ChatGPT Plugins: Uses and Alternative Options

India has always been amongst the world's leaders in adopting evolving technologies. Artificial intelligence and ChatGPT are no different. As of December 2025, India accounts for 9.06 per cent of ChatGPT users globally, second only to the United States [1].

You can ask ChatGPT to help you brainstorm ideas for academic papers, write social media posts, summarise books, review grammar, or write computer code, among its many tasks. Since its launch in late 2022, ChatGPT India’s users can query ChatGPT with various questions that can help them find answers for professional, personal, or educational use, depending on their needs.

The site’s advantages include the ability to efficiently execute a task, improve the quality of content, enhance productivity, or handle multiple queries at once. ChatGPT plugins are a now-defunct feature that extended the capabilities of ChatGPT by connecting with external tools and services. Let’s explore ChatGPT, its plugins, and features that are still available to users.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a popular form of generative artificial intelligence (AI) that allows you to make queries and get answers in a conversational form. OpenAI created ChatGPT and launched it online in India in November 2022. The company followed that up with the launch of ChatGPT Plus in February 2023 to enhance users' experience who decide to upgrade their access for a fee of $20 a month, or roughly ₹1,670. In August 2025, OpenAI launched its least expensive plan, ChatGPT Go, for only ₹399 per month, though the company offered a promotion in November 2025 that allowed users in India to sign up for a free year [2].

What were ChatGPT plugins?

OpenAI first introduced ChatGPT plugins in April 2023, and discontinued them a year later in April 2024 [3]. ChatGPT plugins were third-party tools that you could add to ChatGPT to expand its functionalities. Similar to browser extensions, you could add a plugin to ChatGPT to extend and customise its function without modifying its code. Plugins could help ChatGPT access current information, automate certain functions, and run complex computations.

Third-party developers specialising in a service typically developed these plugins for ChatGPT to allow the model to communicate with their external platforms and perform specialised tasks. For example, a ChatGPT plugin for Zapier allowed the AI engine to interact with several apps, like Google Sheets and Salesforce. These plugins leveraged application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow ChatGPT to interact with third-party tools, databases, and other services, facilitating the integration of industry-specific features and customised functionalities for specific use cases.

By extending the capabilities of ChatGPT’s base models, plugins were intended to improve user experience and efficiency. However, ChatGPT plugins were only available for GPT-4 models that had access to the web, which meant lower GPT models couldn’t integrate plugins. Additionally, since third-party vendors offered most of these plugins, there remained the risk of sensitive information getting exposed.

What replaced ChatGPT plugins?

OpenAI introduced custom GPTs that can perform similar functions as plugins. You can customise your GPTs by adding instructions and documents or even integrating third-party services.

Custom GPTs utilize RESTful APIs to connect to external services. Using natural language processing, the GPT understands the user’s question, determines which API would be most relevant, executes the API through function calls, and provides a response in natural language as well. This allows the GPT to retrieve information from or perform an action in an external application by converting text into a JSON schema for the API call. What's more, you can simply specify the schema, add an authentication mechanism, and provide instructions in natural language to the GPT, and the model will do the rest itself.

ChatGPT’s custom GPT features enable anyone to create a GPT model for their specific use without requiring any coding. By simply chatting with ChatGPT, adding instructions in the form of prompts that guide your custom GPT’s behaviour, providing documents relevant to your use case, and specifying the actions you want it to perform, you can create a customised GPT tailored to your needs.

This feature makes GPTs a powerful alternative to plugins, as you no longer have to rely on the plugins available from third-party vendors for specific tasks. Instead, you can create your own custom GPT that can call on these functions from external sites and perform specialised tasks. In fact, you might not even need to connect to external APIs for many of the functions that were previously handled by plugins, as the newer GPT models already come with advanced capabilities in contextual awareness and response accuracy.

Even if you don’t want to build your own GPT, you can browse the GPT Store to find millions of GPTs contributed by users and OpenAI’s partners that perform a diverse range of functions. This might have also contributed to the discontinuation of plugins, as several companies that previously offered ChatGPT plugins now have GPTs that perform the same functions.

Pros and cons of GPTs compared to plugins

A significant benefit of custom GPTs over plugins is that anyone can create them without coding knowledge by having a conversation with ChatGPT. In contrast, plugins were third-party APIs created by an external vendor outside of ChatGPT. This means that while you didn’t need to be a developer to create your GPT, you did need coding knowledge to create a plugin. However, this also means that plugins sometimes offered more complex functionality than GPTs, which are more suited for specialised tasks.

Some other differences in their benefits include:

• You can only use one GPT chatbot at a time, while you could integrate up to three plugins for a single chat.

• GPTs are more cost-effective than plugins since they can perform a wide variety of simple tasks without the need for complex development.

• You can customise your instructions and conversational styles for your GPT to tailor its behavior for specific use cases; however, you couldn’t modify the instructions for plugins.

• Developing and deploying a custom GPT is generally a much quicker process compared to plugins, which required more maintenance.

Get started with Coursera.

Online courses offer an excellent, flexible way to learn about ChatGPT and how to utilise plugins to maximise your platform use. For example, consider taking the beginner-friendly Generative AI: Prompt Engineering Basics course from IBM to learn about prompt and generative AI on a conceptual and practical level, with opportunities to practice techniques and use prompt engineering tools. If you want a more hands-on approach, you could complete the ChatGPT Playground for Beginners: Intro to NLP AI Guided Project offered on the Coursera Project Network.

Another option, ChatGPT Advanced Data Analysis from Vanderbilt University, allows you to learn more about using the Code Interpreter plugin to read PDFs and view images and videos. You’ll find these opportunities and more on Coursera.