Honest Review of Jasper (Formerly Jarvis AI): Pricing, Features & User Experience

Jasper is one of the most well-known AI writing platforms with a focus on providing faster and better outputs for marketing. Boasting its ability to craft copy catered to your brand style, the tool specializes in collaborative work for firms and teams but also offers plenty of features for solo users.

But with so many AI-based writing tools these days, how well does Jasper fare against the competition? We'll be looking at what the service is good at and what it isn't and figuring out if this tool is exactly what you need to grow your business.

TL;DR

While Jasper excels at creating on-brand content for different use cases, it may not be an affordable platform for freelancers or individual creators, with some hiccups in its features.

Pros:

Built-in templates are for various types of content
AI chat offers useful ideas for content with access to the Internet
Able to apply your custom brand voices to your writing

Cons:

Pricing may not be friendly for individual users
Blog posts generated lack depth
Browser extension comes with imperfect features

What is Jasper?

Jasper, formerly branded as Jarvis AI, was founded in 2021. Located in Austin, Texas, the company is home to over 50 employees with almost 800 associated members (per LinkedIn).

As a fast-growing AI writing service provider, Jasper acquired $125M in funding and reached a valuation of $1.5 billion in 2022. It was also awarded as one of Inc. 5000's "America's Fastest Growing Private Companies". And in the same year it boasted that it reached over 100,000 customers worldwide.

As an AI platform, Jasper offers a wide range of AI-based services, with a focus on marketing and branding support. Most notably, Jasper can quickly generate written content for businesses, using various built-in templates to simplify the generation process. Their users can also generate written content in a brand voice of their choice.

Aside from content generation, Jasper also offers other AI-based services related to writing. It can rewrite text, shorten or lengthen it, and even translate it to various supported languages. An AI chatbot is also available on the platform, which can provide the user with ideas for future planned content.

Pricing of Jasper

As Jasper is a more company-oriented AI platform, two of the three pricing options are geared toward businesses. Here are all three pricing plans with their respective features:

Creator ($49/month, billed monthly)

Includes 1 seat and brand voice
50 knowledge assets
Over 50 templates
SEO Mode
Browser Extension Support

Teams ($125/month, billed monthly)

Includes 3 seats and 3 brand voices
150 knowledge assets
Make your own template
Campaign support and collaborative features

Business (Talk with sales)

All features accessible
API access
Custom templates
Tech support and team onboarding

For a freelance creator working solo, users will need to set aside almost $40 a month unless they go for the discounted annual subscription. The Teams plan offers more features and access for up to three users, making it useful for small-scale collaborations and startups. Businesses looking for a more tailor-made solution can contact Jasper directly for more bespoke plans.

When it comes to affordability, Jasper sits on the much steeper end compared to other services, though given that it's a more business-oriented service, that's to be expected. Still, $40 is quite the monthly setback, especially for creators just getting started.

An In-Depth Review of Jasper's Key Features

So, how does Jasper work? What does a typical creator's workflow look like when generating content? To give you a better idea of how Jasper's services work for the average creator, we signed up for a paid plan and gave the tool's features a test run of our own.

Dashboard and Workflow

When opening the dashboard for the first time, you'll be greeted by a screen that looks something like this:

It contains tools and templates you may need to access, and works you've recently created or edited. And gives you a prominent Create content button for those who do not know where to start. And once you click that, you'll be asked what type of content you'll need:

As their names suggest, the content generation abilities Jasper grants you include writing from their templates, writing a new blog post, and creating images.

Overall, we think Jasper is easy to get started. But for those who're not familiar with Jasper's features, you'll be easily overwhelmed by all these elements of the dashboard. Luckily, Jasper offers some learning resources for you to get a grasp of how to use this tool.

Text Editor

If you create a blank document or choose to open the generated content in documents, Jasper will direct you to a text editor like this:

At the top center of the screen, you'll see three tabs to get you started. The Focus mode tab allows you to create or edit with simple briefs. The Chat mode tab opens up an AI chatbot that can assist you with research and brainstorming ideas. And the Power mode presents all their 50+ templates to help you create content for specific use cases.

Unlike dedicated text editors, such as Google Docs or Microsoft Word, Jasper's text editor is much simpler. It gives you a few format settings such as changing the heading of text, adding bullets or numbering, and other typical options you'd need for writing content on the web.

