The Ultimate Curated Guide to AI Tools (2025 Edition)

Welcome to TiltStack's expert-curated 2025 AI stack guide, built for small businesses, creators, developers, and automation pros looking to scale smarter.

The AI landscape is exploding with new tools daily, making it nearly impossible to keep up. We've done the hard work for you, constantly reviewing and categorizing the most promising AI tools across key verticals—from AI chatbot builders and automation platforms to SEO assistants, coding agents, and video generators.

TiltStack actively deploys many of these tools within our custom AI chatbot builds, SMB automation stacks, SEO content strategies, and web design projects. This isn't just a list; it's a reflection of what actually works in the real world.

💡 Bookmark this page. It’s an evolving resource. We will add new tools and updates regularly as the AI space matures.

Full Tool Index by Category

• AI Models & LLM Resources
• AI Agents & Automation
• Code & Web Development
• Content Creation & Marketing
• Lead Generation & Sales
• Video & Audio Production
• Voice AI
• Prompt Engineering Resources
• Productivity & Personal AI
• Website Analytics & Optimization
• Prototyping & UI/UX Design
• AI Ecosystem & Discovery Tools
• Specialized AI Applications

AI Models & LLM Resources

These are the foundational models and tools for running them.

• LM Studio: A desktop app to download and run open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) locally on your computer. Excellent for privacy-focused experimentation.
• SmolVLM2: A small but mighty open-source model that understands videos, images, and text.
• DeepCoder-14B: An open-source model based on DeepSeek that writes complex code with impressive accuracy, rivaling more expensive proprietary models.
• T3 Chat: A budget-friendly ($8/month) chatbot interface to run fast, cheap AI models like DeepSeek and Gemini Flash, making advanced AI more accessible.
• Inception: A new AI model architecture promising to generate text 10x faster and cheaper than many alternatives, aimed at startups building AI features.
• [NEW] OpenRouter: Gives you one API to access 400+ AI models, automatically routing your request to the best option based on your needs.
• [NEW] MedGemma: Google's open medical AI models that read chest X-rays, write reports, and analyze patient records.

➡️ TiltStack Insight: For businesses wanting to leverage AI without massive API costs, using a tool like T3 Chat or self-hosting a model with LM Studio provides a powerful, cost-effective alternative. We used T3 Chat with a custom CRM integration to automate scheduling for a local wellness clinic.

AI Agents & Automation

Tools to connect your apps and automate complex workflows.

• Make.com: A powerful, visually-driven workflow automation platform that is a fantastic, SMB-friendly alternative to Zapier.
• n8n.io: A leading open-source workflow automation tool. It offers incredible flexibility and can be self-hosted for full data control.
• Superexpert.AI: A no-code platform for building enterprise-grade AI agents that can search your internal data and complete multi-step tasks.
• Chat Thing: Turns your business content (docs, website, etc.) into 24/7 customer support bots that work across your website, Slack, and Discord.
• Goose: A free, open-source framework from Jack Dorsey's Block to simplify the process of building AI agents.
• CopyCat: A free tool that automates repetitive browser tasks by simply recording you doing them once.
• tl;dv: Records and transcribes your meetings, then automatically updates your CRM and drafts follow-up emails.
• [NEW] Project Mariner: Google's web browser agent that navigates websites and performs multi-step tasks for you (e.g., finding ingredients and adding them to a cart).
• [NEW] Trace: Maps your business workflows and automatically routes repetitive tasks to the right AI agent or human.
• [NEW] Aident AI: Turns your plain-language descriptions into working automation workflows in under 5 minutes.
• [NEW] Simular Pro: Automates complex desktop tasks by controlling your Mac like a human would (Mac only).
• [NEW] Liberate: Automates insurance back-office operations with AI, helping clients reduce costs.
• [NEW] Google Opal: Lets you build AI mini-apps with plain language and visual workflows, regardless of coding skills.

➡️ TiltStack Recommendation: We build the vast majority of our Business Process Automation solutions for SMBs using Make.com or n8n.io. They offer the perfect balance of power, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness.

Code & Web Development

AI tools to accelerate building websites, apps, and backends.

