I’ve been using ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro side by side for eight months. Paying for both. Using them for real work. OpenAI and Anthropic both make solid products.

Here’s the honest comparison nobody’s paying me to write.

Writing Quality

Claude wins. It’s not close.

Claude’s writing sounds more human. Less corporate. Fewer filler phrases. When I ask Claude to write in a specific voice, it actually does.

ChatGPT writes like it’s optimizing for word count. Everything has unnecessary introductions and conclusions. You have to specifically tell it to be concise.

For emails, blog posts, anything customer-facing: Claude.

Coding

Tie, with caveats.

GPT-4 handles more languages and frameworks out of the box. If you’re working with something obscure, ChatGPT has probably seen more of it.

Claude is better at understanding what you’re trying to do. Asks clarifying questions. Writes cleaner code on the first try.

For standard languages (Python, JavaScript, etc.): Either works. For niche stuff: ChatGPT. For complex logic: Claude.

Following Instructions

Claude wins significantly.

ChatGPT loves to improvise. Ask it to do X, it’ll do X plus Y and Z that you didn’t ask for. Sometimes helpful. Usually annoying.

Claude does what you ask. If you want it to do more, you have to ask for more. I vastly prefer this.

Example: “Write a bullet list of 5 items.”

• Claude: Writes 5 bullets.
• ChatGPT: Writes 5 bullets plus an intro paragraph and a closing thought.

Knowledge Cutoff

ChatGPT wins.

ChatGPT has browsing. Claude doesn’t. For anything time-sensitive, ChatGPT can actually look things up.

This matters more than you’d think for business use. Competitor research, current pricing, recent news—ChatGPT handles it.

Speed

ChatGPT wins.

Claude is slower. Sometimes significantly. During peak hours, Claude can feel sluggish.

ChatGPT is consistently fast. For quick tasks, this adds up.

Conversation Length

Claude wins massively.

Claude can handle much longer conversations and documents. I’ve fed it 50-page reports and gotten useful analysis.

ChatGPT forgets what you said 10 messages ago. For complex projects, this is maddening.

Honesty About Limitations

Claude wins.

When Claude doesn’t know something, it says so. ChatGPT confidently makes things up.

I trust Claude’s “I’m not sure” more than ChatGPT’s confident answers. This matters enormously for business use.

Cost

Tie. Both are $20/month for pro versions.

Free tiers: ChatGPT free is GPT-3.5, noticeably worse. Claude free is the full model with usage limits.

If you’re only going to pay for one, depends on your use case.

My Setup

For what it’s worth, here’s how I use them:

Claude: Long-form writing, document analysis, complex problems, anything customer-facing.

ChatGPT: Quick lookups, current information, broad coding help, image generation (DALL-E integration).

If I could only have one, I’d keep Claude. The writing quality and instruction-following are too important for my work.

But I keep both because $40/month is nothing compared to the productivity gain.

The Real Answer

Try both for a month. Free tiers are good enough to evaluate. Your use cases might be different than mine.

Anyone who tells you one is definitively better than the other for all purposes hasn’t used them seriously. They’re different tools with different strengths.

Pick based on what you actually do, not what influencers tell you.