Anthropic's AI assistant excelling at long documents, nuanced writing, and coding.
Claude's standout feature is its 200K context window — you can feed it an entire book, codebase, or research paper and it will analyze it coherently. This alone makes it invaluable for lawyers, researchers, and developers working with large documents.
The writing quality is noticeably better than competitors. Claude produces nuanced, thoughtful responses that feel less generic and more tailored. For coding, Claude consistently generates cleaner, better-documented code with fewer logic errors.
The Projects feature lets you create persistent workspaces with custom instructions and uploaded files — essentially building custom AI assistants for specific workflows without any coding.
Claude doesn't have built-in image generation, web browsing is more limited than ChatGPT's, and there's no equivalent to the GPT Store ecosystem. The free tier is generous but you'll hit limits faster during heavy use sessions.
The free tier provides access to Claude Sonnet with generous daily limits. Pro at $20/month unlocks Claude Opus (the most capable model), higher limits, and priority access. Team and Enterprise plans are available for organizations.
If you work with long documents, need high-quality writing, or do serious coding work, Claude is the best AI assistant available. It's the thinking person's AI tool — less flashy than ChatGPT but more capable where it matters most.