Anthropic, the AI startup behind the Claude AI Chatbot, has announced the release of Claude Pro, a paid tier of the company’s free-to-use Claude AI. The Claude AI free tier is quite capable and even outdoes the ChatGPT free-to-use tier in many ways.
But ChatGPT Plus, which uses the all-powerful GPT-4 language model, has more capabilities and a much more extensive feature set. So, with the arrival of Claude Pro, how does Claude Pro compare to ChatGPT Plus?
What Is Claude Pro?
Claude AI’s free tier is already enjoying massive adoption. The AI chatbot is clocking millions of monthly users despite being limited to only two countries. It is evidently good enough to be adopted by large companies like Quora, who have made it available on their Poe AI platform.
But there’s an interesting twist. ChatGPT and Claude AI take different approaches to their free and paid tiers. With ChatGPT, the free tier is limited to GPT-3.5, while paid users get access to both GPT-3.5 and the more advanced GPT-4. Claude AI, on the other hand, uses the same Claude 2 model for both its free and paid tiers. So, what’s the incentive to go Pro with Claude?
How Is Claude Pro Different from Claude?
If you are a frequent Claude AI user, there’s a good chance you’ve run into usage limits. This hardly ever happened in the early days of the free tier, but it seems to be happening more often.
It’s not entirely clear whether this is a result of increased usage as more users join or intentional restrictions aimed at pushing users to paid plans. Irrespective of the reason, the paid tier promises to solve this problem by increasing the usage limit to as much as five times what the free tier offers.
For power users who want to avoid disruptions and delays, the expanded usage quota incentivizes upgrading to Claude Pro. The paid tier enables productive reliance on Claude AI regardless of traffic spikes or any intentional limitations of the free version.
Also, like ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro promises early access to new features and updates. But beyond this and a few more usage options, the differences between the free and paid tiers are not very pronounced right now. However, just like ChatGPT Plus, we expect Anthropic to make progressive and incremental changes to Claude Pro over time.
How Much Does Claude Pro Cost?
Like ChatGPT Plus, a Claude Pro subscription will set you back $20 per month (£18 in the UK). The pricing puts Claude Pro in direct competition with ChatGPT Plus.
How Does Claude Pro Compare to ChatGPT Plus?
With $20 to spend, should you get a subscription to ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro?
Well, while ChatGPT’s GPT-4 model continues to be the top dog in the AI chatbot space, Claude AI’s Claude 2 model is not too far behind. In fact, beyond sheer model capabilities and ChatGPT’s use of plugins, there are severalways that Claude AI outperforms ChatGPT.
One of the most important advantages of the Claude AI model is its significantly larger context window, which currently stands at around 100,000 tokens, a far cry from ChatGPT’s average 4,096 token context window.
This means Claude can handle many more input and output variables in a conversation than you can do with ChatGPT Plus. Also, while ChatGPT’s GPT-4 model has message caps ranging between 25 and 200 messages per three hours, you’ll find Claude Pro significantly more generous. There’s a good chance that you might never run into the message caps on Claude Pro, even if you are among the heaviest users of the service.
For a general sense of how ChatGPT and Claude AI compare, you can check out thisdetailed comparison of ChatGPT and Claude AI.
Claude Pro Is Welcomed Competition
Anthropic’s Claude Pro subscription plan may not be the most value-packed offering in the AI chatbot market, but it has immense potential. If Anthropic pushes its Claude AI model’s strengths, nothing will stop it from going toe to toe with ChatGPT Plus for market share.
For now, Claude Pro is an uncut diamond, but with the right honing, Anthropic could shape it into a true gem that gives ChatGPT Plus a run for its money.
