ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini: which should your business pay for?

For most small businesses the answer depends on where your work already happens. If your team lives in Gmail and Google Docs, start with Gemini through Google Workspace. If you write a lot of long documents, proposals or reports, try Claude first. If you want one all-rounder with the most features and the biggest add-on ecosystem, go with ChatGPT. The paid plans cost much the same, about $20 a month for one person and $20–25 a seat for a team, so price rarely decides it.

Below are the plans and prices as of 19 October 2026, what each tool is best at, and a 30-minute test so you can decide with your own work rather than someone else’s benchmark. Prices are in US dollars from each vendor’s own pricing page. UK and other regional prices are set separately, so check the page in your country before you buy.

What changed in the last month?

All three vendors shipped new models within three weeks of each other, so any comparison written before late September is already out of date.

• OpenAI released GPT-6 on 7 October. Paid ChatGPT plans get GPT-6 Sol and Free and Go get the lighter GPT-6 Luna. It came with “Intelligent UI”, where answers can include charts, buttons, forms and small interactive tools instead of plain text.
• Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 on 22 September, followed by Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5. Anthropic says Opus 5.5 costs about 40% less to run than Opus 5 and raised the five-hour usage limits on Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise. Those are the vendor’s claims; we haven’t tested them.
• Google brought Gemini 4 Argon to the Gemini app on 13 October for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, along with a Tasks mode that keeps working while you’re away from your computer and connections to more than 40 apps, including Shopify and Adobe.

How much do ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini cost?

For one person

	ChatGPT	Claude	Gemini (Google One)
Free	$0, GPT-6 Luna	$0, Sonnet and Haiku, up to 5 projects	Free Gemini app
Budget tier	Go, $8/month	No	Google AI Plus, $9.99/month
Main paid tier	Plus, $20/month	Pro, $20/month or $17/month billed annually	Google AI Pro, $19.99/month
Power-user tier	Pro, $100, $200 or $500/month	Max, from $100/month	Google AI Ultra (price not listed on the plans page)

For a team

	ChatGPT Business	Claude Team	Google Workspace with Gemini
Price per seat	$25/month, or $20 billed annually	Standard $25/month, or $20 billed annually. Premium $125/month, or $100 billed annually	Starter $7, Standard $14, Plus $22 per user/month on flexible billing. Google says an annual commitment saves 16%
Minimum	2 users	2 seats (up to 150)	Not stated on the pricing page
Admin and security	Admin controls, SAML SSO, MFA	SSO, central billing, admin controls	Full Workspace admin console
Trains on your data by default?	No	No	Not outside your domain without permission
What else you get	Codex for coding tasks, credits	Claude Code, Cowork, Design, Slides, Docs, Microsoft 365 add-in	Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Meet. Gemini is “limited” on Starter and expanded from Standard up

Google is running a new-customer discount on Workspace at the time of writing. The prices above are the list prices you’ll pay once it ends.

Which is best for marketing and content?

There’s no clear winner on writing quality, so be wary of anyone who says there is. All three can draft emails, posts and product descriptions well if you give them good examples. What differs is everything around the writing.

• ChatGPT is the broadest all-rounder: Intelligent UI for charts, calculators and forms, Projects for keeping work and files together, and Codex for coding tasks on Plus and above. If you’ll only ever pay for one tool, it’s the one least likely to leave a gap.
• Claude is built around long documents and finished files. Its paid plans include Projects, Research, and tools for making slides, documents and dashboards, plus an add-in for Microsoft 365. It’s a good fit if most of your work is reports, proposals or long-form content.
• Gemini works inside the Google apps you already use. On Workspace Standard and above it’s in Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Meet, so you can draft a reply or summarise a thread without copying anything into a separate chat.

Whichever you pick, load your brand voice guide into it on day one. That makes more difference to your drafts than which model you chose.

Which is best if you use Google Workspace or Microsoft 365?

Google Workspace: Gemini is the obvious first try, because you may already be paying for it. Check which Workspace plan you’re on: Starter gives you basic Gemini in Gmail and the Gemini app, and Standard is the cheapest plan with Gemini in Docs, Sheets and Meet.

Microsoft 365: Anthropic lists Claude for Microsoft 365 on its Pro and Team plans, so Claude is worth testing alongside ChatGPT. Microsoft’s own Copilot is another option, but it’s outside this comparison.

Neither: go by the 30-minute test below.

How do you choose in 30 minutes?

Use the free plans, or a one-month subscription if you can spare $20. Run the same jobs through each tool with the same prompt and judge the results yourself.

1. Pick five real jobs from last week. For example: reply to a tricky customer email, write three social posts about an offer, summarise a long PDF, turn messy notes into a proposal outline, analyse a small spreadsheet. Remove client names and anything confidential first.

2. Paste this into each tool, once per job:

I run a small business. Here is a real task from my week.

Task: [DESCRIBE THE JOB IN ONE OR TWO SENTENCES]
Audience: [WHO WILL READ OR USE THE RESULT]
Material: [PASTE THE EMAIL, NOTES OR DATA, OR ATTACH THE FILE]

Do the task. Then, in two or three lines, tell me what you assumed
and anything you'd need from me to make it better.
If you don't know a fact, write [CHECK] instead of guessing.

3. Score each answer from 1 to 5 on three things: how much editing it needs before you’d use it, whether it made anything up (a hallucination), and how long it took you to get there, including any back-and-forth.

4. Add up the scores. Then weigh the total against the practical stuff: which apps your team already uses, whether you need admin controls, and the price per seat across the year.

If two tools come out close, choose the one that fits the apps you already use, because that’s the one your team will keep opening.

What do business plans give you over personal ones?

Mostly control. ChatGPT Business and Claude Team both give you central billing, admin controls and single sign-on, and both vendors say they don’t train on your business content by default. Google says Workspace content isn’t used for model training outside your domain without permission. Personal plans have their own privacy settings, which are easy to miss. If staff paste client data into personal accounts, check those settings or move them to a business plan.

Where does this comparison break?

• Prices and models change monthly. Three new model generations landed in three weeks. Recheck the pricing pages before you commit to an annual plan.
• Usage limits aren’t published as numbers. Claude describes its plans as multiples of the free plan’s usage, and Google describes Gemini access as “2x” or “4x” non-subscribers. You’ll only learn whether a plan is enough by using it for a few weeks.
• We haven’t run a head-to-head test yet. This guide compares plans and features from the vendors’ own pages. It isn’t a quality ranking, and vendor claims about speed and cost are theirs, not ours.
• Regional differences. Some features, such as Google’s Gemini Agent on Ultra, are US and English-only for now.

What to do next

Pick your top two from the tables above and run the 30-minute test this week. Once you’ve chosen, put the tool to work: build a one-page brand voice guide so drafts sound like you, then use it to plan a month of social posts. If you’re rolling AI out to a team, the AI capability assessment shows who needs help first.