The best AI models for building customer support chatbots and help desk agents, ranked by quality with bonus points for streaming, function calling, and JSON output - the essential capabilities for production support systems.
| # | Model | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | GPT-5.4 ProOpenAI | 94 |
| 2 | GPT-5.4OpenAI | 94 |
| 3 | GPT-5.4 MiniOpenAI | 93 |
| 4 | GPT-5.2 ProOpenAI | 93 |
| 5 | GPT-5.2OpenAI | 93 |
| 6 | Claude Opus 4.6Anthropic | 92 |
| 7 | GPT-5 ProOpenAI | 92 |
| 8 | o3 Deep ResearchOpenAI | 92 |
| 9 | Claude Opus 4.5Anthropic | 90 |
| 10 | GPT-5OpenAI | 90 |
| 11 | Gemini 3 Flash PreviewGoogle | 89 |
| 12 | Claude Sonnet 4.6Anthropic | 89 |
| 13 | Claude Sonnet 4.5Anthropic | 89 |
| 14 | o3 ProOpenAI | 88 |
| 15 | Grok 4.1 FastxAI | 87 |
| 16 | Grok 4.20 BetaxAI | 86 |
| 17 | Grok 4xAI | 86 |
| 18 | Gemini 3.1 Pro PreviewGoogle | 86 |
| 19 | o3OpenAI | 86 |
| 20 | GPT-5.1OpenAI | 85 |
| 21 | MiMo-V2-OmniXiaomi | 85 |
| 22 | MiMo-V2-ProXiaomi | 85 |
| 23 | GPT-5.4 NanoOpenAI | 85 |
| 24 | Seed-2.0-LiteByteDance | 85 |
| 25 | Qwen3.5-9BAlibaba | 85 |
Streaming lets your chatbot display responses token-by-token, creating a natural "typing" effect. Essential for interactive support experiences where users expect immediate feedback.
Support agents need to look up orders, check account status, and perform actions. Function calling lets the AI invoke your APIs directly - turning a chatbot into a true support agent.
Customer support generates high volume. A chatbot handling 10K conversations/day can cost $10-100/day with budget models vs $500+ with premium models. Choose based on your complexity needs.
Vision-capable models can understand screenshots, error messages, and product photos that customers share - enabling visual troubleshooting without human intervention.
Based on our composite scoring updated hourly, the top-ranked models for customer support are shown at the top of this page. Rankings consider benchmarks, pricing, capabilities, and community adoption.
Yes, several models listed on this page offer free tiers or are fully open-source. Look for models marked as Free in the pricing column above.
We use a composite scoring system combining benchmark performance, capability matching for customer support use cases, pricing, context window size, and community adoption. Scores are updated hourly.
Rankings refresh every hour using real-time data from benchmarks, API testing, and community metrics. The data shown always reflects the most current performance.