Cohesive AI Review: Is This AI Writer Better Than ChatGPT?

Discover our insightful Cohesive AI review that profiles the pros and cons of this AI writing tool for creatives and decide if it’s worth the hype.

Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, hundreds of new AI writing applications have popped up. I’ve tested almost all of them and some are great, others I suggest steering clear of. One of the best AI writers that I’ve been using a lot lately is Cohesive AI. I signed up because they offered AI voice generation, which helped me edit my articles and spot errors I might’ve missed if I was proofreading myself. 

However, I started digging deeper and found that Cohesive has a few more hidden features that tools like ChatGPT don’t have. So if you’re researching Cohesive and want to know if it’s a good option, this review is for you.

What Is Cohesive AI?

Founded by Hemesh Singh while living in San Francisco, Cohesive is a ChatGPT alternative allowing you to generate 200 types of copy, including entire blog posts, YouTube video scripts, Instagram captions, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn posts.

You can even paste existing text and ask the AI to expand, summarize, or rephrase it. From here, integrate Cohesive into your social media platform of choice, and Cohesive will export its responses for easy publishing.

What sets Cohesive apart from ChatGPT and other AI chatbots is that you can communicate with your team inside the dashboard. Think of it as ChatGPT and Slack put together. This feature makes it much easier for me to collaborate with my editors, strategists, and fellow writers.

Cohesive AI Pricing

Cohesive offers three price plans, one of which is free. This free plan is generous, allowing you to produce unlimited words, 15 template runs, 20 images, and one minute of AI voices. However, if this isn’t enough and you want to upgrade to the paid plan, you can choose between these options:

• The creator plan costs $15 per month
• The agency plan costs $30 per month

With the creator plan, users can generate up to 150 template runs, 100 images, and 90 minutes of AI voice generation. You can also integrate Cohesive with five applications and collaborate with your team.

The agency plan has all these features, but you get more outputs. You can create 300 monthly outputs, 200 AI images, and 240 minutes of AI voice generation. As well as this, you can integrate Cohesive with 30 applications of your choice.

The free plan is best for getting a feel for the platform, while the creator plan suits solopreneurs and small teams, and the agency plan is tailored around large organizations or startups scaling rapidly.

What Is Cohesive AI For?

After using Cohesive AI to learn how to write a good introduction for an essay, an outline, or to create AI voices, it could empower the lives of professionals, including:

• Freelance writers
• Corporate teams
• Marketers and Copywriters

Freelance Writers 

If you’re a freelance writer and find ChatGPT a bit limiting, Cohesive can benefit you. After testing both platforms, I noticed Cohesive’s outputs are more in-depth.

When you log into your dashboard, you’ll find over 150 different templates that you can use to generate content quickly. In the example below, I asked Cohesive to write a hook for a social media ad about machine learning:

As you can see, the output is short yet high-quality, and you can prompt the AI to expand, summarize, or edit its previous output in a certain style. 

Corporate Teams

Cohesive also has a creator and agency plan perfect for teams. It’s almost like ChatGPT and Slack combined. You can use the AI to generate content, edit it, and collaborate with your team to get feedback on outputs. I’ve tested countless AI writers and Cohesive is the first one I’ve come across that offers this level of collaboration. Check out our guide on Slack Grammly integration.

Marketers and Copywriters

Cohesive’s writing templates are tailored around the needs of copywriters, marketers, and anyone else who writes sales copy on a regular basis. For example, you can generate:

• TikTok Ads
• Facebook Ads
• Landing pages
• Sales pitches 
• Customer surveys

If you’re part of a brand that uses both blog posts and YouTube videos to interact with audiences, I highly suggest utilizing the AI voice feature to repurpose your blog posts into YouTube videos. The AI voices sound surprisingly human, and the entire repurposing process only takes 20 to 30 minutes.

How Does Cohesive Work?

To start, head to Cohesive.so and sign up for a free plan. You don’t have to enter your credit card details; you can easily log in with your Google or Gmail account. Cohesive will ask you a few questions about your AI writing needs, and once you’ve answered them, you’ll land on your dashboard.

Simply click on the template you want, whether it’s the full blog post generator or AI image generator, and enter a prompt like you would with ChatGPT. Select generate, and Cohesive will give you an output within a few seconds. 

If there’s something about the output that you’d like to change, prompt the AI further, and it’ll tailor its next output around your feedback. I ask Cohesive to generate an article about large language models in the example below. This is what the AI produced:

While this is a good first try, I feel like the introduction is a bit thin; I want to add more context. So what I’ll do is head to the introduction section, right-click, and select continue writing. After I prompted the AI to expand the introduction, this is what it gave me:

This looks great. But there’s one section I’d like the AI to touch on a bit more, and that’s the future of language models heading. I’ll do the same thing I did with the introduction, and after a few seconds, the AI expanded upon this section.

Next, I want to add images because you can’t publish an article without some visuals. So I’ll right-click on areas where I want Cohesive to add pictures and the AI will import pictures from Unsplash that are relevant to my article.

But before I publish this piece, I want to share it with my editor. So I’ll click the share button in the upper-right-hand corner, type the email address of my editor, and provide editing access.

