Try both free on the same real task for a week and keep the one you prefer. Use a business plan for anything involving customers. For jobs that must happen every day without anyone typing a prompt, connect AI to your systems instead.
What can ChatGPT and Claude both do for a business?
- Write and rewrite emails, quotes, job ads, website wording and social posts.
- Summarise long emails, documents, contracts and meeting notes into plain points.
- Read spreadsheets and PDFs and answer questions about them.
- Brainstorm: pricing ideas, names, offers, questions to ask a supplier or your accountant.
- Write in Australian English if you ask them to.
What are the main differences?
| ChatGPT | Claude | |
|---|---|---|
| Plans for one person | Free, Go, Plus, Pro | Free, Pro, Max |
| Plans for a team | Business (Standard and Premium seats), Enterprise | Team for 2 to 150 people (Standard and Premium seats), Enterprise |
| Business data | OpenAI says ChatGPT Business data is never used to train its models | Anthropic says Team plans don’t train on your content by default |
| Stand-out extras | Image creation, voice chats, custom GPTs, scheduled tasks | Projects, Claude Code, and Claude for Microsoft 365 and Outlook on Pro |
Checked 30 October 2026 on chatgpt.com/pricing, chatgpt.com/business and claude.com/pricing. Features change often; check before you buy.
How much do ChatGPT and Claude cost in Australia?
- Claude Free: $0.
- Claude Pro: $34 a month billed monthly, or $28 a month billed yearly ($340 up front), as shown to Australian visitors.
- Claude Max: from $170.01 a month, for people who use it all day.
- ChatGPT: the pricing page lists Free, Go, Plus and Pro for individuals, and Business and Enterprise for teams. Prices didn’t load for our check on the day, so we’ve left them out; see chatgpt.com/pricing.
Claude prices as displayed on claude.com/pricing to an Australian visitor on 30 October 2026. Team and Enterprise are priced per seat; check the page for the current figure in your currency.
Which one should a small business choose?
- Your team lives in Outlook and Microsoft 365: Claude Pro includes Claude for Microsoft 365 and Outlook, so it’s worth trying first.
- You want images and voice: ChatGPT has image creation and voice chats built in.
- You mostly write and summarise: both are strong. Give each the same three real tasks and compare.
- More than one person will use it with customer details: pay for the business plan of whichever you pick, and set it up centrally.
What can’t ChatGPT or Claude do on their own?
- They mostly wait for you. Both can run a scheduled task on a timer, like a morning summary, but they don’t start work the moment something happens in your business, like an email arriving or a call being missed.
- They don’t know your customers unless you tell them, every time or through a project you keep up to date.
- They don’t reliably act inside your systems (booking, invoicing, your customer list) without set-up.
- They don’t leave a record in your customer system of what was said and done.
- They can be confidently wrong, so a person still checks anything that matters.
When does a custom system beat ChatGPT or Claude?
When the job happens every day, starts with an event (an email arrives, a call is missed, a quote goes quiet), needs your own information and must leave a record. That’s where AI becomes part of the business, instead of a tab someone has to remember to open.
One example we’re building: a consultant’s email assistant that goes through his inbox at 6am, saves draft replies in his own voice into his Outlook Drafts folder and lists the to-dos for each client. It uses Claude to write, but it can never send anything without him. Read the write-up.
