ChatGPT vs Claude: Which AI Should You Actually Use?

On Super Bowl Sunday, February 8, 2026, Anthropic ran a 30-second spot. Not for Claude itself. For the idea that your AI shouldn't show you ads. "There is a time and place for ads," the broadcast version said. "Your conversations with AI should not be one of them."

The next morning, on February 9, ChatGPT started showing ads to free and Go-tier users.

Sam Altman called Anthropic's campaign "so clearly dishonest." The internet called it prescient. Either way, that one week captures the ChatGPT vs Claude divide better than any benchmark table could. These two companies have different philosophies about what AI should be, and those philosophies show up in their products.

I use both every day. Claude vs ChatGPT isn't a question of which is better. It's a question of what you're doing right now, what you're willing to pay, and what trade-offs you can live with. After thousands of conversations across both platforms, here's where each one actually wins.

The 30-Second Answer (February 2026)

Use Claude if you write for a living, code for a living, or need to think through something complicated. Claude Opus 4.6 (released February 5, 2026) handles 200,000 tokens by default (with a 1 million token beta for heavy users), outputs up to 128,000 tokens in a single response, and produces text that sounds like a person wrote it.

Use ChatGPT if you need images, video, voice mode, or the widest feature set in one app. GPT-5.2 powers three modes (Instant, Thinking, Pro), and OpenAI keeps shipping features faster than anyone can track. Image generation, Sora video, scheduled tasks, custom GPTs, a brand-new $8/month Go tier.

Use both if you're serious. The people getting the best results in 2026 aren't loyal to either platform. They switch based on the task.

Now the details.

Writing: Claude Wins, and the Gap Got Wider

ChatGPT vs Claude for writing is the comparison with the clearest answer. Claude's output sounds human. ChatGPT's output sounds like AI wrote it and then tried to hide the evidence.

GPT-5.2 improved over GPT-4o, but the habits persist. "In today's ever-evolving landscape." "Let's dive in." "Here's the thing." You'll spend ten minutes scrubbing these phrases from every draft. Claude's defaults need less cleanup because the voice is more natural to begin with.

Where the gap widened: Claude now ships custom writing styles. Save a preset for "casual blog voice" or "formal legal brief," and every conversation starts in that mode. ChatGPT has custom instructions, but they're blunter. Claude's style presets apply at the token level. The difference is noticeable.

Claude also handles nuance better. Ask for "professional but warm" and you get professional but warm. Ask ChatGPT for the same thing and you get corporate with an exclamation mark.

Where ChatGPT catches up: bulk content. If you need 50 product descriptions or 100 social media captions, ChatGPT's speed and consistency across large batches still works. Canvas lets you edit documents inline, which is useful for iterative work. And the new $8/month Go tier makes ChatGPT the cheapest option for casual writers who just need a first draft.

Verdict: Claude for anything that needs to sound human on the first draft. ChatGPT for high-volume content where you'll edit anyway.

Coding: The Agent War Changes Everything

A year ago, this section would've compared benchmark scores and called it a day. Not anymore. Something shifted in December 2025, and it changed how developers actually work.

Andrej Karpathy, former Director of AI at Tesla and a founding member of OpenAI, described it bluntly: a "phase shift in software engineering." He said his workflow flipped from 80% manual coding and 20% AI agents to 80% agent coding and 20% edits, in a matter of weeks. He called Claude Code "the first convincing demonstration of what an LLM Agent looks like" and the "biggest change to my basic coding workflow in ~2 decades of programming."

That's not a small claim from someone who built the AI team at Tesla.

Claude Code vs. Codex: Two Different Bets

Claude Code (Anthropic's CLI tool) connects directly to your codebase. It reads your files, writes code, runs your tests, creates commits, and pushes to GitHub. Boris Cherny, who built it at Anthropic, says 100% of his own code is now AI-written. Across the company, Anthropic puts the figure at 70-90%. The tool is on a $2.5 billion annual revenue run rate and accounts for roughly 4% of all public GitHub commits, according to SemiAnalysis (February 6, 2026). Accenture is training 30,000 professionals on it. The average power user spends about $6/day.

OpenAI's answer is Codex, now powered by GPT-5.3-Codex (also released February 5, 2026). Codex takes a different approach. Instead of a CLI in your terminal, it offers four surfaces: a macOS desktop app, a CLI written in Rust (open source), a web interface inside ChatGPT, and IDE extensions for VS Code, Cursor, and JetBrains. The headline feature is autonomous sessions that can run for seven or more hours. OpenAI claims the tool "helped build itself." It scores 77.3% on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and 56.8% on SWE-Bench Pro.

Here's the honest difference. Claude Code is more reliable right now. Developers report that it works on the first try more often, uses 5.5x fewer tokens than Cursor for the same task, and integrates into existing workflows without friction. Jaana Dogan, a principal engineer on Google's Gemini API team, posted that Claude Code built in one hour what her team had spent a year on (a distributed agent orchestrator). Jim VandeHei, the CEO of Axios and self-described "tech dope who knows nothing about coding," built four apps in eight hours on his phone using Claude.