• V0 (by Vercel): An AI tool that generates high-quality, production-ready UI components for React based on your text prompts. A leader in "vibe-coding."
• Cursor: An AI-native code editor designed from the ground up for pair programming with AI.
• Zed: A high-performance, open-source code editor with a built-in AI agent to help write and refactor code.
• Line0: An AI backend development tool that generates production-ready APIs and services in minutes from business logic.
• Buildship: A low-code platform for building backend tasks (e.g., processing payments, calling OpenAI) without extensive coding.
• Firebase Studio: Google's tool to create and deploy complete applications directly in your browser with built-in templates.
• Magic UI: A collection of 150+ free, open-source animated components to make your landing pages stunning.
• Dora: A no-code platform for designing and publishing impressive, interactive websites with 3D and animation capabilities.
• [NEW] Dyad: Builds full-stack apps locally on your computer like Lovable or v0, but free and open-source.
• [NEW] TestSprite: Automatically tests your software and validates AI-generated code, catching bugs before production.
• [NEW] Kiro: Amazon's new vibe coder that generates detailed specs and automated checks to build apps from idea to production.
• [NEW] Youware: A "vibe community" that turns text prompts into working apps and websites, allowing you to share them for feedback.
• [NEW] Orchids: A design-first vibe-coding tool that builds professional websites and apps through chat.
• [NEW] Trickle: Turns your ideas into live websites through a visual canvas where you co-create with AI in real-time.
• [NEW] Rork: Turns app ideas into working iOS and Android apps, leveraging GPT-5.
• [NEW] Anything: Turns your app idea into a working iOS/Android app in minutes—just describe it and deploy.
• [NEW] Conductor: Runs multiple Claude Code agents in parallel on your codebase, so one fixes bugs while another adds features simultaneously.
• [NEW] Onlook: Lets you drag-and-drop to design websites while it writes the actual code for you.
• [NEW] Cognition (Devin): An autonomous AI software engineer that takes full projects from start to finish.
• [NEW] Convex: Lets you write your entire backend in TypeScript and automatically syncs changes across all users in real-time.
• [NEW] Bubble: Turns your prompt into a working app you can publish to iOS and Android, handling code and hosting.
• [NEW] Claude Code: Capable of design tasks like converting UI screenshots into prototypes and Figma specs into React components.
• [NEW] Amp Free: Writes, edits, and debugs code for you directly inside VS Code or Cursor for free (ad-supported).
• [NEW] Google Chrome DevTools MCP: Connects your AI coding assistant to Chrome's browser tools to debug and fix website issues in real-time.

➡️ TiltStack Insight: We use tools like V0 and Magic UI to rapidly prototype visually impressive interfaces for clients. This allows us to get feedback on the "vibe" quickly before committing to a full hand-coded build, which is always our final step for optimal performance and SEO. See our Web Design Services.

Content Creation & Marketing

AI to help research, write, and distribute your marketing content.

• Taplio: Your AI-powered LinkedIn growth coach, trained on millions of posts to help you write high-performing content.
• table.studio: An ingenious tool that turns your spreadsheet data into a batch of hundreds of professional visuals or images simultaneously.
• Creatify: Turns your e-commerce product pages into compelling video ads in seconds. Just paste a URL.
• Manus Slides: Generates full, structured presentations from a single prompt.
• Purposewrite: An AI writing assistant that creates tailored content for blogs and social media while fixing grammar in real-time.
• Keyword Research: A simple, free tool for keyword research without requiring signups, offering volumes, difficulty, and trends.
• [NEW] Picsart: A comprehensive design platform that turns ideas into professional content without design experience.
• [NEW] Higgsfield Soul: Turns your text into hyper-realistic photos with 50+ style presets that look like real smartphone pics (now free to use).
• [NEW] Lovart: Turns your design ideas into polished brand ads and visuals without complex prompts.
• [NEW] Genspark AI Designer: Turns one prompt into a complete brand system—logo, packaging, website, and all.

➡️ TiltStack Use Case: We use tools like Taplio to help our Content Creation clients ideate social media strategies, and then we build a full content calendar around those ideas.

Lead Generation & Sales

AI tools designed to find leads and automate outreach.

• Mailgo: An AI tool that discovers ideal leads and launches high-deliverability cold email campaigns, ensuring your messages reach inboxes, not spam folders.
• Luna.ai: Finds qualified leads and uses AI to write personalized B2B outreach emails.
• FirstQuadrant: An AI sales agent that manages your entire pipeline—drafting follow-ups, reactivating cold leads, and providing insights on when to close deals.
• [NEW] Parpsec: Finds products that match what your customers need and creates quotes and proposals for you.
• [NEW] Happenstance: Searches your entire network (email, LinkedIn contacts) using natural language to find specific connections.
• [NEW] Keychain: Matches your product ideas with manufacturers—describe "gluten-free protein bars" and get connected to suppliers.

