. Stick with the 5-8 that actually earn their subscription, ignore the rest.
How I keep this honest
I pay for every tool I review with my own money. No free accounts from vendors, no sponsored reviews, no affiliate kickbacks. saas.pet exists because I got tired of AI tool reviews that read like press releases.
If you want to browse all 213 reviews by category, start at saas.pet. If you want the shortlist of what I actually use, this article is it.
Originally published on saas.pet
