You summon a celestial of challenge rating 4 or lower, which appears in an unoccupied space that you can see within range. The celestial disappears when it drops to 0 hit points or when the spell ends.
The celestial is friendly to you and your companions for the duration. Roll initiative for the celestial, which has its own turns. It obeys any verbal commands that you issue to it (no action required by you), as long as they don't violate its alignment. If you don't issue any commands to the celestial, it defends itself from hostile creatures but otherwise takes no actions.
The GM has the celestial's statistics. (Sample: Pegasus)
At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a 9th-level spell slot, you summon a celestial of challenge rating 5 or lower.
Mythic Odysseys of Theros added two more CR 4 celestials: the winged bull and winged lion. Both are good at charging enemies, and the lion can even knock them prone, which is fun and useful.
Spoilers for Tomb of Annihilation:
You can have a couatl disguised as a humanoid who does everything a couatl does. See "Eku".
For the right campaign, there are more CR 5 celestials in Boo's Astral Menagerie: a starlight apparition and a mercane, which have their uses.
.
Thanks to Planescape, this spell now has a lot more targets:
bariaur wanderer, hound archon, lantern archon, musteval guardinal, sunfly
The dabus is only an option if you're in Sigil.
I'd say the hound archon is the best one out of these overall.
The most powerful part of this spell is the shape change ability. It can polymorph into any CR4 humanoid caster. It can refresh "spell slots" of the humanoid caster by returning to its true form and polymorphing into another creature just as an action. Some CR4 humanoids can cast hold monster, cone of cold, plane shift, cloud kill, arcane eye, telekinesis etc. Except you're a cleric, but you now have access to warlock, sorcerer and wizard spells.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1HFliCW365VtgMbYtAFzXmklrf7aDo2F35EyquecgPmg/htmlview#gid=729155693
In order to make this spell actually viable:
This spell is really bad they is not much celestials to summon