Codex is more ambitious. Those seven-hour autonomous sessions can tackle massive refactoring jobs that Claude Code would break into smaller pieces. But reliability is still catching up. Developers on OpenAI's forums report that longer Codex sessions sometimes hang or crash silently, and the usage limits create confusion about what you're actually paying for.

On raw benchmarks, they're nearly tied. SWE-bench Verified puts Claude Opus 4.5 at 80.9% and GPT-5.2 at 80.0%. The gap is smaller than the noise.

What Karpathy Actually Said

His advice for working with AI coding agents is worth reading in full. The models act like "a slightly sloppy, hasty junior dev." They "really like to overcomplicate code." You need to "watch them like a hawk" for anything important. But he also says programming feels "more fun because a lot of the fill-in-the-blanks drudgery is removed."

His predictions: a "slopacolypse" of AI-generated code in 2026, plus a growing split between code that matters (reviewed carefully) and code that doesn't (generated and shipped without reading it). Whether that excites or terrifies you probably determines which tool you'll pick.

Verdict: Claude Code for daily coding, reliability, and workflow integration. Codex for long autonomous sessions and the OpenAI ecosystem. If you build software for a living, you likely want both, plus Cursor or Copilot on top.

Image and Video: ChatGPT Wins by Default

Claude can't generate images. ChatGPT can, and GPT Image 1 produces genuinely impressive results. Product mockups, social media graphics, diagrams, memes. All without leaving the chat.

Sora adds video generation, included with ChatGPT Plus. Quality varies, but it's there. Claude has nothing comparable.

Claude's counter: it writes better image prompts. If you use Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, Claude's descriptions are more detailed and produce better output. That's a workaround, not a feature.

Verdict: ChatGPT. No contest on visual content.

Research and Analysis: Different Strengths

Both tools search the web. Both process uploaded documents. The difference is in what they do with the results.

Claude is better at synthesis. Upload five research papers and ask for a comparison. Claude will find contradictions, flag methodology differences, and build a structured argument. ChatGPT tends to summarize each paper in order without connecting the dots.

ChatGPT is better at breadth. Its web search is faster, pulls from more sources, and handles live data (stock prices, breaking news, sports scores) more consistently.

Claude's extended thinking (new in Opus 4.6) is worth calling out. When you turn it on, Claude shows its reasoning process and works through problems step by step. For complex analysis, this transparency changes the quality of the output. You can see where the model is uncertain, where it's making assumptions, and where it needs more information.

Verdict: Claude for deep analysis of specific documents. ChatGPT for broad web research and current events.

The Trust Question: Ads, Yes-Men, and Who's Watching

This didn't used to matter for a feature comparison. Now it does.

ChatGPT ads launched February 9, 2026, initially on free and Go-tier users. OpenAI framed it as a way to fund free access. Critics called it the beginning of the end. Zoe Hitzig, an OpenAI research scientist, resigned on February 10, citing the ad rollout. Mark Ruffalo endorsed the QuitGPT movement, which has collected over 200,000 signups. The worry isn't the ads themselves. It's whether ad revenue eventually shapes which answers ChatGPT gives you.

Then there's the yes-man problem. In April 2025, a GPT-4o update caused ChatGPT to agree with almost everything users said. It called a "shit on a stick" business idea genius. In one widely shared case, a user said they'd stopped taking psychiatric medication, and ChatGPT responded "I'm proud of you for speaking your truth." OpenAI rolled the update back within days, but the incident stuck.

Claude isn't immune to issues. It's sometimes too cautious, refusing requests that ChatGPT handles without problems. But Anthropic's positioning is clear: no ads, no marketplace, no third-party GPTs that might introduce misaligned incentives. Whether you find that reassuring or limiting depends on what you value.

The bottom line: if you're using AI for work where accuracy matters (legal, medical, financial), the trust architecture behind the model matters as much as the model itself.

Pricing: A New Tier Changed the Math

ChatGPT's new Go tier ($8/month, launched January 2026) gives you GPT-5.2 access with ads. That's the cheapest paid AI chatbot on the market. If you're a casual user who just wants better-than-free answers, Go is hard to beat on price.

At the $20 level, they match exactly. Both offer full model access. Both have team plans at $30/user/month.

The gap is at the top. ChatGPT Pro costs $200/month for unlimited access to their most powerful reasoning mode. Claude Max starts at $100/month for higher rate limits. Heavy users hit rate limits on both platforms. Claude Max is cheaper when you do.

API pricing favors ChatGPT for most use cases, especially with GPT-4o mini.

Verdict: ChatGPT cheapest at the bottom (Go, $8). Same at $20. Claude cheaper at the top. API cost favors ChatGPT.

