If you've been using ChatGPT for a while and it's lately been feeling like more work than it's worth, you're not alone. The editing gets heavier, the outputs start to feel same-same, and troubleshooting anything technical can turn into an hour of being sent in circles by a AI hallucinations.
That's where we landed after months of daily use. We'd done the work to set ChatGPT up properly, and it still wasn't performing. So we switched to Claude, and we've been moving the whole team across. Here's what we found.
It Wasn't One Big Moment
There was no single catastrophic failure, just a steady accumulation of small things that made staying feel harder than moving on.
We'd built out custom GPTs with full brand guidelines loaded in, but outputs were still landing with that recognisable AI tone. More time was being spent editing than we were saving. Anything requiring long context or deeper thinking kept going off track. We'd have to re-explain earlier points, pull the conversation back on course, and sometimes start over entirely.
There were also issues with the consistency across large documents. In one instance when we used ChatGPT to summarise a large file, it quietly skipped the second half. It didn't flag that it couldn't handle the length. It just ignored it, and we only caught it because we were checking the output. That's a real risk if you're relying on a summary to actually reflect the full document.
The clearest sign something wasn't working: when you realise you're spending more time editing the AI's output than it would've taken to do the task yourself, the tool isn't helping anymore.
What Claude Does Differently
Before committing, we ran a side-by-side test. Same prompt, same context, both tools open at once. Claude's outputs were closer to our brand voice from the start, needed less editing, and didn't carry that AI-generated quality we'd been fighting against in ChatGPT.
A few things stood out straight away:
It actually follows instructions. Claude picks up context with less prompting and is able to hold conversations without drifting. You don't have to keep dragging it back to what you said at the beginning.
It's more honest about uncertainty. All AI tools hallucinate to some degree, but Claude is more likely to flag when it's unsure rather than pushing confidently ahead with a wrong answer. ChatGPT had sent us around in circles for over an hour on automation troubleshooting before eventually conceding the approach was never going to work. Claude resolved the same issues in minutes.
The tone is less performative. ChatGPT can read as though it's trying very hard to be agreeable, which tips into cheesy and over-the-top. Claude is more neutral.
It produces formatted documents inside the chat. Claude has a feature called artifacts that builds actual formatted documents, spreadsheets, and interactive content within the conversation. Instead of getting a wall of text to copy somewhere else, you get something much closer to a finished output.
Claude Projects vs Custom GPTs
If you've built custom GPTs in ChatGPT, the biggest upgrade you'll find in Claude is the projects feature.
A project is a dedicated workspace. You upload your documents, brand guides, tone of voice notes, and client information, and Claude carries all of that context across every conversation within that project. You're not re-explaining yourself every time you open a new chat.
The difference in capacity is significant. Custom GPTs allow around 8,000 characters for instructions. That sounds like a lot until you try to build something genuinely detailed and useful — then it runs out fast. Claude projects have no meaningful character limit that anyone has hit yet. We've seen people reporting project instructions exceeding 300,000 characters and still going.
If you've already built out a custom GPT, that work isn't wasted. You can take the brand context, instructions, and prompting logic and put it straight into a Claude project without starting from scratch.
How to Try It Without Starting Over
The free version of Claude is worth testing before you commit to anything. You won't have access to the more advanced thinking models, and there are limits on how many messages you can send, but it's more than enough to get a genuine sense of whether the outputs suit your work.
The pro plan is around $20 USD per month — roughly the same as ChatGPT Plus. If you're already paying for ChatGPT, switching is a direct cost swap, not an added expense.
A useful shortcut: take an existing ChatGPT conversation, ask ChatGPT to summarise it, and use that summary as your starting prompt in Claude. It saves you rebuilding from scratch and gives you a direct comparison straight away.
If the outputs feel better immediately, that's your answer. And if AI has been frustrating you and you've been putting it down to your prompting, it might genuinely just be the tool.
Where To Go From Here
Test it with something real - a task you'd normally do this week. See how much editing the output needs. See whether it holds your instructions without being corrected multiple times.
If you'd like help working out how AI tools like Claude could fit into your business, book a call with us today, or listen to episode 54 of the Get Savvy podcast - 'We Ditched ChatGPT' below.
