When Claude first launched, it was easy to lump it in with ChatGPT and Gemini. And, some people unknowingly still do that. But over the past year, Anthropic has steadily expanded Claude from a conversational assistant into something closer to an AI workspace.
It can build working software, search the web, run multi-step research projects, produce polished documents, write and ship code from your terminal and connect to the apps you already use. Some of these features are available on the free plan. Most get significantly more powerful on a paid one.
