The Best AI Tools for Marketing in 2026

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0:25Neil Patel:What would you say would be the five latest AI tools that you have tested for marketing? And give us feedback on all five. Start with your least favorite at number five and your favorite at number one.

0:43Eric Siu:I can't think of my least favorite because if I'm using it... Order it in any order you want. If I'm using it, I'm assuming it's useful. Okay, here, I'll tell you what. So here, so I've been talking a lot about Hermes and OpenClaw, right? What I've learned from both of these is this. They're beautiful, very useful if you use it in the right way. But if you overload it, it becomes useless and it degrades very quickly. And so I use, I would still say I love Hermes, I love OpenClaw and I use them a lot. Because when you combine Hermes OpenClaw with your codex and your cloud code and they build with each other, you're able to make babies with it.

1:18Eric Siu:Right. Like product babies with it.

1:19Neil Patel:So let's give some real examples. Let's talk about. I'll give you an example. A successful example and an overloaded example when you're saying you're overloading it and you're putting in too much, you're asking it to do too much, and then you're not getting what you're looking for. Here's one example.

1:32Eric Siu:So my team actually made a creative agent called Picasso that will spin up creatives at scale. Add creatives? Add creatives, yeah. And a lot of people can do that, but ours is focused on, hey, what's actually performing? What are your brand guidelines? And also, what are your competitors doing? And we have a designer in the loop. And I was like, huh, I want your GitHub repo. I told the team, I was like, give me the GitHub repo. I'm going to fork it. So forking it means I can take it for myself, right? So I took it for myself. I dumped it into Codex, which is OpenAIs. And I said, hey, I want you to basically make this into where I can send Neil cold emails or Noah cold emails and say, hey, Salesforce, we made some ads for you over here that are on brand.

2:12Eric Siu:Here's three. Would you like more, right? And so that I built with Codex. And then it told me to finish off the build using Hermes. and so that was the situation where that's something that we already have like a cold outbound infrastructure it added it into the infrastructure which is instantly um and is able to send okay like that's one example of it where it fails where all this stuff fails open claw and hermes fail because if you add too much to its disk or too much to its memory it starts to i can't find it anymore neil i don't know i don't have that capability oh but you do It's like, oh, I appreciate the confidence.

2:49Eric Siu:I don't have it anymore. So you start to go back and forth with it. It starts to become really unreliable. So I will say it's a love-hate relationship with Hermes and OpenClaw right now. Codex and CloudCode have been amazing in that respect. I will say what's overhyped, I think, is Higgsfield, right? The reason why I say Higgsfield is overhyped, not because the product sucks, it's because you run out of credits too quickly. And so it basically makes it useless if you can't really use it that much.

3:13Neil Patel:Yeah. Yeah. And one quick thing when you're talking about what is it called? Forking. What Eric's doing here is he's creating his own version and modifying it and making any changes that he wants. So that's why you would go get the code. So that way you can just do whatever you want and go create your own version or expand upon it.

3:32Eric Siu:Yep. And I'll kind of close it off with this. So obviously, okay, best AI tools, love, hate with OpenClaw, with Hermes. I do love Codex and CloudCode. I think you need to pay for the$20, sorry,$200 a month version. because here's the reason, Neil. I bet you don't know these numbers. So for$200 a month using the OpenAI 20X Pro version, how much usage do you think you're actually getting from it in value?

3:54Neil Patel:Don't cheat.

3:55Eric Siu:Yeah, I already know the answer because I saw it on your sheet. Okay, so it's$14 ,000, right? Assuming you use it. Yes. Okay, and if you're using Claude, how much value do you think you're getting? The Claude max$200 a month, how much do you think you're getting? Maybe$30 ,000,$40 ,000? No,$8 ,000. And here's the thing. Remember, there was that time period where I spent$12 ,000 in that month, right? So I've always felt open and I was very generous. I'm like, well, I can just keep going on this, right? And it did feel like I was spending$12 ,000 to$14 ,000. But Claude, you can tell it eats it up pretty quickly.

