Club Benefits
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Want to add more newsletters?
Daily (Mon-Sun)
Tom's Guide Daily
Sign up to get the latest updates on all of your favorite content! From cutting-edge tech news and the hottest streaming buzz to unbeatable deals on the best products and in-depth reviews, we’ve got you covered.
Weekly on Thursday
Tom's AI Guide
Be AI savvy with your weekly newsletter summing up all the biggest AI news you need to know. Plus, analysis from our AI editor and tips on how to use the latest AI tools!
Weekly on Friday
Tom's iGuide
Unlock the vast world of Apple news straight to your inbox. With coverage on everything from exciting product launches to essential software updates, this is your go-to source for the latest updates on all the best Apple content.
Weekly on Monday
Tom's Streaming Guide
Our weekly newsletter is expertly crafted to immerse you in the world of streaming. Stay updated on the latest releases and our top recommendations across your favorite streaming platforms.
Join the club
Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards.
ChatGPT has become a household name. In fact, I've even noticed it to be interchangeable with "AI" itself — and with good reason; it was first to market and it’s genuinely useful. It's often a person's first look at what a chatbot can do.
But if you’ve never tried Anthropic’s Claude, you’re leaving serious capabilities on the table. I’ve been testing both tools extensively, and there are specific areas where Claude doesn’t just match ChatGPT — it flat-out beats it.
These aren’t subtle differences you need a benchmark to notice. They’re the kind of things that make you wonder why you’ve been doing it any other way.
1. Artifacts: Interactive creations, right in the chat
Ask ChatGPT to build you a quick web app, a data visualization or an interactive tool, and you’ll get a block of code you need to copy, paste into a file and open in a browser. Ask Claude the same thing, and it generates a live, interactive Artifact right inside the conversation. This was a total gamechanger for me.
Artifacts are genuinely magical the first time you see them. You can ask Claude to create a mortgage calculator, a Mermaid diagram, an SVG illustration, a React component or even a small game — and it appears as a fully functional, interactive panel alongside the chat. No setup, no IDE, no developer tools required.
What makes this especially powerful is the iteration loop. You can say “make the chart blue instead of green” or “add a dark mode toggle” and Claude updates the Artifact in real time. It’s like having a front-end developer on call who works in seconds. It can handle just about anything you throw at it — just prompt it.
ChatGPT has its Canvas feature, which is useful for editing text and code side by side — but it’s not the same thing. Artifacts let you build and use things, not just look at them.
2. Real file creation: Polished documents on demand
This one is a game-changer for anyone who works with documents. Claude can generate fully formatted Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets and PDFs — and hand them to you as downloadable files.
That's right, no more copying/pasting. Claude produces properly styled documents with headings, tables, page numbers and professional formatting. Need a pitch deck for a meeting tomorrow? Claude will build you a real .pptx file with designed slides. Need to turn messy notes into a formatted report? Done, as a .docx you can open in Word and edit.
ChatGPT can generate files too, but in practice, the output tends to be more basic. Claude’s file creation feels like it was designed to replace an actual workflow step, not just demonstrate a capability.
3. Writing quality: Less “AI voice,” more you
You know the “AI voice.” The one with the unnecessary adverbs, the hollow enthusiasm, the lists of five things where three would do? ChatGPT has gotten better about this, but it still defaults to a particular register that’s instantly recognizable as machine-generated.
Claude’s writing is noticeably more natural. It’s better at matching tone — casual when you want casual, formal when you need formal, technical when you’re working through a problem. It doesn’t pad responses with filler or repeat your question back to you before answering it. Oh, and my personal favorite? It doesn't ask a follow-up question with every response.
Where this really shines is in longer-form writing. Blog posts, reports, emails, creative fiction — Claude’s output requires less editing to sound like something a human actually wrote. It’s also better at following specific style instructions. Tell Claude “write this in the style of a New Yorker profile” and you’ll get something that actually reads like one, not a generic article with a literary adjective sprinkled on top.
Anthropic also recently introduced a style feature that lets you customize Claude’s default writing voice. You can upload samples of your own writing and Claude will match your style going forward. It’s a small thing that makes a big difference if you use AI for writing regularly.
4. Instruction following: It actually does what you ask
This sounds basic, but it’s one of the most frustrating things about working with AI: you give it a detailed, multi-part prompt with specific constraints and it subtly ignores half of them.
Claude is significantly better at following complex instructions. If you say “write me a 500-word summary, use only data from the attached PDF, format it as three sections with headers, and don’t include any speculation,” Claude will hit all of those requirements. Give this a try and you'll notice right away a big difference.
You might notice that ChatGPT sometimes drifts. Maybe it’ll write 800 words, maybe it’ll add context from its training data, maybe it’ll reorganize your sections. But, it won't do everything I ask.
This matters enormously for professional use. When you’re working with an AI as a tool in a real workflow — not just casually chatting — you need it to be precise. Claude’s reliability with complex prompts means less time re-prompting and editing and more time actually getting things done.
5. Honesty and transparency: It tells you when it doesn’t know
ChatGPT is known to hallucinate — that is, it sometimes makes things up with complete confidence. But there’s a meaningful difference in how they handle uncertainty, and this is where Claude stands apart.
Claude is more likely to flag when it’s unsure. It’ll say things like “I’m not confident about this specific detail” or “this is my best understanding, but you should verify.” ChatGPT tends to present information with uniform confidence whether it’s drawing from solid training data or filling in gaps.
This makes Claude a safer tool for research, fact-checking and any task where accuracy matters more than speed. You’re less likely to unknowingly pass along bad information because Claude gave you a heads-up that it might be wrong. In a world where AI-generated misinformation is a growing concern, this kind of epistemic humility isn’t just a nice feature — it’s essential.
The bottom line
ChatGPT is still an excellent tool, and for some tasks — image generation, voice mode, its ecosystem of GPTs — it has its own advantages. But the narrative that ChatGPT is the clear default and everything else is playing catch-up? That’s outdated.
Claude has carved out real, practical advantages in the areas that matter most for getting actual work done: creating things, writing well, following directions and being honest about its limits.
If you haven’t given it a serious try, you might just be missing out on a better way to work.
Follow Tom's Guide on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds.
More from Tom's Guide
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
