Claude vs ChatGPT: plans, models and limits compared

Claude vs ChatGPT plans and prices

Claude Pro and ChatGPT Plus both cost $20 a month. Above that, Claude Max costs $100 or $200 and ChatGPT Pro costs $100, $200 or $500.

Claude Pro billed yearly costs $200 a year ($17 a month), while ChatGPT Plus is billed monthly only, so a full year of Plus comes out to $240.

Models and context windows

Claude's current models (Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5) all have a 1M-token context window on the API. In ChatGPT, GPT-6.1 Sol runs in Work and Codex, not in Chat.

Usage limits

Every Claude plan runs on rolling 5-hour session limits, and the paid plans put weekly limits on top of that. Your web or desktop chat and Claude Code pull from the same usage pool, and Anthropic doesn't publish a fixed message count. Instead, Claude Pro gives you at least 5x Free's usage per 5-hour session, while Claude Max gives you 5x Pro's usage at $100 or 20x Pro's usage at $200.

ChatGPT Free gives you unlimited text chats with GPT-6 subject to abuse guardrails, though file uploads, image creation, voice, deep research, memory and Codex access are all limited. On ChatGPT Plus, Codex allows an estimated 15 to 160 local GPT-6.1 Sol messages per five hours, while ChatGPT Pro plans currently have no five-hour Codex limit at all.

Claude Code vs Codex

• Claude Code comes with every paid Claude plan starting at $20 a month (it isn't on Free), and it runs in your terminal, in IDEs like VS Code, Cursor and JetBrains, and inside the Claude Desktop app.
• Codex is included on every ChatGPT tier, though access is limited if you're on the $0 Free tier or the $8 Go plan.
• Moving up to ChatGPT Plus unlocks Codex on the web, in the CLI, in the IDE extension and on iOS.
• ChatGPT Pro plans currently have no five-hour Codex limit, unlike Plus.

Images, research and extras

• ChatGPT includes image generation on every plan, with limits on Free.
• Claude's pricing page doesn't list image generation on any tier, though Claude Free does include Claude Design, Slides and Docs.
• Claude Pro includes Research, whereas ChatGPT's deep research is limited on Free and expanded on Plus.
• Claude Max includes $100 or $200 a month in API credits, and ChatGPT Pro also lists monthly API credits with activation and eligibility requirements.

Which one to pick

• For feeding long documents or large codebases into one conversation, pick Claude for its context window of up to 1M tokens.
• For built-in image creation, pick ChatGPT on Go, Plus or Pro (or Free with limits).
• For the cheapest paid subscription, pick ChatGPT Go at $8 a month.
• For coding on a $20 monthly budget, either works: Claude Pro includes Claude Code, and ChatGPT Plus includes Codex.
• For the heaviest daily workloads, look at Claude Pro vs Max and go with Claude Max 20x at $200 a month, or pick ChatGPT Pro at $200 or $500 a month.

Use both subscriptions through one API key

If you pay for both, Plan2API lets you connect Claude Pro or Max and a ChatGPT subscription (through Codex) to a single OpenAI-compatible p2a_ API key at plan2api.com/connect. You pick the provider in your code by setting the model id prefix to claude/ (like claude/claude-opus-5-5 or claude/claude-sonnet-5) or openai/ (like openai/gpt-6.1-sol or openai/gpt-6-astra), and each connected subscription keeps its own native usage limits. Requests go to https://api.plan2api.com/v1 using POST /v1/chat/completions with an Authorization: Bearer header in the standard Chat Completions format. There is no /v1/responses, /v1/messages, /v1/completions or /v1/embeddings endpoint, and the x-api-key header isn't accepted.

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(base_url="https://api.plan2api.com/v1", api_key="p2a_...")

for model in ["claude/claude-opus-5-5", "openai/gpt-6.1-sol"]:
    reply = client.chat.completions.create(
        model=model,
        messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Explain this error message."}],
    )
    print(model, reply.choices[0].message.content)