The depth-first thinker vs the Swiss Army knife. A different angle on the most popular AI comparison.
| Feature | Claude | ChatGPT |
|---|---|---|
| Reasoning Depth | Industry-leading Winner | Very good |
| Context Window | 200K tokens Winner | 128K tokens |
| Writing Quality | Excellent, natural Winner | Good, sometimes generic |
| Coding | Excellent Winner | Very good |
| Image Generation | Not available | DALL-E 3 built in Winner |
| Web Browsing | Limited search | Full browsing Winner |
| Plugin Ecosystem | Projects, MCP | GPT Store (massive) Winner |
| File Analysis | PDFs, images, code | PDFs, images, data, spreadsheets Winner |
| Safety | Industry-leading Winner | Good |
| Free Tier | Daily message limits | GPT-4o mini unlimited Winner |
Claude for quality: better reasoning, writing, and coding output. ChatGPT for quantity: more features, integrations, and ecosystem. Professionals who care about output quality lean Claude; those who need versatility lean ChatGPT.