ChatGPT vs. Claude: Which Should You Use in 2026?

Let's talk about the number one question I keep getting from people: ChatGPT or Claude? My short answer: it doesn't matter, just become fluent. The authentic answer to me: use Claude. That's where I spend most of my time. It's a bit more intermediate user-friendly. The detailed answer on what the actual differences between these two absolute behemoths of a product are is this video. I came up with these categories that we're gonna rate these tools on. I'm gonna sprinkle tips and tricks all throughout the video. And we're gonna be talking about this from a place of you actually trying to get better at these tools rather than taking the quick wins and moving on with your life. Because as you know, people using AI or using AI are not the same thing. Some people are all over there in the Agentic world getting things done while they sleep, while others are still using it like a fancy Google. And I hope that this video is gonna help you on this progression in an ever-changing landscape. So without further ado, let's talk about what is the better tool for everyday use, ChatGPT from OpenAI or Claude by Anthropic. Let's start with the easy one, pricing and limits. So at the entry level, pricing is similar. You have free plans on both of those, and then they go $20, $100, $200. What increases throughout those levels is not just extra features, where the biggest unlock is always at the $20 level, but then also more usage at the $100 and $200 level where it's just not gonna cut you off. So while that is similar, the usage amount is not similar at all. Claude is way more restrictive with its usage than ChatGPT. This really depends on what you're doing. But generally speaking, if you get the $20 plan on both, expect Claude to cut you off probably somewhere around 30 to 50% of the time that you would have on the ChatGPT plan. Same goes for the free plan. ChatGPT is way more generous on the free plan than Claude is. So for pricing, this one has to go to ChatGPT. Let's talk about the next point, which matters to a lot of people, which is writing. Like, how does it sound out of the box? Now, I should add, yes, you can heavily customize both of these. You can show it various patterns of your own writing. But kind of out of the box writing, I think the wide consensus is that just Claude sounds better. It sounds less robotic than ChatGPT does. And also, it's just, which in result is just less obviously AI-generated text coming out of Claude. But look, mine and the team's opinion is only worth so much. On screen, you can see a basic prompt run in both of them. Here are the results. You can make up your own mind. Maybe pause this for a second and just make a call on which writing you like the most. As you can tell, I am pretty opinionated on this point, but you can make up your own mind. Now, that being said, if you go a little deeper into the setup and you really set it up with your patterns and examples of those patterns, then both are just different and don't sound robotic at all anymore. But you have to be actively managing context in order to do that. Later in the video, I'll point you towards a place where you can actually learn that. But for now, just know out of the box or with very little customization, Claude is superior in terms of writing. So this point goes to Claude. Next up, this is going to be really simple, voice mode. I love inputting things into AI with my own voice. As you might be able to tell, I am a talker. That's why I run a YouTube channel and do lectures and speak and all that stuff. This is kind of what my life evolved into. So naturally, I will also be able to speak into chat a lot. But the fact remains, No matter how much you talk, no matter if you're introverted, extroverted, I don't care. The bandwidth of us speaking is just a multitude of what you'll be able to achieve while typing on a keyboard. Even if you're a fast typer, there's no way you can type even as close as fast as I can speak right now. It's not a comparison. It's like 4x, 5x the speed. And if you type with two fingers, then straight up, you should just be using voice mode a lot because it's just so efficient and it feels fluid. And you're going to be adding a lot more context, which at this point you should know helps get better results. And in terms of ChatGPT versus Claude, it's not even close. The ChatGPT voice input is just so much better, more reliable. It's kind of close to perfect, to be honest. Whereas Claude is just flaky. You can hardly put in a sentence without it misunderstanding something. Multilingual support is not as good. Accents are not as good. The punctuation, the structuring, it's just overall, it inferior to what ChatGPT has right now. So this point clearly goes to ChatGPT. Yet I still use them in both apps. And this is not sponsored, but if you have an external application, I use something like Whisper Flow, then you don't need the built-in function in Claude or in ChatGPT. Kind of just set up a hotkey on your keyboard. And when you press that, it gets your voice. I use that all over the place. It's great. And then this doesn't matter if you're using the built-in feature, ChatGPT takes this one. Next up, this is probably the easiest category, image generation. ChatGPT is the best one in the market right now. Even beyond what Google can do, it's just the best image generator. You can upload images of yourself and others and combine them into really accurate results and create marketing materials with fonts and colors as you specify them. Meanwhile, Claude doesn't even have an image generator, none at all. So this point clearly goes to ChatGPT. But I do want to highlight that it's not just that they have one, they have the best one in the market right now. I'll link a video in the description below on my favorite prompting technique in the ChatGPT image generator. It's called reverse prompting. I think the video is like 3 minutes long and you'll get incredible results out of ChatGPT image generation. And on screen right now, you can see a comparison table of ChatGPT image generation versus some others. But let me just tell you, just in practice, in terms of editing images and not just creating them and day-to-day usage, it just shines above all other models. That's my take and ChatGPT definitely takes this point. Next one is presentations and documents. Now, we ran a bunch of tests on this, and our conclusion is that Claude is slightly better on this. This is where the comparison gets a bit more nuanced because ChatGPT is excellent at creating documents too, but Claude is just a bit more coherent. In my experience, it overwhelms the document a little