I set businesses up on Claude, so you can guess where this ends. But I'd rather you understood why, and the honest answer is that for most small businesses the choice of tool matters far less than what you do with it in the first week.
Start with what doesn't matter
Benchmarks. Model version numbers. Which one “won” this month. If you run a six-person business, none of that changes whether Tuesday looks different. Both tools will write a good customer email, summarise a contract, draft a job ad, and fix a spreadsheet formula. Both will occasionally be confidently wrong. Both need a human to read what they wrote before it goes anywhere.
Anyone who tells you one is dramatically better for “business” in general is selling something. Including me. So here's what I'd actually look at.
1. Can you give it your business once, and have it remember?
This is the whole game. Both tools now have some way to store standing instructions and documents so you're not re-explaining yourself every time. In Claude that's Projects plus custom instructions; ChatGPT has its own equivalents.
What matters isn't whether the feature exists. It's whether anyone in your business will sit down and fill it in. In my experience that's the step nearly everyone skips, on either tool, and it's the step that decides whether the thing gets used.
2. How does it sound?
This one is genuinely subjective, so test it yourself. Take three real emails you sent and were happy with. Paste them into each tool with the same instruction: “match this tone, then reply to this new enquiry”. Read both replies out loud.
My own experience, and the reason I lean on Claude, is that it tends to write in a more natural, less salesy register out of the box, and it takes a plain instruction like “shorter, less formal, no exclamation marks” without fuss. Plenty of people prefer the other. Ten minutes with your own emails will tell you more than any article.
3. What happens to what you paste in?
For a business this is the question that should decide it, and the answer differs by plan and changes over time, so I won't quote specifics that may be out of date by the time you read this. Do this instead: before you sign up, read the current data-use terms for the business tier of whichever tool you pick, not the free consumer one. Then set a simple rule for the team. Mine is: treat it like a new employee on day one. A customer email is fine. A spreadsheet of everyone's bank details is not.
4. What does it cost per person?
Similar enough that it shouldn't be the deciding factor. Check the current pricing pages rather than trusting a blog post. What's more useful to work out is the cost of not setting it up: if one person spends five hours a week on writing that could take one, the subscription pays for itself in the first day of the month.
5. Will you actually use it?
Pick the one you find pleasant. Seriously. The tool you open without thinking beats the tool that's theoretically better. If your team already lives in a particular suite, that's a legitimate tiebreaker too.
So why Claude?
Three honest reasons. It writes the way I want a small business to sound. Its project set-up maps cleanly onto how a small business actually works: replies, quotes, marketing, internal. And I know it inside out, which means when I train a team I can get them to a good place in a day rather than a fortnight.
None of those are reasons for you to choose it if the ten-minute email test goes the other way. What I'd push back on hard is the idea that the choice is the important decision. It isn't. The important decision is whether anyone in the business is going to spend a day setting it up properly, and if not, who you get to do it.
If you want to see what “set up properly” looks like, here's how I build the four projects on every Kickstart. You can do it yourself from that.
Vantage AI Solutions is an independent consultancy and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Anthropic. Claude is a trademark of Anthropic, PBC. ChatGPT is a trademark of OpenAI.