➡️ TiltStack Strategy: For lead generation, we believe in a combined approach. First, build a high-converting website. Then, use an AI chatbot to capture leads 24/7. Finally, use automation tools to nurture those leads.

Video & Audio Production

AI to create, edit, and enhance multimedia content.

• Descript: A revolutionary tool that edits video and audio by letting you edit the text transcript. Includes AI features like removing silences and creating social clips.
• Pika 2.1: A new and extremely realistic AI video generator that can export videos at 1080p.
• Kling: An impressive AI video generator from the creators of TikTok, known for maintaining character consistency.
• Riffusion: A music generator that turns your text descriptions into complete songs.
• Synthesia 2.0: An enterprise-grade AI video platform for creating professional videos with AI avatars and turning documents into video presentations.
• [NEW] Luma AI: Turns your text into videos and lets you completely restyle any video's background, characters, or setting in post-production.
• [NEW] OpenArt Story: Turns your idea, script, or character into a complete ready-to-post video with motion, music, and narrative.
• [NEW] Higgsfield Animate: Lets you replace any actor in video footage with someone else using just one photo.
• [NEW] Higgsfield: Creates ready-to-share images and videos in one click using AI, including upscaling.
• [NEW] Mozart AI: "Cursor for music"; create music by talking to an AI co-producer that generates chord progressions and loops.
• [NEW] VibeVoice (Microsoft): Open-source text-to-speech model that generates up to 90 minutes of realistic speech with multiple speakers.
• [NEW] Guidde: Turns your screen recordings into professional video tutorials with AI-generated step-by-step narration in 100+ languages.

➡️ TiltStack Tip: We recommend Descript to nearly every client creating video content. It dramatically cuts down on editing time and makes content repurposing effortless.

Voice AI

Tools for voice generation, cloning, and building voice agents.

• ElevenLabs: The most popular and high-quality voice AI model for generating speech and cloning voices. Their conversational AI is perfect for building realistic voice agents.
• Vapi: Adds voice AI capabilities to your automation stack, allowing you to build and handle inbound and outbound phone calls that integrate with tools like Make.com.
• Bland.ai: A developer platform for building and scaling intelligent AI phone agents.
• Zonos: Turns text into natural-sounding speech and can clone any voice in just a few seconds of audio.
• [NEW] Murf AI: Turns your text into human-like speech in 200+ voices, ideal for narrating presentations or creating audiobooks.
• [NEW] Uplift: Builds voice models for underserved languages like Urdu, Sindhi, and Balochi.
• [NEW] Quo: Handles all your business calls and texts in one place with an AI receptionist.
• [NEW] Tavus: Creates lifelike video agents that see, hear, and respond to you in real-time (great for tutoring or therapy).
• [NEW] Accent Guru: A fast, free, browser-based English accent test that flags pronunciation issues.

➡️ TiltStack Insight: We are actively exploring Vapi + Make.com integrations to build custom AI phone agents for clients needing to automate appointment reminders or customer service calls. This is a powerful frontier for automation.

Prompt Engineering Resources

Tools and templates to get the most out of LLMs.

• PromptHub: A platform to discover, manage, version, and test AI prompts.
• Awesome ChatGPT Prompts (GitHub): A massive, crowd-sourced collection of prompts for ChatGPT.
• Maskara.ai: A resource for prompt engineering, particularly useful for training customer service chatbots.
• [NEW] Twigg: Organizes your AI conversations as a visual tree where you can branch off from any message to explore different directions.

Productivity & Personal AI

AI to organize your work and life.

