Claude

Claude is Anthropic's AI assistant, designed for nuanced reasoning and long-form work. It excels at analyzing large documents (200k token context window — roughly 500 pages), writing detailed technical content, and careful reasoning. The tone is less casual than ChatGPT, more like a thoughtful colleague. Free tier is usable, Pro ($20/month) unlocks higher usage limits and priority access.

Ideal for researchers analyzing papers, developers working with large codebases, and writers who need AI to maintain context across long documents. If you're asking complex questions requiring multi-step reasoning, Claude's outputs are often more thorough than ChatGPT. The extended context window means you can paste entire codebases or documents for analysis.

Where it differs: less "creative" than ChatGPT (more conservative outputs), no image generation or web browsing (focuses on text), and smaller ecosystem of plugins/integrations. For quick brainstorming or casual tasks, ChatGPT feels faster. But for deep work — code reviews, research analysis, technical writing — Claude is often superior. Many power users keep both.