As my editor makes changes, I’ll be able to view it in real-time, almost like in Google Docs. Cohesive version control gives me full control over edits, and I can reject or accept each one based on its quality. Check out our Grammarly vs. Google Docs review!

AI Voice Generation

The feature that caught my eye was the AI voice generator. It allows you to generate AI voices that sound similar to a human’s, which is perfect for YouTubers and video marketers.

All you have to do is select the voice option on your home screen, choose a voice you want to use, and paste your text into the prompt box.

When I compared Cohesive to other AI voice generation platforms, I found that Cohesive offers a wider range and more natural-sounding voices. You can even choose between voices in various languages such as Spanish and French.

I’m a big fan of this feature because it simplifies my editing process. When I proofread my article out loud, it’s difficult to spot errors because my brain ignores them. However, with Cohesive, I can paste my work into the application and when it reads my article back to me, it’s super easy to spot errors. What is content editing? Find out in our guide!

Template Runs

I like that Cohesive offers templates for various types of content, such as blog posts, Facebook Ads, Instagram captions, LinkedIn posts, blog introductions, song lyrics, Amazon product descriptions, and more! Get paid to write blog posts by checking out our guide!

For example, I was writing an article about deep learning a few weeks ago, but I struggled with writer’s block and couldn’t come up with an introduction, even after 20 minutes of brainstorming. So I went to my Cohesive dashboard, chose the blog post option, prompted the AI to generate a catchy introduction, and this is what it came up with:

Prompt Creation

When I use ChatGPT, I know what I want to create, but it’s still challenging to put it into words. Sometimes I’ll ask a question, but because my wording could be better, the AI produces outputs that make no sense. Creating prompts is so complicated that there’s even a specialized field called prompt engineering that involves getting what you want from an AI in an efficient way. 

Fortunately, this isn’t a problem with Cohesive because it suggests prompts you might be looking for, similar to Google’s suggested search. In the example below, I wanted to ask Cohesive to create a headline for me, and before I even typed my entire prompt, this is what is suggested.

As I entered my prompt, the suggested search kept updating me with potential inputs. So if you’re looking for an AI platform that makes prompt creation easy, Cohesive is a better option than ChatGPT.

Areas For Improvement

During the testing phase, I compared Cohesive to other AI writers and found a few areas where it fell short:

• Cohesive is more rigid than ChatGPT
• Cohesive doesn’t offer a mobile app
• Plagiarism checkers will sometimes flag your work

Cohesive Is More Rigid Than ChatGPT

ChatGPT offers a chatbot interface where you can enter prompts and the AI will reply with relevant responses. However, the main drawback to Cohesive is that it relies too much on its templates. You can’t ask for things that fall outside the parameters of these templates.

For example, I’ll sometimes ask Cohesive to write an article introduction for me, but because there isn’t an article introduction template, Cohesive will notice the word “article” and write an entire article.

The same applies if you’re asking the AI questions. In the example below, I asked Cohesive how much it’ll cost to start a SaaS business, and the AI produced a 2000-word article:

This makes Cohesive an impractical option if you’re looking for a more interactive chatbot that’ll understand the nuance of your prompts. So if you want an interactive experience, ChatGPT is a much better option. Read our ChatGPT review.

Cohesive Doesn’t Offer a Mobile App

Cohesive doesn’t offer a mobile app. So if you’re like me and prefer working on your phone occasionally, Cohesive might not be your best choice. They’ll probably launch a mobile app within a few years, but for now, you’ll have to stick to ChatGPT’s mobile app.

Plagiarism Checkers Will Sometimes Flag Your Work

After I pasted Cohesive’s outputs into Grammarly’s plagiarism checker, I noticed that it’d sometimes flag the outputs as plagiarism. Although it’s usually just one or two sentences and not entire walls of text, it is annoying to fix all the time. 

There are many different types of plagiarism to look out for, but unfortunately, there isn’t an AI writer that guarantees zero plagiarism, so this is something to watch out for when editing your copy.

Cohesive Review Criteria

When I tested Cohesive and compared it against other AI chatbots to see how it could benefit the lives of writers, I used this set of criteria:

Ease of use: The first thing I looked at was how easy to use Cohesive’s dashboard is. I considered that the prompt creation of ChatGPT was quite difficult, so I was looking for an easier-to-use alternative.

Accuracy: Next, I analyzed the most important factor; accuracy. I ran multiple tests for this, asking the AI to generate articles, ads, and images. I compared these outputs to those of ChatGPT and other AI writers.

Affordability: I didn’t want Cohesive to break the bank, and since a massive part of the Cohesive audience is freelance writers on a budget, affordability was the third criterion I looked at.

Additional features: I reviewed any other features that Cohesive offered that most AI writers don’t, such as integration and AI voices.

Why You Can Trust Me

I’ve been in the freelance content and copywriting industry for five years, writing software reviews, comparison posts, listicles, how-to guides, you name it. This experience gave me a solid foundation on which I based this review. 

Before I wrote this review, I played around with the features on the dashboard, like the AI writer, image generator, team chat, AI voices, and integrations. I even pasted the first draft of this article into Cohesive and asked the AI to read it back to me so I could spot errors. Read our Article Forge review to learn more.

Looking for more? Check out our guide to marketing for writers!