I used ChatGPT for a long time before deciding to switch to Claude. However, I found that when it came time to cancel ChatGPT, I couldn’t do it. Both Claude and ChatGPT have their own strengths and weaknesses, so currently, I’m still paying for both.
Claude wins for planning and connectors
Best for local MCP servers
Claude’s connectors are the reason I can’t go back to using ChatGPT alone. Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard developed by Anthropic that allows AI chatbots to connect to external services. Using Claude’s native connectors, you can connect Claude to a huge range of popular services, such as GitHub, Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, Spotify, Todoist, and more.
Using these tools, you can read from and often write to the connected services. For example, I use Notion to organize my work and personal life, and using Claude, I can read anything from my Notion pages and write brand new pages just by telling Claude what I want to add.
ChatGPT has its own similar feature called apps, with a lot of popular services. However, I could never get the Notion app to work properly, while with Claude, it works flawlessly.
The biggest difference, however, is that Claude Desktop can use local MCP servers to connect to services you’re running on your own hardware, such as the n8n automation platform. Claude can talk to my n8n server over my local network, whereas ChatGPT’s apps and MCP-style connections generally rely on hosted endpoints rather than direct localhost access.
I use connectors all the time with Claude; every project I work on in Claude gets written up in Notion. Claude can then access that information at any time if I want to make changes or work on a similar project that can build on a previous one.
ChatGPT wins for proofreading and research
Claude can’t access some useful resources
If Claude’s connectors are so good, why didn’t I just stick with Claude and cancel ChatGPT? The reason is that there are some things that Claude can’t do as well as ChatGPT, and some other things that it can’t do at all.
I use Home Assistant a lot, and a lot of useful information can be found on Reddit. Often, the solution to a problem I’m having is mentioned somewhere in a Reddit post. Using ChatGPT, I could search for and find these solutions with ease.
With Claude, this isn’t the case. Reddit has multi-million-dollar deals with Google and OpenAI that give Gemini and ChatGPT licensed access to Reddit content through Reddit’s Data API. This helps explain why ChatGPT can be better at finding that one Reddit post halfway through a thread that solves your problem.
Anthropic has no such licensing deal with Reddit, so it doesn’t have direct access to the site’s content. This makes Claude far less effective at surfacing Reddit discussions and finding specific forum posts.
In my experience, ChatGPT is also better at proofreading. As someone who writes for a living, using ChatGPT to help proofread and fact-check my work has been really useful. When I tried the same with Claude, it was far less thorough and regularly missed issues that ChatGPT spotted.
Even with careful prompting, I wasn’t able to get Claude to match ChatGPT’s accuracy for proofreading and fact-checking, so I’m back to using ChatGPT for this purpose. It’s something I use multiple times per day, and one of the biggest reasons why I can’t let ChatGPT go.
Claude found 50 GB of junk on my PC in 5 minutes—junk that BleachBit had missed
Claude found 50 GB of junk my disk cleaner missed—and it only took it 5 minutes.
Both are excellent for coding
Using them together can pay dividends
Having two AI subscriptions is not as mad as it sounds. Both Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex are excellent coding tools that allow you to build impressive projects just using natural language prompts. Both Claude Code and Codex can produce impressive results by themselves.
However, both can be a little better in different areas. For example, you might prefer to use ChatGPT as the architect and researcher for your project and use Claude Code to handle the implementation. You can then pass what Claude creates back into Codex to look for flaws or things that can be improved.
There are other benefits to each option, such as context window size, deep reasoning, and tool integration. By using both Claude and ChatGPT together, you may end up with a better result than either would have reached alone.
Paying for both doesn’t make sense for everyone
You may not get $40 of value
I use AI tools daily for both work and personal projects. The time that Claude and ChatGPT save me makes it worth paying $40 per month to keep both subscriptions. This won’t be true for everyone, however.
If you’re only a light user of AI chatbots, you can probably get by just using the free tiers. While these have fairly tight limits when using the more powerful models, they can be fine for casual use.
Even if you use an AI chatbot a lot, you may not get any real benefit from paying for two subscriptions. It’s only if you want to take advantage of the strengths of both Claude and ChatGPT that it makes sense. If features such as Reddit results or local MCP access aren’t important to you, then either chatbot alone should be fine.
I never planned to keep both subscriptions
I hate paying for subscriptions. I was intending to cancel ChatGPT at the end of my monthly payment cycle after I moved to Claude. In the end, however, it still felt worth the price to get the best features of both products.