4:27Eric Siu:So what I would just say is maybe buy both if you have the means to do it. What's the pricing for both? $200. So you have$20 version, you have free, you have$20 version, and then$200. So they both have - $200? I thought it was$100. They do have a 100 version, but there's also a 200 version for Claude. There's a 100 version, but if you want 20x more usage or something like that, you get 5x or 20x.

4:48Neil Patel:But OpenAI, is it 200 or 100? It's 200.

4:51Eric Siu:I thought I was paying 100. No, you're definitely paying either 20 or 200. I'm not paying 20. Yeah, you're paying 200. So I think those stick out. Oh, I do love the Ahrefs MCP. That's been great. I do love the Riverside MCP as well. The Beehive has an MCP. Riverside has an MCP. What do you use a Riverside MCP for? So Riverside actually has the ability to look at your, like let's say we're recording this. I can say, hey, find the best moments to clip. So you can use their magic clipper in there. Okay. You can pull the files that you need. You can pull transcripts from it. So I can just work in there.

5:25Eric Siu:And then I like the Beehive one because you can just have it draft emails or you can have it, it's going to be able to, I said, I messaged a Beehive growth guy the other day. I was like, hey man, your MCP needs to give me the ability. So whenever we're doing a webinar that we can make a special lead magnet and spin up a page immediately. And he's like, that's coming. I was like, you know what I mean? Because you're doing webinars, you're doing different topics, right? But if you have a special resource for each one, that's great. And then you can tie it into your socials too. So those are just a couple of examples.

5:52Eric Siu:I would say using kind of the main models, the main autonomous agents, and then using MCPs from tools like this. Because I love Ahrefs too, because their brand radar is really good as well.

6:01Neil Patel:Yeah.

6:01Eric Siu:Yeah.

6:02Neil Patel:And when it comes to marketing, one interesting thing that I've noticed is every time Claude, specifically Claude, or Anthropic, not Claude, specifically Anthropic announces a new model, it calls a whole SaaS industry to tank. I'm talking about all the publicly traded stocks. And what I've noticed, this is just my two cents, from everyone who I've talked to that really spends money with them, what kind of company do you think they are? A SaaS company? SaaS or a tech company that has tons of engineers. so it's just like they could put out a notice saying that hey hey guys we don't actually think we're gonna end up disrupting all these companies like you the analysts actually think uh the nvidia ceo has stated that a few times and every time he states it the stocks go up and then eventually they go back down um but anthropic from a marketing standpoint i really haven't seen them really push out any narrative because the customers paying them are the ones a lot of them are getting hurt and if those companies went away anthropic would hurt because they spend so much money on coding right software companies they need to have tons of engineers that's the primary use case literally the primary use case for paying a lot of these corporations like anthropic but if they said that I believe that would also hurt their valuation.

7:29Neil Patel:So they don't say it. It would.

7:31Eric Siu:I would also say one thing too. If you're Google right now, I would just try to squeeze them on costs, squeeze them on pricing because it squeezes the entire, it squeezes OpenAI and it squeezes Anthropic. You know what I mean? No, they are. Yeah. But more.

7:45Neil Patel:Yes. You saw the announcement. It was OpenAI and maybe one other player they were talking today about potentially reducing pricing even more. That's going to squeeze them all. Did you also see the winners from Anthropic's IPO? No. From Anthropic IPO. There's a really cool chart. Are you in on any of these with these funds that you're in? No comment. So, Anthropic, no. So, if you look at the Anthropic winners, where is the chart? Anthropic, which companies will make the most? let's see three plus make okay Amazon holds a 21 % stake yeah and Amazon owns a 21 % stake Google owns a 15 % stake that can deliver hundreds of billions in value for both Amazon and Google Microsoft backed open AI Salesforce turned a 50 million dollars in 2023 into a five billion dollar Anthropics stake ahead of the IPO.