Hovering over the document in certain areas will bring up a small button. Clicking on an empty space of text will also incur a tooltip to use the "/"; key. Using either one of these methods will allow you to generate text directly without the use of any of Jasper's provided AI templates.

One issue we had with this feature is the trouble with checking the prompt we had just written. Prompts that are too long won't fully be displayed unless you use the arrow keys to navigate through the text, and once you hit enter on that prompt, you'll have no way of checking what you just typed.

From our view, the integration of its AI writing tools and chatbot make its text editor a handy writing assistant. But its simplistic formatting features may not be adequate if you are seeking advanced options to make your generated text look better.

Generating Content With Templates

Jasper's 50+ templates cover a wide range of content needs, from blog post writing, copywriting to social media post drafting and even art creation. But to be honest, "50+" is not an impressive number for us. Some of its more affordable competitors, like Copy.ai (90+) and our HIX.AI (120+), are able to offer a lot more than this.

We chose the Blog Post Introduction Generator to test their usability and output quality. After selecting the template, Jasper gives us a few options for us to let it know exactly what we want. The following screenshot shows what we provided and the two results Jasper delivered:

It's worth mentioning that the template did not ask for any specific word counts, so the outcome like this may be too long or too short for you, depending on your needs. Aside from this, Jasper gives you more freedom to specify your target audience and tone of voice by letting you type your requirements, instead of selecting from a few fixed options.

And the output quality looked okay. A bit lengthy as they were, they could act as a proper introduction to the detailed benefits of exercise. They were written in a casual tone, which was what we specified. But only the second one addressed our target audience specifically.

Generating Articles

In addition to writing short-form content with those templates, you can also write blog posts with Jasper.

Jasper's article writer looks just like another template. It only asks about your intended topic, tone and audience, but nothing about the word count or your target search keyword (which is helpful for SEO).

It outputs a roughly structured blog post with about 600-700 words in total, as you can see from our first test to generate a blog post on how to improve SEO:

The information Jasper provided in this article is correct, clearly stating some methods you can try to improve SEO. But it's not in-depth or insightful enough to give you detailed and actionable steps.

And we didn't see any option that allows you to access the Internet or up-to-date online resources to create blog posts. This means the generator will be limited by the training data of its own language models, and will produce something outdated or inaccurate.

Brand Voices

Jasper's brand voice feature is a solution to ensure that the generated articles are consistent in tone and style of your company.

Essentially, brand voices are writing style guides that Jasper can follow when generating content. The tool uses its default settings when you first get started, but you can create your own voice to match the content you write on your website or page. Note that as mentioned earlier, you can only have one custom brand voice in the Creator plan, and three in the Teams plan.

Jasper learns from things you provide to build your brand voice: the company or product information as the "Knowledge Base", and the tone and style of the content you've created. You can submit the content by copying and pasting some sample text you choose or provide the URL of your website.

To test how this feature works, we created a conversational ad copy for a fictional dog soap brand, PawCare.

"Hey there, dog lovers! Meet PawCare, the dog soap that's got your furry friend's back... and tail... and belly... you get the idea.

This isn't your run-of-the-mill, off-the-shelf soap we're talking about here. Nope, PawCare is designed specifically with your pup in mind. We know bath time can be a wild ride, so we've formulated PawCare to make it as stress-free and beneficial as possible."

Jasper quickly identified the tone of voice of this text and output a detailed analysis of this brand voice:

Once we saved it, we used Jasper's default tone and the test tone to generate content with the following prompt: "Write me a paragraph that's selling me a shampoo brand called 'En Avant.' Be sure to mention its fresh minty feeling and cool fragrance.". The following is their comparison.

The first paragraph, generated using Jasper's default voice, is about what you'd expect from AI-generated content. On the other hand, the second paragraph's tone is livelier and more lighthearted to give it a more conversational voice.

This means Jasper successfully applied our test brand voice to the writing here. And it's effective in helping you align your writing more closely with your brand identity or personal writing style.

AI Chatbot

Jasper includes an AI chatbot that you can use to ask questions or brainstorm ideas.

Apart from that, the chatbot is surprisingly useful for content generation, with the ability to answer different types of questions relating to any given topic.

Asking the chatbot for article ideas will give you responses like this:

It can even access URLs, allowing you to get the chatbot's input on the contents of the link provided.

