ChatGPT vs Claude
Two product families, side by side — subscriptions, API pricing, and which one to reach for.
The short answer
Claude leads on raw capability — its strongest model, Claude Fable 5, posts the higher combined coding and reasoning score in this comparison. ChatGPT is the cheaper way in: GPT-5.6 Luna blends to $0.50 per million tokens, which is what matters once you are running volume rather than evaluating. ChatGPT offers the wider context window at 1.05M tokens. Most teams end up using both — one for the hard problems, one for everything else.
ChatGPT
OpenAI's consumer product and the most widely used AI assistant. Strongest on multimodal breadth — voice, image generation, browsing, and agent tooling all ship in the same subscription. The API line-up spans a full frontier-to-budget ladder on one 1.05M-token context.
- API models
- 6
- Max context
- 1.05M
Claude
Anthropic's assistant, favoured for long-document work, writing quality, and agentic coding. The API family runs from an always-thinking frontier model down to a fast extraction tier, with a 1M context window across the current generation.
- API models
- 5
- Max context
- 1M
Subscriptions
What ChatGPT and Claude charge a person per month.
The paid tiers land at $20/month for ChatGPT and $20/month for Claude. At that price the deciding factor is rarely raw intelligence — both clear the bar for everyday work. It is the surrounding features and the usage ceiling that differ, so pick on what you actually hit limits doing.
ChatGPT
- ChatGPT FreeFree
- ChatGPT Plus$20/mo
- ChatGPT Pro$200/mo
Claude
- Claude FreeFree
- Claude Pro$20/mo
- Claude Max$100/mo
Plan prices last verified 2026-07-21.
API pricing, tier by tier
ChatGPT and Claude line-ups matched by capability tier.
| Tier | ChatGPT | Claude |
|---|---|---|
| Flagship | GPT-5.6 Sol$5.00 / $30.00 per 1M in / out | Claude Fable 5$10.00 / $50.00 per 1M in / out |
| Mid-range | GPT-5.6 Terra$2.00 / $12.00 per 1M in / out | Claude Sonnet 5$3.00 / $15.00 per 1M in / out |
| Budget | GPT-5.6 Luna$0.20 / $1.20 per 1M in / out | Claude Haiku 4.5$1.00 / $5.00 per 1M in / out |
At 10M + 2M tokens a month — a realistic mid-size production workload — the cheapest option from ChatGPT (GPT-5.6 Luna) runs about $4.40, against roughly $20.00 for Claude's Claude Haiku 4.5. Run your own numbers on the calculator before committing: the mix of input to output tokens moves this more than the headline price does.
Which one to pick
- For the hardest reasoning and long agentic runs: Claude, specifically Claude Fable 5.
- For high-volume production where cost dominates: ChatGPT, specifically GPT-5.6 Luna at $0.50 blended per million tokens.
- For whole-repository or long-document work: ChatGPT, with up to 1.05M tokens of context.
Model-level comparisons
The brand answer is a summary. These pages compare the specific ChatGPT and Claude models against each other with full benchmark and cost breakdowns.