Claude Pro vs. ChatGPT Plus: Which AI chatbot is better for you?

The race to dominate the burgeoning market for sophisticated artificial intelligence chatbots intensified last week as the startup Anthropic introduced a subscription version of its conversational AI assistant, Claude.ai.

The new service, called Claude Pro, offers users faster and more reliable access to the Claude chatbot during peak hours, as well as exclusive features that are not available in the free version. The subscription fee is $20 a month, the same price that OpenAI charges for its premium chatbot service, ChatGPT Plus.

Both companies are vying for the attention and loyalty of millions of eager users who have been captivated by the ability of modern chatbots to engage in natural and intelligent conversations on a wide range of topics, from politics and philosophy to sports and entertainment. The chatbots can also provide assistance on various tasks and challenges, such as writing, learning, and personal development.

But how do these two subscription chatbot services compare? Should you stick to the free versions? Which one of the two offers more value for money? Which one performs better in terms of accuracy, coherence, and creativity? And which one has more unique and useful features that can enhance the user experience? In this article, we will try to answer these questions by providing a detailed and unbiased comparison of ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro, the two leading artificial intelligence chatbot services on the market today.

The Basics: ChatGPT Plus vs. Claude Pro

Both services are based on large language models (LLMs), which are powerful neural networks that can generate natural language texts from a given input or prompt. These models are trained on massive amounts of text data from the internet, and can learn to mimic different styles and genres of writing. They can also answer questions, summarize texts, translate languages, and generate original content.

However, there are also significant differences between the LLMs that each service uses. ChatGPT Plus is based on GPT-4, a model with an estimated 1.76 trillion parameters, significantly more than any other model, which in theory should make it more knowledgable. GPT-4 is known for excelling at tasks that require advanced reasoning, complex instruction understanding, and creativity. It also has access to a more comprehensive set of online text data, which enables it to produce more diverse and relevant outputs.

Alternatively, Claude Pro uses the newly released Claude 2 language model. Claude 2 is known for its ability to take in and understand very large amounts of text, up to 75,000 words at once — for example, it is able to summarize entire novels in just a few seconds. Claude 2 is also built to be more safe and aligned with human values than GPT-4, because of its use of constitutional AI, a method that trains a chatbot to follow a set of principles or rules that define what is acceptable or unacceptable behavior for the chatbot. These principles are provided by the human creators of the chatbot, and are intended to reflect the ethical and social norms of the intended users.

There are many other significant differences between ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro in terms of how they operate, what they offer, and how they interact with users. Here are just a few of the other main points of comparison:

• Free versions: Both ChatGPT and Claude have free versions that anyone can use online without paying anything. These versions allow users to interact with the chatbots, albeit with limited capabilities. The free versions are a great way to test the chatbots and get a sense of their capabilities and personalities. However, they also have critical limitations that would prevent us from recommending the free versions in any business setting, such as slow response times and lower quality outputs. For example, the free version of ChatGPT uses an older language model — GPT 3.5 — to deliver responses.
• APIs: Both ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro provide application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable developers and businesses to integrate the chatbots into their own applications or platforms. The APIs allow users to customize the chatbots’ behavior and functionality according to their specific needs and preferences. For example, users can fine-tune the chatbots’ parameters to control their creativity. The APIs also provide access to advanced features such as domain adaptation, which allows users to train the chatbots on their own data sets.
• Pricing: Both ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro charge $20 a month for unlimited access to their chatbots online or via their APIs. It’s important to note that neither ChatGPT Plus nor Claude Pro charge additional fees based on the number of tokens (i.e. letters and words) generated or consumed. Therefore, the cost-effectiveness of each service depends more on the specific features and capabilities that meet the person’s needs, rather than the number of tokens or requests.
• Performance: Both ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro have state-of-the-art performance in terms of generating natural and coherent texts. Of course, there is no definitive way to measure the performance of each model objectively, as different people may have different expectations and preferences for what constitutes a good conversation or output. Moreover, both chatbots are constantly being updated and improved by their respective teams, so their performance may vary over time. Therefore, the best way to evaluate their performance is to try them out yourself and see which one suits your needs and tastes better. Based on VentureBeat’s own assessment, ChatGPT Plus is more slightly creative and Claude Pro is better at summarizing large amounts of text.
• Features: Both ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro offer a set of unique and distinctive features that set them apart from each other — but at the time that this article was published, ChatGPT Plus had a clear advantage in the number of features it offered. That is mainly because ChatGPT Plus offers plugins. These plugins are essentially apps designed specifically for language models with safety as a core principle, and they help ChatGPT access up-to-date information, run computations, and use third-party services. Some of the first plugins have been created by Expedia, Instacart, Kayak, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Wolfram, and Zapier. They allow people to perform actions like making travel arrangements, reserving a table at a restaurant, ordering food delivery, applying for a job, playing a game, tracking diet, or learning a new language all directly from the ChatGPT Plus interface.

The Verdict:

In conclusion, the choice between ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro is largely a matter of personal preference and specific needs. Both provide high-quality conversational AI experiences, with unique features and strengths.

ChatGPT Plus, with its larger model, excels in creativity and complex reasoning, supplemented by a wide array of plugins for diverse tasks. On the other hand, Claude Pro stands out for its ability to comprehend and summarize large volumes of text rapidly, along with its constitutional AI design for improved alignment with human values.

The pricing for both is identical, and each offers a free version for initial experimentation. As the landscape of AI chatbots continues to evolve, the competition between these two giants serves to push the boundaries of what’s possible, offering users increasingly sophisticated and useful tools for communication, learning, and productivity. Ultimately, the best way to decide between them is to try both and see which one better meets your personal or business needs.