What's more the chatbot can search for recent and relevant information. Here's its response to the question, "Who won Super Bowl LVII?";

AI chatbots are fairly common these days, and you can get responses like these with many other services, but given the competency of Jasper's own chatbot, you won't need to open another website or service to get decent answers for your questions.

Browser Extension

Jasper's extension allows you to access its AI writing capabilities anywhere on the internet.

One feature of this extension is once you simply highlight the text you wish to edit with Jasper. Once highlighted, you can let Jasper change the text's length, tone, and even its language. Here's the extension changing the tone of a highlighted paragraph:

Two things are worth pointing out, though: for one, you can't highlight any text to invoke this tool. It works when you're in an input box or text editor like Google Docs; Also, Jasper's translation function doesn't support many languages, so unless you live in America or Europe, Jasper likely won't be able to translate text into your tongue.

This feature is meant mainly to modify and edit already existing text. To generate something using this extension, you will need to head to the lower right corner of your browser and click the Jasper icon there. Then you can create content with your own prompt or their templates and apply them to your writing.

Another text generation feature this extension offers is the ability to continue writing your existing content. You can activate this by clicking the arrow that appears when your text cursor is at the end of a paragraph you are editing.

For our test run of this feature, Jasper generated a paragraph which was as long as our test text, and contained a misspelled word and unfinished phrases towards the end. And with a closing phrase like "Happy travels," it resembled an email or letter, which was not our intended format.

In general we think this extension is able to help writers in content creation, but its workflow and UX design can use some improvements to become more straightforward. Also the continue writing feature does offer a starting point for expanding your content, but it may also need some refinement to improve its output quality.

How Jasper Compares to Other AI Writing Tools

Now that we know the ins and outs of Jasper, how well does it fare when compared to other AI writing tools on the market today? Here's a brief list of resources about different alternatives to Jasper:

Looking for a Better Alternative to Jasper? Try HIX.AI!

Need an AI tool that offers more and better than what Jasper does? Check out HIX.AI! Here is why we excel:

More Affordable and Flexible Pricing Options

With options starting at half the price of Jasper's, HIX.AI has more flexible and affordable plans, starting at $9.99/mo if billed monthly, for any creator or team looking to grow their brand through generated content. We also provide Free plans that give you access to our powerful AI-driven tools, something you can't find on Jasper.

Comprehensive AI Writing/Editing Tools

While Jasper offers 50+ templates, HIX.AI features over 120 AI writing tools, each with its uses and benefits. These tools include an article writer, text summarizer, grammar checker, paragraph generator, proofreader, Instagram hashtag generator, Facebook Ad writer, and so on.

The content you generate or edit with these tools will be SEO optimized and can be made for just about any type of media, including video scripts, press releases, and social media posts, to name a few. With over 50 languages supported, you can also reach a much wider international audience.

Fact-Based Article Writing

Although Jasper can help you create various blog posts, it doesn't come with the ability to write in-depth content or include updated information in their writing. HIX.AI's ArticleGPT, on the other hand, is a hallucination-free AI article writer, generating articles with well-researched and fact-based content for multiple article types.

Whether you need news articles, Amazon or general product roundups/reviews, product comparisons, or how-to tutorials, ArticleGPT allows you to specify the reference sources and will write articles based on their content. This ensures your articles are backed by concrete and updated facts and data.

More Powerful Browser Extension

While Jasper's browser extension allows you to modify text in various ways, HIX.AI takes it a large step further with its own extension, offering a wider range of services no matter where you are on the web.

Whether you're writing on Google Docs, drafting emails, or simply need quick access to AI generation on the fly, HIX.AI's extension can do it all and more. It allows you to

Type // to get its AI writing help on Google Docs, social media, and Gmail.
Rewrite, summarize, or translate any selected text with its Quick Lookup toolbar.
Get instant access to its all-round writing tools and HIX AI Chat, a powerful AI chatbot, with its browser sidebar.
Summarize lengthy YouTube videos to grasp its key points fast.

To Wrap Up

In conclusion, Jasper offers a range of features that can be beneficial for business content creation, but its steep prices, imperfect blog post writer and browser extension make the tool a little lackluster. Meanwhile, its alternatives such as HIX.AI offer more features for less, suitable for those who are looking for a cost-effective option.

Jasper Review: Pricing, Features & User Experience