This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Alex Cohen, a 42-year-old CEO and founder of Xander Marketing, based in Kent, UK. This story has been edited for length and clarity.
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I started using ChatGPT in December 2022. When I tried Claude about 10 months later, it was mostly out of curiosity.
Even early on, there was a clear difference. Claude has always been a better writer, in my opinion. I run a small marketing firm, and we write a lot of content for brands. When I gave both systems the same prompt with context, Claude got it closer to what I envisioned the first time.
That started to change how we work. Last year was when I really started predominantly using Claude. It doesn’t feel like a chatbot. It feels like an entire operating system.
At this point, we work with Claude for 80% to 90% of our usage, and maybe 5% each for Gemini and ChatGPT.
It was a gradual switch, but now my company does almost everything with Claude
My company saw right away that Claude could capture our client’s brand voice and place it into content better than ChatGPT. So, we started using Claude for a lot of our writing content, but we kept using ChatGPT.
The one thing we still consistently use ChatGPT for is image generation, since Claude doesn’t generate photos or illustrations. I built a co-CEO in the projects tool in Claude as my sounding board for strategy help, so I only occasionally use ChatGPT for strategy or as a backup.
Slowly, I began to prefer Claude’s output. It asked me more questions, pushing back on my prompts rather than always agreeing with me, as I’ve found ChatGPT does.
Claude feels more like talking to a human instead of just telling me what I want to hear. It’s changed my business a lot. Content that we would’ve previously given to a copywriter, I now trust to do directly with Claude.
The biggest operational difference was that Claude’s features, like the projects and skills, allowed me to reuse context across chats, and that’s when it became central to how we work.
ChatGPT had an early advantage
When AI first went mainstream, I only thought of ChatGPT when AI was mentioned. Now there are more choices.
As Claude keeps introducing more updates to its projects and skills, it feels like ChatGPT is playing catch-up. I think it’s easier to set up and use projects and skills in Claude. With skills, especially, I’ve already built my operating system in Claude.
One of the best things we did was build a human writing skill into Claude to remove overused AI phrases that we flag. It gets closer on the first try, so we’re not going back and forth, prompting as much and burning through tokens.
Some things ChatGPT can do, like making an ROI calculator, or vibecoding a website or app, I didn’t start doing until I used Claude.
Read more from our Tiny Teams series for an inside look at how small teams use AI to do big things
I’ve kept my ChatGPT subscription as a backup for when Claude goes down
Besides using ChatGPT for images, I also switch over when Claude has an outage or experiences issues. It feels like Claude goes down fairly regularly, which is frustrating, but it also makes me realize how much I rely on it when it’s gone.
I have some projects and workflows built into ChatGPT, but I’ve tailored Claude more extensively to work the way I need it to.
Occasionally, even if Claude isn’t down, I’ll run the same question through both Claude and ChatGPT to compare answers. I still use ChatGPT in my personal life, but for business use, I trust Claude to challenge me more.
ChatGPT, on the other hand, seems to get me answers faster than Claude.
I think Claude could win the enterprise space
I’ve spoken to a lot of people who use ChatGPT and have also gone to Claude for a business use case. That’s key if it’s happening on a larger scale.
It seems like the big money play for these huge AI companies will be winning the enterprise space, and for me, Claude is the winner at this stage.
At the same time, we’re thinking about how to structure files and workflows so they can be moved between platforms if something better comes along.
Do you have a story to share about which AI tool you prefer? Contact this reporter, Agnes Applegate, at aapplegate@businessinsider.com.