Features Gap (February 2026)

ChatGPT has:

• Image generation (GPT Image 1)
• Video generation (Sora)
• Voice mode (multiple voices, camera access on mobile)
• Custom GPTs (build and share specialized chatbots)
• Scheduled tasks ("Every Friday, summarize my week")
• GPT marketplace
• $8/month Go tier
• Codex (7+ hour autonomous coding sessions)

Claude has:

• Artifacts (live code and content previews in chat)
• Custom writing styles (saved tone presets)
• Claude Code (CLI agent for software development)
• 200,000-token context window (1M in beta) vs. 128,000 for GPT-4o
• Extended thinking (visible reasoning process)
• Claude Cowork (AI file and task agent for non-developers, launched January 12, 2026)
• 128,000-token output (Opus 4.6)
• No ads, no marketplace

That context window gap matters more than most people realize. Claude handles roughly 150,000 words by default, with up to 750,000 words in the 1M beta. ChatGPT maxes out around 96,000 words with GPT-4o. If you work with large codebases, legal contracts, or research papers, Claude's extra context means fewer "sorry, that's too long" errors.

The Dark Horse: Gemini 3 Pro

No ChatGPT vs Claude comparison in 2026 is complete without mentioning the third option. Google's Gemini 3 Pro has traded the #1 spot on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena leaderboard with Claude Opus 4.6 throughout early 2026, with both hovering around 1490+ Elo. On any given day, either one tops the blind human preference rankings.

Gemini 3 Pro is strongest at multimodal tasks (mixing text, images, audio, and video in one conversation) and at tasks where Google's search infrastructure gives it a data advantage. It's weakest at the kind of extended writing and coding where Claude excels.

If you're already in the Google ecosystem (Workspace, Android, Chrome), Gemini integrates more naturally than either ChatGPT or Claude. Worth trying, especially on the free tier.

When to Use ChatGPT

• You need images or videos generated
• You want voice conversations on your phone
• You're doing broad web research on current topics
• You want the cheapest paid option ($8/month Go tier)
• You need a custom GPT for a specific workflow
• You want scheduled, recurring AI tasks
• You need long autonomous coding runs (Codex)

When to Use Claude

• You're writing anything that needs to sound human
• You're coding and want reliable, first-try results
• You're analyzing long documents (contracts, codebases, research papers)
• You want to see the AI's reasoning process (extended thinking)
• You care about the ad-free, no-marketplace model
• You need CLI-level codebase integration (Claude Code)
• You're working with documents over 96,000 words (up to 750,000 in beta)

The Honest Answer: Use Both

The "best AI chatbot" question assumes you have to pick one. You don't. $40/month gets you both at full tier. $28/month gets you ChatGPT Go plus Claude Pro. $0 gets you both free tiers, which are enough for casual use.

Here's what that looks like in practice. I write first drafts in Claude because the output needs less editing. I generate images in ChatGPT because Claude can't. I do deep code work with Claude Code in my terminal. I use ChatGPT for quick web lookups and voice mode in the car. I send long documents to Claude because the context window handles them. I use Codex when I need an agent to run for hours on a refactoring job.

The best ChatGPT alternative isn't Claude. The best Claude alternative isn't ChatGPT. The actual answer is to use both for different things.

And if you want prompts that work across both platforms, browse the prompt library. Every prompt there works with ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Good prompts are model-agnostic. The techniques transfer.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Claude better than ChatGPT? For writing and coding, yes. Claude produces more natural text and more reliable code. For image generation, voice mode, video, and feature breadth, ChatGPT wins. For research, it depends on whether you need depth (Claude) or breadth (ChatGPT). Neither is universally better.

Should I switch from ChatGPT to Claude? Don't switch. Add Claude for writing and coding work. Keep ChatGPT for images, voice, and web browsing. The free tiers overlap at zero cost. Full access to both is $40/month.

Is ChatGPT or Claude better for coding in 2026? Claude Code is more reliable for daily development work. Karpathy called it the "first convincing LLM agent" and said it changed his workflow more than anything in twenty years. OpenAI's Codex runs longer autonomous sessions (7+ hours) but has more reliability issues. Most professional developers use both, plus Cursor or GitHub Copilot.

Does ChatGPT have ads now? Yes. As of February 9, 2026, ChatGPT shows ads to free-tier and Go-tier ($8/month) users. Plus ($20/month), Team, and Pro ($200/month) subscribers don't see ads. Claude has no ads on any tier.

Is Claude or ChatGPT more expensive? Same price at $20/month. ChatGPT is cheaper at the bottom ($8/month Go tier vs. no equivalent from Claude). Claude is cheaper at the top ($100/month Max vs. $200/month Pro). API pricing generally favors ChatGPT.

What about Gemini? Google's Gemini 3 Pro trades the #1 spot on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena with Claude Opus 4.6. It's strongest at multimodal tasks and anything that benefits from Google's search data. Weakest at extended writing and coding compared to Claude. Worth trying if you're in the Google ecosystem.

What are the disadvantages of Claude? No image or video generation. No voice mode. No $8/month budget tier. Smaller ecosystem (no GPT marketplace). Stricter rate limits on free and standard tiers. Occasionally refuses requests due to more conservative safety filters.

What are the disadvantages of ChatGPT? Writing still sounds more "AI-generated" than Claude's. Code reliability trails Claude Code in daily use. Ads on free and Go tiers. The April 2025 yes-man incident raised trust questions. The $200/month Pro tier is expensive. Feature overload can be overwhelming if you just want a good text conversation.

Browse the full prompt library