Claude vs. ChatGPT: How do they compare?

Claude AI vs. ChatGPT pricing and model options

Claude and ChatGPT are names for chatbot products, not specific LLMs. When interacting with Claude or ChatGPT, users can choose to run different model versions under the hood, whether using a web or mobile app or calling an API.

Claude

Anthropic offers Claude online at Claude.ai, as well as mobile apps for iOS and Android, desktop apps for macOS and Windows, and a developer API.

The company provides both free and paid subscription tiers. The free tier includes access to the Claude 4 Sonnet model with standard rate limits. Paid options include the following:

• Claude Pro. This option costs $17 per month when billed annually or $20 when billed monthly.
• Claude Max. Depending on usage limits, Claude Max is $100 or $200 per month,.
• Claude Team. This option costs $25 per user per month when billed annually or $30 per user per month when billed monthly. Whereas Pro and Max target individual subscribers, Team is intended for groups of at least five users.

Paid plans offer benefits including access to the more advanced model Claude 4 Opus, the command-line tool Claude Code, extended context windows, integration features such as Model Context Protocol connectors and higher rate limits.

Anthropic released the Claude 4 model family on May 22, 2025. This launch followed a series of incremental updates throughout 2024 and early 2025, including Claude 3 in March 2024, Claude 3.5 Sonnet in June 2024 and Claude 3.7 Sonnet in February 2025. Claude 4 introduced extended reasoning capabilities, improved support for lengthier workflows and upgrades to coding performance.

As of mid-2025, Anthropic's model offerings include the following:

• Claude 4 Opus. Anthropic's most advanced model, Opus 4, is available to Pro, Max and Team subscribers. Through the API, it costs $15 per million input tokens and $75 per million output tokens. According to Anthropic, Opus 4 outperforms the previous Sonnet models on technical benchmarks like SWE-bench and Terminal-bench.
• Claude 4 Sonnet. The mid-tier Sonnet 4 model is included in both free and paid Claude plans. Through the API, it costs $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens.

• Claude 3.5 Haiku. Although it's not part of the Claude 4 series, Anthropic continues to offer its most lightweight model, Haiku, via the API. It costs $0.80 per million input tokens and $4 per million output tokens.

All Claude 4 models support a 200,000-token context window -- roughly 150,000 words -- and can handle up to 1 million tokens in certain applications with additional support from Anthropic. Although Anthropic's documentation states that both Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 are trained on data through March 2025, their internal system prompt and user reports indicate a knowledge cutoff at the end of January 2025.

Anthropic's models can analyze user-uploaded documents and images, but they currently do not support image generation or voice output, although voice features are being piloted in the Claude mobile app. In March 2025, Anthropic added a web browsing tool, and the company previously launched a "computer use" capability in late 2024, which enables Claude to interact with a user's computer environment by taking screenshots and controlling the mouse and keyboard.

Claude models can also be deployed via managed services on Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud Vertex AI.

ChatGPT

OpenAI provides more model options than Anthropic, including multiple versions of its GPT LLM and specialized models such as Dall-E for image generation, Whisper for speech-to-text and Code Interpreter for code execution. ChatGPT is available online at ChatGPT.com, as well as through mobile apps for iOS and Android, desktop apps for macOS and Windows, and OpenAI's developer API.

As of mid-2025, OpenAI's main model offerings include the following:

• GPT-4o. Released in May 2024, GPT-4o is OpenAI's flagship multimodal model, meaning it can process text, images and audio using the same neural network. GPT-4o can generate images, have real-time voice conversations, analyze uploaded files and browse the web. Users can also create custom assistants called GPTs using GPT-4o.
• GPT-4.5. Released as a "research preview" in February 2025, GPT-4.5 is a general-purpose model designed to provide more thoughtful and accurate responses than previous versions in the GPT series.
• GPT-4.1 series. Introduced in April 2025, this set of models includes GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1-mini, and GPT-4.1-nano. GPT-4.1 is optimized for rapid instruction following, analysis and code generation, with the lightweight mini and nano versions offering the fastest response times and lowest costs.
• O series. The o series of models is designed for complex reasoning tasks, especially math and logic use cases and multi-step problem-solving. Specific models within this family include the following:
  • O3 series. This model group includes o3, o3-mini and o3-pro, released in April, January and June 2025, respectively. The main o3 model is OpenAI's flagship reasoning model, whereas o3-mini and o3-pro are more lightweight and higher-performance variants.
  • O4 series. Released in April 2025, these two models, o4-mini and o4-mini-high, are smaller, more efficient reasoning models that provide faster, cheaper answers to technical, analytical and coding tasks.

