Claude
A rival assistant that holds long documents better and hedges less
claude.ai Free tier Checked 30 August 2026
- Price
- From $20 per month
- Not priced in pounds
- Trains on your data
- Vendor does not publish it
- Where data is processed
- Not published
- Data processing agreement
- Not published
- Setup
- Minutes
- Skill needed
- Anyone
What is Claude?
The same broad job as ChatGPT, with a noticeably longer working memory. It will read a hundred-page tender document and answer questions about page 74 without losing the thread, which is the specific thing most business users want and most assistants do badly.
The practical difference from ChatGPT shows up on long inputs. Paste in a sixty-page framework agreement and ask what the termination terms are, and you get an answer that refers to the right clause rather than a plausible summary of what termination clauses usually say.
For a business that reads a lot — tenders, contracts, reports, regulations — that is worth more than a marginally better turn of phrase. For a business that mostly writes short marketing copy, it is not, and the choice between the two comes down to which interface you prefer.
What does Claude cost in the UK?
From $20 per month.
What the free tier actually gets you
A free tier with daily message limits, enough to judge whether you like it.
What to watch on the price
We are not quoting an entry price. Anthropic's consumer plan pricing was not read on the vendor's page this month, and the tiers have been restructured more than once. The link goes to the live page.
Does Claude train AI models on your data?
Vendor does not publish it
Anthropic's privacy centre documents a model-training setting — "If you allow us to use your chats or coding sessions to improve Claude, we may retain your data in a de-identified format for up to 5 years in our model training pipelines" — and says "You can change your privacy settings with respect to model training at any time." The pages we read do not state which way that setting defaults for a new consumer account, and the position has changed more than once, so we are not recording a value. Check Settings in the app. Torus is built with Anthropic tooling, which is a reason to be stricter here, not more generous. Read on 30 August 2026.
The rest of the data position
- Where data is processed: Not published
- Data processing agreement: Not published
What do people use Claude for?
- Read a long tender or contract and answer questions about it
- Rewrite a technical document for a non-technical reader
- Work through a spreadsheet of data and explain what changed
What does Claude connect to?
- Google Drive
- Slack
- Zapier
- Microsoft 365
Where does Claude fall short?
- Consumer plans have different data terms from the business plans, and those terms have changed before
- Smaller ecosystem of third-party integrations than ChatGPT
- No UK data residency option on the consumer tiers
Who is Claude for?
A good fit for
- Anyone reading long documents
- Consultants
- Bid and tender writing
Not for
- Businesses that need a deep third-party integration ecosystem — ChatGPT has more of one
- Anyone assuming the consumer terms match the commercial ones. They do not, and they have changed before
What are the alternatives to Claude?
Others in writing, with what each one is for.
- ChatGPT See vendor pricing The general-purpose assistant most people mean when they say "AI"
- Claude for Work Price on application Anthropic's assistant on a business plan, which is not trained on your data
- DeepL See vendor pricing Translation that reads like it was written by a person
- Google Gemini for Workspace See vendor pricing Gemini inside Gmail, Docs and Sheets, on your own Workspace content