What I actually use.

Best at long-form writing, strategy work, and reading documents without losing the thread. The one I keep open all day. Web app for chat, Claude Code for the harder edits. Worth the subscription.

Faster than Claude for short questions and the only one whose image generation I trust for production. Image generation has my voice better than Midjourney; Midjourney has better lighting. I use both.

One API key, any model. Worth it the first time you want to swap Claude for GPT for Llama mid-project without rewriting auth. The free tier of Llama 3.3 70B is good enough for low-volume production; the paid catalog is where it earns its keep at scale.

VS Code with Claude pre-wired. The first AI-native editor that did not feel like a demo. Composer mode is the difference — it understands a whole file at a time, not just the line under the cursor.

Mood boards, hero visuals, occasional product mockups. The aesthetic ceiling is highest here; the variation discipline is highest on me.

System-wide voice-to-text. I think faster than I type. Two-thirds of my long-form thinking starts in Superwhisper, ends in Claude.

Genuinely good — and getting better — especially anywhere video is in the loop. Long-form video understanding, frame-accurate captioning, multi-modal reasoning across decks and screen recordings. The first model where uploading a 40-minute walkthrough and asking it the operator question doesn't feel like a stunt.

The standard at Outsight and every B2B company I've worked with. Powerful and expensive. Marketing Hub Pro is the breakpoint where it earns its keep; below that, use anything else.

GA4, Tag Manager, Search Console, Google Ads. The default. GA4 is still worse than Universal Analytics was; I keep it because everything else assumes it.

Expensive, slow, the only place where the cost-per-qualified-lead math actually works for B2B. Conversation Ads + Audience Network is where I find headroom.

What every outbound team ends up using once they realise lists are a programming problem. Treat the playbook as the product; the data sources are interchangeable.

The sequencer that runs the playbook Clay builds. Honest take: it doesn't play well with AI yet — prompting inside the templates is clunky, and the model-personalisation features still feel like add-ons rather than the workflow. I use it because the underlying sequencing is solid. The day a peer ships an AI-native equivalent, this entry changes.

The everywhere-tool: docs, project tracker, lightweight CRM, draft system. MCP-enabled Notion AI started earning the subscription back this year — search and write across the whole workspace from one prompt. Performance is still the daily complaint.

For things I want to own and link. Markdown files in a folder, synced via iCloud. Outlives whichever SaaS goes out of business next.

Notion for my own work and for the engagements I drive. Jira when I'm inside an engineering org. Trello and Monday when the client's already on them. The honest truth about consulting marketing leadership: the tracker is rarely the bottleneck, and switching teams to a new one is a tax most marketing functions can't pay this quarter. Meet the team where they are.

End-to-end encrypted. Slower at search than Gmail, by design. Worth it.

Open source, self-hostable, less ugly than Calendly. The team availability features are where it pulls ahead.

For social posts and one-off graphics. Not for brand systems or marketing sites. Use the right tool for the job.

Less and less useful in the AI-image era, kept around for deep work and very detailed edits. Premiere and After Effects are still the best at video. Photoshop earns less of its keep now that masking, generation, and clean compositing happen elsewhere. Illustrator stays useful for anything destined for print.

Edge serverless that finally pays back. Static assets, API routes, and durable storage in one runtime; the pricing model is the kind of thing that quietly redirects a roadmap. Best fit for marketing sites with a handful of endpoints, where Vercel feels heavy and a VPS feels archaic.

Still good enough for the first version of an idea — the throwaway prototype, the demo needed by Friday, the page that has to exist before committing to a stack. Once the idea has shape, the work tends to move to GitHub and Claude Code.

Still the only source-of-truth that has outlived three generations of would-be replacements. The unlock for marketing teams is treating brand docs, sitemap, llms.txt, and JSON-LD the same way engineering treats code — versioned, reviewable, rollback-able.

Pair programming that compresses a Friday's worth of work into a coffee. Best at refactoring patterns across many files, deploying via the CLI it already knows, and showing its reasoning before it touches anything. The first AI tool a non-engineer marketing lead can use to ship production code with confidence. This site is mostly written this way — straight from prompt to the same git the site deploys from, no Webflow in the middle.

The pattern is converging — Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor's agent mode are increasingly substitutable for the same job, with different strengths in different weeks. I keep Codex around as the second pair of eyes when a Claude session is convinced of something I'm not. Worth having access to both; not worth feeling loyal to either.