GPT-4.5 was trained on data through October 2023, while GPT-4o, the 4.1 series and the o series have more recent knowledge cutoffs of June 2024. Internet browsing is available for both free and paid users, which can help supplement the models' static knowledge base with more up-to-date information.

All ChatGPT users can access GPT-4o and o3-mini, with GPT-4.1-mini as a fallback when free users reach rate limits. Paid users can access additional models, including GPT-4.5 and o3, and higher usage limits. Unlike Anthropic, OpenAI doesn't offer its models through third-party cloud providers such as AWS or Google Cloud managed services.

Alongside its free tier with limited access to core models, OpenAI offers several pricing tiers:

• ChatGPT Plus. This individual plan costs $20 per month and includes priority access to GPT-4o, GPT-4.5, the o series models, and tools such as voice chat and file analysis.
• ChatGPT Pro. This higher-tier individual plan, targeting power users and professionals, costs $200 per month. It offers higher rate limits than Plus and early access to advanced features such as OpenAI's Operator agent and Deep Research report generator.
• ChatGPT Team. Designed for smaller group accounts, Team costs $25 per user per month billed annually or $30 per user per month billed monthly. It offers collaboration tools and the full feature suite of Plus.
• ChatGPT Enterprise. Designed for larger businesses with specific needs, the Enterprise plan adds features such as heightened security and admin controls. Organizations interested in ChatGPT Enterprise need to contact OpenAI's sales team to discuss pricing.

OpenAI's API gives developers access to the full model lineup. GPT-4o costs $2.50 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, while GPT-4.1 costs $2 per million input tokens and $8 per million output tokens. Other API pricing varies widely by model.

Architecture and performance

Anthropic and OpenAI remain tight-lipped about their models' specific sizes, architectures and training data. Both Claude and ChatGPT are estimated to have hundreds of billions of parameters. A recent paper from Anthropic suggested that Claude 3 has at least 175 billion, and a report by research firm SemiAnalysis estimated that GPT-4 has more than 1 trillion. Both also use transformer-based architectures, enhanced with techniques such as reinforcement learning from human feedback.

To evaluate and compare models, users often turn to benchmark scores and LLM leaderboards, which measure AI language models' performance on various tasks designed to test their capabilities. Anthropic, for example, claimed that Claude 3 surpassed GPT-4 on a series of benchmarks and that its Opus model was the first to outperform GPT-4 on the leaderboard Chatbot Arena, which crowdsources user ratings of popular LLMs.

User-generated rankings, such as Chatbot Arena's, tend to be more objective, but benchmark scores self-reported by AI developers should be evaluated with healthy skepticism. Without detailed disclosures about training data, methodologies and evaluation metrics -- which companies rarely, if ever, provide -- it's challenging to verify performance claims. And the lack of complete public access to the models and their training data makes independently validating and reproducing benchmark results nearly impossible.

Especially in a market as competitive as the AI industry, there's always a risk that companies selectively showcase benchmarks that favor their models while overlooking less impressive results. Direct comparisons are also complicated by the fact that different organizations might evaluate their models using different metrics for factors, including effectiveness and efficient resource use.

Ultimately, Claude and ChatGPT are both advanced chatbots that excel at language comprehension and code generation. Most users will likely find both options effective for most tasks -- particularly the most advanced options, like Claude 4 Opus and GPT-4.5 or o3. But details about models' training data and algorithmic architecture remain largely undisclosed. While this secrecy is understandable given competitive pressures and the potential security risks of exposing too much model information, it also makes it difficult to compare the two directly.

Privacy and security

Anthropic's organizational culture centers on minimizing AI risk and enhancing model safety. The company pioneered the concept of constitutional AI, in which AI systems are trained on a set of foundational principles and rules -- a constitution -- intended to align their actions with human values.

Anthropic doesn't automatically use users' interactions with Claude to retrain the model. Instead, users actively opt in -- note that rating model responses is considered opting in. This could be appealing for businesses looking to use an LLM for workplace tasks while minimizing the exposure of corporate information to third parties.

Claude's responses also tend to be more reserved than ChatGPT's, reflecting Anthropic's safety-centric ethos. Some users found earlier versions of Claude to be overly cautious, declining to engage even with unproblematic prompts, although Anthropic promises that more recent Claude models "refuse to answer harmless prompts much less often." This abundance of caution could be beneficial or limiting, depending on the context; while it reduces the risk of inappropriate and harmful responses, not fulfilling legitimate requests also limits creativity and frustrates users.

