Short answer: do not pick a general AI assistant by brand. Run the same drafting, research, and coding tasks in each finalist and keep the one that reduces review time without raising verification risk.
What each assistant is usually best for
- ChatGPT: broad everyday work — drafting, files, browsing, and multimodal tasks in one place.
- Claude: long documents, careful prose, instruction-heavy drafting, and document review.
- Grok: real-time X/web context, always-on agent features, and image generation where available.
- Gemini: Google Workspace-native work across Docs, Gmail, Drive, and multimodal tasks.
Confirm current model names and plan limits on each vendor page — lineups change. See also our model lineup notes and the individual worth-it guides.
30-minute hands-on protocol
- Write one brief for drafting, one for research, one for coding/debugging.
- Run the identical brief in ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini on the plan you actually pay for (or free).
- Score editing burden, factual verification effort, and whether the output is usable without heavy rewrite.
- Keep one primary assistant. Keep a second only if it owns a different weekly job.
Free vs Premium
Public pages give you the comparison framework and tool reviews. Premium members get a fillable hands-on comparison CSV, the full decision matrix, tool-change alerts when model lineups shift, and priority research slots. 7-day free trial · $12/month · code LAUNCH50 for 50% off the first paid month (new users).
Related: Claude vs ChatGPT for writing, ChatGPT vs Claude, ChatGPT vs Gemini, ChatGPT vs Grok.