Apertus Chat (Public AI)

Chat directly on Apertus 1.5, the fully open Swiss model from ETH, EPFL and CSCS (released 2026-07-24)

What Apertus Chat (Public AI) does

  • Chat directly on Apertus 1.5, the fully open Swiss model from ETH, EPFL and CSCS (released 2026-07-24)
  • publicai.co/chat serves the 8B model with no login; a free account unlocks the 70B model with thinking mode
  • Hosted under Swiss jurisdiction

Apertus Chat (Public AI) — straight answers

What is Apertus Chat (Public AI)?

Apertus Chat (Public AI) is listed under General Purpose Chatbots, in the AI Chat & Assistants category on Flocci AI Tools. Chat directly on Apertus 1.5, the fully open Swiss model from ETH, EPFL and CSCS (released 2026-07-24). It is free, with no paid plan attached, and it lives at chat.publicai.co.

Is Apertus Chat (Public AI) free?

Apertus Chat (Public AI) is listed as fully free — there is no paid tier attached to it in the catalog. That makes it one of the 399 entries on Flocci AI Tools with no upgrade path built in.

What can Apertus Chat (Public AI) do?

Apertus Chat (Public AI) does 3 things the catalog singles out: Chat directly on apertus 1.5, the fully open swiss model from eth, epfl and cscs (released 2026-07-24); publicai.co/chat serves the 8b model with no login; a free account unlocks the 70b model with thinking mode; hosted under swiss jurisdiction.

What is the best free alternative to Apertus Chat (Public AI)?

Alibaba Quark AI Assistant is the closest free alternative: it sits in the same General Purpose Chatbots sub-category and is free. Amazon Nova, Baichuan Bai Xiao Ying (百小应) and Baidu Ernie Bot (Wenxin Yiyan) also start free. The full list is on the alternatives page.

See the full list →

Apertus Chat (Public AI) alternatives

Compare all alternatives →

ChatGPT

General Purpose Chatbots
freemium
  • Free tier on OpenAI's fast GPT-6/GPT-5.x 'Luna' models, with a Think button for harder questions
  • Voice, vision, image generation and web search in one app
  • Agent mode, projects, memory and file uploads
  • Custom GPTs and a large app/connector ecosystem

Claude

General Purpose Chatbots
freemium
  • Free tier on Anthropic's Claude 5 family (Sonnet-class model by default)
  • Top-tier coding, writing and long-document reasoning
  • Artifacts for live code, document and app previews
  • Projects, memory, web search and MCP tool connectors

Gemini

General Purpose Chatbots
freemium
  • Free tier on Gemini 3.x Flash models, with limited access to the top Pro model
  • Very long context for whole books, codebases and long videos
  • Deep Google Workspace and real-time Search integration
  • Native image (Nano Banana) and video (Veo) generation, Gemini Live voice

Grok

General Purpose Chatbots
freemium
  • Free, rate-limited access to xAI's latest Grok 4.x models
  • Live data from X and the open web
  • Grok Imagine for image and video generation
  • Fast, less-filtered conversational style

DeepSeek

General Purpose Chatbots
freemium
  • Free web and app chat on DeepSeek's V4-series models
  • Instant and Expert (deep-thinking) modes
  • Strong math, coding and reasoning at open-model cost
  • Models are also released as open weights

Microsoft Copilot

General Purpose Chatbots
freemium
  • Free tier mixing frontier OpenAI models with Microsoft's own MAI models
  • Built into Windows, Edge and Microsoft 365
  • Voice, vision and image generation
  • Copilot Vision can see and talk through your screen

Head-to-head comparisons