Unlike Anthropic, OpenAI retrains ChatGPT on user interactions by default, but it's possible to opt out. One option is to not save chat history, with the caveat that the inability to refer to previous conversations can limit the model's usefulness. Users can also submit a privacy request to ask OpenAI to stop training on their data without sacrificing chat history -- OpenAI doesn't exactly make this process transparent or user-friendly, though. Moreover, privacy requests don't sync across devices or browsers, meaning that users must submit separate requests for their phone, laptop and so on.

Similar to Anthropic, OpenAI implements safety measures to prevent ChatGPT from responding to dangerous or offensive prompts, although user reviews suggest that these protocols are comparatively less stringent. OpenAI has also been more open than Anthropic to expanding its models' capabilities and autonomy with features such as plugins and web browsing.

Additional capabilities

ChatGPT and Claude each have additional functionalities that could be of interest to different users. ChatGPT offers multimodality, internet access and GPTs, while Anthropic offers Artifacts and Projects.

Multimodality

With ChatGPT-4o, users can create images within text chats and refine them through natural language dialogues, albeit with varying degrees of success. ChatGPT also supports voice interactions, enabling users to speak directly with the model as they might with other AI voice assistants.

Claude lacks ChatGPT's extensive multimodal capabilities. Although Claude has sufficient vision capabilities to analyze uploaded files, including images and PDFs, it does not currently support image generation or voice interaction.

Custom GPTs

Another unique ChatGPT feature is GPTs, a no-code way for users to create a customized version of the chatbot for specific tasks, such as summarizing financial documents or explaining biology concepts. Currently, OpenAI offers a selection of GPTs made by OpenAI developers, as well as an app store-like marketplace of user-created GPTs. Although GPTs were formerly available only to paid subscribers, OpenAI released the capability to free users with the launch of GPT-4o.

User ratings of GPTs vary widely, and some GPTs seem primarily designed to funnel users to a company's website and proprietary software. Other GPTs are explicitly designed to bypass plagiarism and AI detection tools -- a practice that seemingly contradicts OpenAI's usage policies, as one analysis highlighted.

While Anthropic doesn't have a direct GPT equivalent, its prompt library has some similarities with the GPT marketplace. Released at roughly the same time as the Claude 3 model series, the prompt library includes a set of "optimized prompts," such as a Python optimizer and a recipe generator, presented in the form of GPT-style persona cards. While Anthropic's prompt library could be a valuable resource for users new to LLMs, it's likely to be less helpful for those with more prompt engineering experience.

Although OpenAI's GPTs and Anthropic's optimized prompts both offer some level of customization, users who want an AI assistant to perform specific tasks on a regular basis might find purpose-built tools more effective. For example, software developers might prefer AI coding tools, such as GitHub Copilot, which offer integrated development environment support. Similarly, for AI-augmented web search, specialized AI search engines, such as Perplexity, could be more efficient than a custom-built GPT.

Artifacts and Projects

Claude Artifacts and Projects were both launched in June 2024. Artifacts are designed to help users work more easily with what Anthropic describes as "significant and standalone content," such as large documents, websites and code. The content in the Artifact is displayed in its own window next to the chat interface.

Users can then update the Artifact content through their conversations with Claude and see the changes made in real time. For example, developers can visualize larger portions of their code and get a preview of the front end in the Artifact window. The Artifact can be copied to the user's clipboard or downloaded for use outside of the Claude interface. Artifacts are available to all users for free.

Projects are designed for team collaboration, functioning as centralized locations multiple users can access with shared chat history and knowledge. Users need some form of paid access, like a Claude Pro or Team plan, to try Projects.

Teams using Projects can upload documents, such as company style guides or codebases, for Claude to use as stored knowledge. They can also add custom instructions, specifying that Claude should respond in a particular tone or giving contextual information about the organization's industry sector.

ChatGPT now offers a very similar Projects feature, released in December 2024. Similar to Claude, ChatGPT users can create projects that centralize chats and files related to a specific topic or task, with the option to add project-specific custom instructions to govern model behavior.

Editor's note: This article was originally written in March 2024 and was most recently updated by the author in June 2025 to reflect updates since the initial publication date, including new models and product features.

Lev Craig covers AI and machine learning as site editor for Informa TechTarget Editorial's SearchEnterpriseAI site. Craig graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in English and has previously written about enterprise IT, software development and cybersecurity.