Picking the Right AI Tool Shouldn’t Be a Vibe Check
A free, single-file decision matrix for the conversation every leadership team is having right now, without the SaaS bill, the login, or the tracking.
Every team is being asked the same question right now: “Which AI tool should we be using?” And the honest answer is still “it depends, but this isn’t useful when a CFO or leaders with P&L ownership are asking.
So I built something to make that conversation easier. The AI Tools Decision Matrix is a self-contained, single-file web app that lets you weigh AI platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Grok, Mistral, DeepSeek, or write in your own) against the criteria your own startup or organization cares about: accuracy, cost, integration, compliance, ethics, ease of use, and so on.
No accounts. No tracking. No SaaS bill. You open the HTML in a browser, and everything, like your weights, scores, rationales, custom tools, and custom use cases, saves locally. You can even save, share, and import views from prior runs.
What’s New
I’ve been iterating on this tool for a few months, and just shipped a newer, meaningful round of updates:
- First-visit onboarding that walks new users through the four-tab flow (Weights → Score → Use Cases → Results) and a
?Help is now in the header, so you can bring it back at any time. - Write-in tools. The default list is a starting point. Need to evaluate an internal LLM, a vertical-specific platform, or something niche? Type the name, hit Add.
- Use case scoring with sample scenarios pre-loaded, so you can stress-test how each tool actually performs against your workflows. Customer support, content, coding, legal, finance, training, etc.
- Brand glyphs on each tool tile so the comparison reads at a glance instead of squinting at “GPT” vs “G” vs “C”.
- Responsive layout that doesn’t break when you shrink the browser window.
- Print / PDF output that hides the chrome and gives you a clean leave-behind for stakeholders.
- Dynamic page title that picks up your company name, so the browser tab and the printed report both read “Acme Corp | AI Tools Decision Matrix” automatically.
Why It Matters at the Leadership Levels
Every AI tool you don’t formally evaluate is a tool your team is likely using anyway. The real discussion or debate isn’t which platform to pick, it’s getting the right people & teams in a room to discuss which criteria actually matter. Frameworks and tools like those make the argument productive, defensive, and repeatable. The pattern we keep seeing is organizations and teams skipping the weighting conversations.
Then defaulting to whatever their loudest engineer is excited about, and then having no answer when the leadership, audit, or procurement asks how the decision was made. A two-hour facilitated session with this tool produces a digital export & trail. That alone is worth the exercise.
The whole point: replace the “vibe check” with a defensible, repeatable framework that gets the right people in the room arguing about the right things, along with the weights and the scores, instead of the tool selection alone.
If you try it and it surfaces something interesting, I’d love to hear about it. Drop me a note here on Substack, LinkedIn, or Twitter.
Try It
- AI Decision Matrix — Apps (compare AI platforms)
- AI Decision Matrix — Use Case (evaluate AI scenarios)
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