8:52Neil Patel:But a lot of these old school companies are the real winners from this. How the heck do you fund all this stuff with all these billions and billions in expenditure? You need the big players to fund it all. So even if they have competition, they're making money from the competition because they own the largest chunk of the competition. Like look at how much the Anthropics founders actually own of the company. Have you seen their percentage ownership no anthropic founders ownership percentage it's tiny not in dollar amount but percentage each of the seven founders of anthropic individually owns less than one percent of the company's total equity dude yeah google owns 15 and amazon owns over 20 how much would sam altman have had i think he had a good chunk right i bet you he's still not sam altman uh sam bickman freed uh a large chunk i believe he owned like 10 or something like that back then man they say he was the one of the best investors because he did that and he did a cursor and there was a few he did a lot of good ones you know robin hood yeah he owned nine percent i think when they were worth like 10 billion dollars now robin hood blew up they went down yeah uh from their peak but they're still an 83 billion dollar company but they're worth more than that dude call it you Less than a year ago, the stock was at 140.

10:10Neil Patel:Now it's at 92. Remember I showed you Marvel?

10:12Eric Siu:It fell down to 245 yesterday. It's up to 280 again. Do these things jump? Have you been trading them? No. I'm not a trader. The only thing I'm going to trade, Neil, is I'm going to bet on the Spurs to win it all.

10:25Neil Patel:Did you see the game where they're down by 20-something and then they're up by 29?

10:28Eric Siu:So I think they're still going to win. So we'll see what happens. You think the Spurs are going to win? I think they're still going to win. So I'm going to put some money on that just for fun, right? Because if you put$1 in, you get$3.50. back in profit if they win the next three games.

10:41Neil Patel:So what are you going to bet on that?

10:44Eric Siu:I'm not going to bet a lot. I'm going to bet like, I don't know,$4 ,000 to$5 ,000.

10:48Neil Patel:Oh, okay.

10:48Eric Siu:Yeah.

10:49Neil Patel:So we'll see. That's too risky of a bet for me. I think the Knicks are going to win. Put a grand. I don't want to lose a grand. What do you mean? You could get$3 ,500 in profit.

10:58Eric Siu:But I believe the Spurs are going to lose. No, they're going to win. Dude, the two games that they lost, and we can move on from this, but the two games that they lost, they lost by one, and they're both boneheaded. Boneheaded mistakes that they made. so I still believe they're gonna lose

11:10Neil Patel:they are very likely going to lose but I still think they can win okay if the Knicks win you buy us lunch the next time we all eat out and if the Spurs win I'll buy you guys lunch

11:21Eric Siu:no no no if the Spurs win the series I'll buy you guys Erwan I still have a bunch of those jars so you know I was talking to our mutual friend yesterday Yaniv and we're like oh they're gonna win because at that time he's like oh the game's over he went to go play tennis right and then he came back they lost and he's like now's the time to vet So I'm like, yep, you're right. I'll do it. But yeah, I probably won't even put in that much. I'll put in like a grand, okay? Put in$100. A grand. A grand makes it more exciting. You, don't even get me started on you. Okay. I don't bet. You did before.

11:54Neil Patel:All right. So. I'm not really gambling though. You used, that was gambling. Are you talking about stocks? You're talking about the casino? No, sports. No, I made a killing. But that's still gambling. Someone, Jay Fen, his buddy had this whole math or formula on sports betting. Years of track record. I didn't even know half the teams. I just followed the bets and I was making money on it. It was great returns. Yeah, but that's still gambling. It's still gambling, but I call that a calculated decision. Isn't that just business?

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13:04Eric Siu:Okay. So I want to go into these costs real quick too. So we kind of briefly touch upon this, but Neil, here, let's just do this. The real cost of a ChatGPT Pro and CloudMax subscription is this. Okay. So if you're paying$200 a month for ChatGPT, I just want to show the chart over here. So it's$14 ,000. Okay. $14 ,000 in what? In value. So I'll go over that in a second. And then if you pay for CloudMax, which is$200 a month, you get$8 ,000 in value. So here's what I mean by that. When I spent that 12 grand on CloudAPI cost, right? Like over here, let's say, I felt like I was getting this much in value.

13:42Eric Siu:Because when I'm using ChatGPT, it feels like I can just keep going. I feel like I'm cheating. I'm like, oh, this is too good. I'm like, why can I just keep going on it, right? And it does feel like I can kind of go to distance on this$14 ,000. And I do actually run out every week, okay? now when i'm on clod max and i'm just using the subscription i run out so fast and it's this is