less. I like the structures, I like the presentations, I like the one-pagers, and it has this ability to create artifacts, which are kind of the standalone apps that are hosted on the web. ChatGPT has it too, but it just works better. Better in Claude. So for all sorts of documents and little one-off artifacts and reports, I'd call them document-style outputs, just overall, yes, you're going to be able to find isolated use cases where it's sort of the same. But usually, if one of them has an edge, it is Claude. And that's why this point goes to them. And yes, this does apply also to data analysis and just all sorts of document-like visualizations that you will be creating with these tools, which is an incredible use case, by the way. Okay, let's talk about memory. And here we start moving more into intermediate territory. It's manually managing your context, making sure that you know what Claude knows about you and that it has all the necessary information. Memory is just the default way of doing it, the automatic way. And it's not the best way. It's just better than nothing. Because if AI remembers things about you, just like a human, it performs better, the relationship is smoother, the work that gets done multiplies. And Claude actually approaches memory differently than ChatGPT. ChatGPT basically picks certain pieces and puts them into a memory bank, which you then can manually manage. Whereas Claude has a more automated approach where every night it looks at your previous chats and builds a new memory on you that updates. What I really like in Claude is that it kind of segments this into different categories of memories. And if it's just a recent topic, it puts it in the category, just a recent topic. Now, as I alluded to in the beginning, they're actually testing a brand new approach to memories that is even further than this. It's kind of hard to explain, but it kind of builds a wiki on you with like different documents that link to each other. And then every night, the system does something that would be referred to as dreaming, which sort of looks at recent developments and sees if there's new additions to the wiki. But overall, when it comes to memory management and context management, Claude is just the superior product. Even if you look at any project, which is just sort of a folder for different context. I use this all the time. I teach in this all the time. You will see that all of the context that this project has is sort of in one box here inside of Claude because they expect you to manually take care of the context that the AI has on you, right? The automatic memories are up here. The instructions where you can kind of put in stuff by hand are in here. And the files that are attached are here. This is it. This is all the context that is going to be referencing when I start a new chat. Whereas if you look into a ChatGPT project, you will see that the files that are attached are in here. Here under sources, whereas the instructions are under three dots, project settings, and here are the instructions. And the memories, well, I can't even access them from here. I need to go into settings, personalization, scroll down, manage memories, and then in here they are. It's more user-friendly and looks simpler on the surface, but it gives you less control, and they don't expect you to manage it manually. And this is sort of where we're arriving at a bit of a conclusion here. Overall, Claude is just built more for people who take manual control of their context, more of an intermediate user who's looking to grow and build his AI skill rather than kind of just use it on the side. And I do like that. But it's kind of a hard point to assign. If you're a complete beginner, ChatGPT would probably take this one. But if you're digging in and watching videos like this, I would guess you're not just somebody who wants to use this for half an hour a week, but you actually want results from it. And for that, Claude is superior. Hey, quick update from editing Igor. Since I recorded this video a few days ago, they actually changed the way memories work. And they also upgraded it inside of ChatGPT to be just like the Claude version, or very similar, that is. It does something they call dreaming, whereas just regularly it updates this memory document that it has on you. You can check it out under personalization. And then if you scroll down memory summary, you can see this does the same thing as Claude now, which takes more compute, but works way better. Even in their post, they stated that reliability of memory retrieval went from something around 60% to over 80%. Which actually confirmed my suspicion that the Claude one works better. But therefore, this point goes to both ChatGPT and Claude. And this is where we move to the next points, which is one, custom GPTs versus Claude skills. And then next up, we'll talk about kind of the agentic capabilities and the evolution of this tool into something that is a bit more autonomous. But first, let's talk about Claude skills and custom GPTs. They're a function within each one of these applications that kind of takes your prompt and saves it as a reusable asset. Let's take a simple example. If you're writing a blog once a week with the help of AI and you have some big prompt with your style embedded in it, copy-pasting that every time is a bit annoying. And what you could do inside of ChatGPT is build a custom GPT where you put that prompt into the GPT and then it's kind of a custom chatbot that is made for a single purpose that you could talk to. Claude Skills, on the other hand, it's kind of just a box around the prompt. For example, if I wanted to repurpose some content from one social channel to another, well, I have AI Advantage Social, which is a skill that I prebuilt that I can quickly access just by typing slash. Now again, it's kind of this user-friendliness versus customization story. And Claude, again, is on the customization side. When it comes to user-friendliness, just putting it inside of a GPT and handing it off to somebody or using it yourself where you don't have to think about anything, you kind of just do, is more user-friendly. But building a custom skill like this gives you more customization. There's literally a Customize tab here. And in here, I can look at my various skills, like for example, this AI Advantage Social skill, and I could customize it or share it with others. It's not something that's super advanced, but as you start managing context and start developing skills that you return to regularly, it is superior. And that's why in this department, again, I want to give it to Claude. Okay, next up, we are getting more advanced. Now