Let me say the obvious thing first: this post was drafted with Claude. That makes it either a very transparent piece of content marketing or a funny coincidence, depending on how you look at it.
I used ChatGPT for most of my writing work for the past few years Outlines, first drafts, turning long posts into short ones. It works. But a week ago I switched to Claude as my main writing tool, and I want to explain why.
The biggest difference is the quality of the prose. Ask ChatGPT to write something and you get a page full of bullet points. Three words per bullet. Six bullets where one paragraph would be clearer. It looks organized, but it does not read like writing. It reads like an outline.
Claude writes in full sentences and full paragraphs. It takes a position. When I ask it to write in our brand voice, I spend less time removing AI-sounding phrases and more time on the actual content.
Claude is not perfect. It can sound a little too eager to help, which sometimes makes the writing feel flat. It also uses em dashes more than I would like, and I am always removing them. But the starting point is better, and the best results are noticeably better.
Here is where working at a CMS company changes how I think about this: moving your work between AI tools is a content migration problem. You have research notes, drafts, brand guidelines, tone references, old posts for comparison. Until the AI has all of that context, it does not really understand what you are building.
We talk about this with customers regularly. The CMS you choose matters less than the point when the system understands your content well enough to do useful work. The same is true with AI writing tools.
ChatGPT has stronger project organization right now, better file management, and understands everything i need it to. For some workflows that is genuinely useful. For writing, I found that Claude did a better job actually reading and using the reference material I gave it, rather than just acknowledging it and then producing something generic.
Use both for a while. They are not doing the same thing.
ChatGPT is better when you need many tools in one place: images, code, file conversion, integrations. Claude is better when the goal is a document that a real person is going to read carefully.
For us, most of what we produce is content that real people read. That made the decision easier.
If you are using AI in your writing workflow and have not tried the other tool yet, it is worth a few hours. The differences become clear quickly once you are working with real material.
And if you find a way to make Claude stop with the em dashes, please let me know.
