5 things nobody tells you when you move from ChatGPT to Claude

Ditching ChatGPT? Here's what your AI bestie should tell you about Claude

02 Mar 2026, 23:30 · TechRadar

Features By Graham Barlow published 2 March 2026

(Image credit: Anthropic)

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Since OpenAI announced its deal with the Pentagon, just hours after Anthropic refused to back down on its stance regarding the use of AI for mass surveillance of the American people and in autonomous weapons, the number of people announcing that they are cancelling their ChatGPT accounts and switching to Claude seems to have risen exponentially. The Claude app even exceeded ChatGPT in number of downloads on Apple's App Store, possibly for the first time ever.

But Claude was already becoming more popular, even before the latest events, thanks to its Super Bowl ad that directly targeted OpenAI and its use of advertising on its platform. Before the Super Bowl on Feb 8, Claude was hovering around number 42 on the App Store. Since then, it's remained in the top 10 every single day, and is now a top-10 productivity app on iOS in 80 countries, up from just one at the start of 2025.

Anthropic tells me that their internal numbers continue to accelerate: it claims that free users are up over 60% since January, daily signups tripled since November (breaking the all-time record every day this week), and paid subscribers more than doubled this year.

So, if you've been using ChatGPT for years, and you want to give Claude a try, then it seems like now is a very good time to start, especially as Anthropic recently made a lot of its best tools — access to Projects, Artifacts, and app connectors — available to free Claude users.

As a current ChatGPT Plus user, I thought I'd write down the five things I wish somebody had told me before I started using Claude.

1. Usage limits

The Claude interface looks pretty much the same as the ChatGPT one — menu on the left, prompt bar at the bottom — just with a different color scheme. The big differences are under the skin, particularly with how usage limits work.

On the Free plan, Claude's usage limits rest on a rolling 5-hour window, rather than a daily fixed cap. Like ChatGPT there's no guaranteed number of messages; it depends on a lot of different things, like how long your messages are, whether you're uploading files, and how busy Anthropic's servers are. Roughly speaking, you're looking at around 15 messages per 5-hour window, but fewer if servers are busy, which means that Claude is less generous with usage than ChatGPT.

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