we're officially entering Agentic territory, and that is the browser automation capabilities of both ChatGPT and Claude. This can be really useful for doing manual tasks like, hey, I have 20 tabs here and I want to copy all of that info into a Google Doc. Anything that is like pretty straightforward and you can describe to a sentence or two with a human with basic computer skills, this thing can probably do. If you get into something more complex, it breaks, just know that. So I'll keep this short because it's really simple. The browser extension of Claude is actually super capable. I do use it regularly for specialty tasks like this or data transfer or things like that. Can even fill out forms for you if you want to. You can get creative here, but ChatGPT has a feature like that inside of chat. To kind of open up a new chat. It's called agent mode. But honestly, over time, I don't find myself using this ever, just because the Claude extension works so damn well for these things. And the ChatGPT extension, I can barely even mention because it's literally just replacing your Google search bar with ChatGPT. So for browser automation, Claude definitely gets this point, although you do need a Chrome extension. And then finally, the point where the journey here would continue, right? Because right now the trajectory is clear. You start using ChatGPT, you use it regularly, you build your context, you then start managing your context, it develops into something that I would call a daily thought partner, a daily work partner, really like a clone of yourself that helps you make better decisions, helps you think better and gets all sorts of work done with you. And then you're like, wow, it's really solid at these things. And I'm managing my context, I'm building skills. Can't I just hand off some of this stuff to AI to just do in itself? And the answer is Yeah, 6 months ago the answer was no, but today it's yeah, you can go towards more agentic applications and both services have offerings on the side. ChatGPT has this standalone app called Codex where you can basically take prompts and run them on a schedule. Claude way more fluidly evolves from Claude into Claude Cowork and then Claude Code. Now here's the cool thing with Claude, all you need to do is download the desktop application of Claude, not the web version that I'm kind of showing you here, but the desktop application. And then you can just switch a tab at the top and move into Cowork. And all of a sudden, it has access to files on your desktop. And you can say, hey, I really like this prompt or this skill. Can you run it every day at 4 AM? For example, the first thing that people usually try is, can you prepare a daily briefing for me where you look at these 10 news outlets and you filter for my taste? Obviously, you need context on yourself so it knows what your taste is. But that's a really great place to start. And all of a sudden, you have an agent doing work for you every day. And then you build on that. You stay inquisitive and you ask more questions about what else it could do for you. You watch channels like this and you develop your skill. And then eventually you have Claude Code, which is more built for developers or people who want to build applications. You don't need to be technical to do it. But for most people, the sweet spot is Cowork. While Code does add a few extra capabilities, it just has more access, but you can also break more things. And the equivalent of Claude Code in the OpenAI universe is Codex. And right now, OpenAI doesn't have this middle ground of Claude Cowork. And that's why for agentic capabilities, I would clearly give this point to Claude. Now, as you can see from the way I talk about it, this is a journey. It is a progression. You don't just go straight to Codex and hope that things work. You can do it. But usually when people do, a month later, they kind of arrive at the conclusion that, hey, this has been fun and an interesting journey. And I learned some things, but really, I'm not operating in my life differently than I did a month ago. They kind of like reverse back to some of the basic usage. And what I did is I mapped this out. You might have heard it on the channel before, but I have this 3-level framework where level 1 is just using it for questions. Level 2 is really building a thought partner that you use every day, a clone of yourself. And then level 3 is being an architect where you build systems that run without you. But the progression happens from 1 to 2 and then from 2 to 3. You don't go from level 1 to 3. If you're interested in me teaching you this literally step by step going through it, we built the AI Advantage Club, which lays this out. You start at level 1, and then we have a level 2 course where you can build that clone of yourself in less than an hour. We do that, and there's monthly masterclasses in there. The last one I talked for an hour about content creation and repurposing just with AI. The recording is in there. You can access all of that and more for just $1 a month that we then donate to Feeding America. Simply go to the link in the description below. For $1, you can get access for 30 days. I want to make it a bit more fair. I want to add a final section, which is user friendliness. As you might have noticed throughout the video, this one will go to ChatGPT just because it feels easier for normal people. The context management is hidden within the menus and it just kind of feels like a chatbot. Oh, I say this, I get a result. It's good. But why a lot of people have switched from ChatGPT to Claude recently is because they kind of hit those limits. They're like, I want more. I want to manage my context. I want to get into this agentic territory. And Claude right now makes that transition smoother. So overall, Claude is the winner of this comparison. And the honest answer for a lot of people watching this channel precisely is probably use both. You now know what each one is best at. If you want images, go to ChatGPT. If I want to write something, I'm in Claude. And if I'm doing agentic stuff, I personally am with Claude, although some people work with Codex. So there you have it. Those are all my thoughts on the topic. If you disagree with something, feel free to leave a comment below. I'll meet you in the comment section. I want to hear what you think. And I'm especially looking forward to the one person who's going to be like, "You are actually— I'm using a Chinese local model and it's superior to all of this." Sure, please let me know in the comments. I'm expecting you already. For everybody else, I hope this video helped you out. My name is Igor Pogany and I'll see you soon.