Claude

Claude is the specialist worth owning if your work involves long documents or writing that other people will read. In our testing it was the most reliable at holding a 60-page PDF together — summarising it, answering questions across sections, and not quietly forgetting the first third by the end.

The writing difference is real and hard to quantify. Claude's default register has less of the recognisable AI cadence than its rivals, which matters when the output is a client email or a policy document rather than a first draft you will rewrite anyway. Several of our reviewers describe editing Claude's output rather than rewriting it, which is a meaningfully different amount of work. Pro at $20 a month matches ChatGPT Plus; the Max tiers exist for people who hit limits daily.

The gaps are consumer-facing. Image generation is absent, the mobile experience is less polished, and the ecosystem of third-party integrations and community prompt-sharing is smaller than OpenAI's. If your assistant use is casual and varied — make me a picture, plan my holiday, transcribe this — ChatGPT covers more ground for the same money.

Our guidance: buy Claude if you work with long text and care how the output reads; buy ChatGPT if you want the widest capability for a single subscription. Plenty of our reviewers pay for both, and at $40 a month combined that is a defensible call for anyone whose job is writing.