• Mem.ai: Organizes your notes and information automatically, creating a "second brain" that helps you find what you need when you need it.
• Google NotebookLM: An AI-powered research and note-taking assistant that uses your own documents as its source material.
• SecondMe: Allows you to train and self-host a private AI that "thinks" like you, based on your own data.
• [NEW] Scira: Searches the web, YouTube, Reddit, and X simultaneously—a clean open-source alternative to Perplexity.
• [NEW] Storm (Stanford): Turns any topic you type into a fully-cited research report with sources and references.
• [NEW] Firecrawl: Scrapes websites 10x faster and lets you guide it with natural language (e.g., "get the blog pages").
• [NEW] AI Sheets: Builds datasets for you in a spreadsheet—describe what data you need, and AI fills it in.
• [NEW] EmbeddingGemma: Search through your emails, notes, and web pages by asking questions in plain English, running directly on your device.
• [NEW] Gemini Storybook: Turns any topic into a custom illustrated storybook with narration.
• [NEW] Dreamcore: Creates mobile games from text prompts that you can share in a vertical feed.
• [NEW] Google Learn Your Way: Turns your textbooks into interactive study materials that adapt to how you learn best.

Website Analytics & Optimization

AI-powered tools to analyze your site's performance.

• AI Peekaboo: Provides AI-powered website analytics and insights.
• Get AI Refs: Offers AI-driven website analysis and recommendations for improvement.

Prototyping & UI/UX Design

AI tools for designers and product managers.

• Visily.ai: An AI-powered design tool that can turn text descriptions or screenshots into editable design mockups.
• Emergent: A platform for collaborative design and prototyping with potential AI features.
• Stitch (by Google): A tool for combining multiple images into a single panoramic or composite image, useful for creating design assets.
• [NEW] Velocity: Tests your Figma designs with AI users first—see where they click and what confuses them before human testing.
• [NEW] Blok: Simulates how real users would interact with your app through AI personas to spot problems before writing any code.
• [NEW] Hera: Turns your animation prompts into professional code-based animations you can fine-tune instantly.
• [NEW] Prototyper: Turns your verbal requests into production-ready interfaces within hours.
• [NEW] Google Mixboard: Turns your text ideas into visual mood boards; just type "cozy living room" and it generates images you can mix.

AI Ecosystem & Discovery Tools

Platforms to discover new tools and stay updated.

• Product Hunt: The go-to place for discovering new products daily, including hundreds of AI tools.
• Google AI Test Kitchen: A place to explore and experiment with Google's latest AI innovations.
• The Neuron AI - Top Tools: An index of top AI tools curated by the popular AI newsletter, The Neuron.
• Best Free Tools: A well-organized directory of free tools across many categories.
• [NEW] Yupp: Shows you answers from ChatGPT, Claude, and other AIs side-by-side, then pays you crypto for voting on the best response.
• [NEW] Engineering.fyi: Searches across engineering blogs from 15+ companies like Google, Meta, and Stripe in one place.
• [NEW] Google Web Guide: Clusters search results by topic instead of ranking them linearly, using Gemini AI to help explore complex topics.

Specialized AI Applications

Niche tools for finance, legal, fashion, and other specific industries.

• [NEW] Conquest Planning: Helps financial advisors create comprehensive financial plans 90% faster.
• [NEW] Gizmo: Lets you create 3D interactive scenes in seconds by dropping photos and objects into virtual worlds.
• [NEW] Menu, please!: Translates menus (Cantonese, Japanese, Thai, etc.) via photos and explains ingredients.
• [NEW] Ella: Creates personalized outfit recommendations across luxury retailers, letting you rent or buy complete looks.
• [NEW] CarEdge: Haggles with car dealers for you, saving customers an average of $569 per transaction.
• [NEW] Lens Live (Amazon): A visual search tool letting users buy products by pointing their phone at real-world items.
• [NEW] GC AI: Drafts contracts and reviews legal docs in seconds, cutting reliance on outside lawyers.
• [NEW] Anime.js: Animates anything on your website with simple JavaScript code.

Feeling Overwhelmed? That's Where We Come In.

This list is massive, and the AI landscape can feel chaotic. The biggest mistake businesses make is trying to adopt too many tools without a clear strategy. You don't need hundreds of tools. You need the right 3-5 tools, integrated perfectly into a smart, efficient system.

That's our specialty. TiltStack provides AI & Digital Strategy Consulting to help you:

• Audit your current processes and identify the highest-impact automation opportunities.
• Design a lean, powerful, and affordable tech stack tailored to your business goals.
• Implement and integrate these tools for you, so they work seamlessly together.
• Provide training and ongoing support to ensure you get the most out of your investment.

Stop chasing shiny new AI tools and start building a strategic foundation that saves you time and drives real growth.

🎯 Book a free AI Strategy Session with TiltStack today and let's design the perfect AI stack for your business.