# Arena AI

> Crowdsourced benchmarking platform and free chat interface for frontier AI models.

Arena AI (formerly LMSYS Chatbot Arena) is an open evaluation platform that ranks LLMs based on blind human preference. It lets you run side-by-side prompt battles between anonymous models, compare specific models side-by-side, or use direct chat with top commercial and open-weight models for free.

Website: https://arena.ai/

## What it is for

- Test and compare outputs from top frontier models using the same prompt
- Access commercial LLMs like Claude, GPT, and Gemini for free without individual subscriptions
- Vote on blind model comparisons to contribute to public AI leaderboards
- Evaluate coding and reasoning performance across different model architectures

## Features

- Battle Mode: Compare anonymous models side-by-side and vote on the better response
- Side by Side: Manually choose two specific models to compare side by side
- Direct Chat: Converse with a single selected model directly
- Agent Mode designed for testing complex multistep tasks
- Public ELO leaderboard ranking LLMs, coding, and vision models

## Pricing

Free to use via web interface

## Details

- Type: Web app
- Category: [AI](https://xiry.app/topics/ai.md)
- Open source: yes
- Platforms: Web
- For: Developers, AI researchers, and general users wanting to test top AI models without paid accounts.
- Alternative to: ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini
- Tags: llm, benchmarking, chatbots, arena, leaderboard, lmsys

## Why it was saved

- [@theaisurfer, 11 January 2026](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DTWek73jp8g/): Under 'Direct Chat' or 'Side by Side', it gives free direct access to top frontier models (Claude, Gemini, Grok, GPT) to test and compare outputs without paid subscriptions.

## Compare

- [Alternatives to Google Gemini](https://xiry.app/alternatives/google-gemini.md)
- [Alternatives to Claude](https://xiry.app/alternatives/claude.md)
- [Alternatives to ChatGPT](https://xiry.app/alternatives/chatgpt.md)

## Related

- [Design Arena](https://xiry.app/resources/design-arena): Compare and test AI models for design, images, code, and video. (Web app, Freemium)
- [ChatGPT](https://xiry.app/resources/chatgpt): Conversational AI assistant for writing, research, reasoning, and coding (Web app, Freemium)
- [Pinokio](https://xiry.app/resources/pinokio): Browser that installs and runs open-source AI apps with one click (Desktop app, Free)
- [Prompt Engineering (Google Whitepaper)](https://xiry.app/resources/prompt-engineering-google-whitepaper-2086): A comprehensive guide to prompt engineering techniques and LLM parameters by Google. (Article or course, Free)
- [Claude](https://xiry.app/resources/claude): Anthropic's conversational AI assistant for analysis, writing, and coding (Web app, Freemium)
- [Hermes 3](https://xiry.app/resources/hermes-3): Open-weights fine-tune of Llama 3.1 built for agentic function calling. (AI model, Open source)

Updated 3 October 2026. Page: https://xiry.app/resources/arena-ai

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