Claude

Claude is Anthropic's AI assistant, known for thoughtful, nuanced answers and an unusually natural writing style. It excels at working with long documents — you can paste entire reports, contracts or books and ask detailed questions — and it's consistently rated among the best AI models for coding, analysis and careful reasoning.

The free plan gives you access to Claude's flagship models with daily limits. Claude Pro at $20/month raises limits substantially and adds priority access, Projects (persistent workspaces with your own files and instructions) and access to the most capable models. Max tiers at $100–$200/month serve heavy users, and Claude also powers popular developer tools like Claude Code.

Strengths: arguably the best prose quality of any AI assistant — drafts sound human and need less editing; a huge context window for analyzing long documents; strong coding ability; and a careful, honest tone that pushes back rather than making things up. Weaknesses: no built-in image generation, and the free tier's daily limits are tighter than ChatGPT's for long sessions.

Who it's for: writers, researchers, lawyers, students and developers — anyone whose work is mostly text and thinking. If your main use is generating images or voice chat, ChatGPT covers more ground; if your main use is writing and analysis, many professionals consider Claude the best tool available.