Alcoven

ChatGPT Business vs Claude Team for a team that uses both

Blog · Published 21 October 2026

On price it’s a tie: ChatGPT Business and Claude Team both charge $20 a seat a month billed yearly or $25 monthly, both sell a premium seat with five times the usage for $100 or $125 a month, and both need at least two seats. If your team uses both assistants, each plan covers only its own half. Both keep your team’s work out of model training by default. They differ in what a shared project shows your colleagues, how you add your own tools over MCP, and whether you can export.

Prices and limits below are from each vendor’s pricing page and help centre, checked on 30 September 2026. They change often, so the links are in the sources at the end.

Which one should your team pick?

  • Pick ChatGPT Business if most of your team already works in ChatGPT, you want colleagues to read and build on each other’s chats inside a shared project, or you need room for up to 200 seats.
  • Pick Claude Team if most of your team already works in Claude, you want shared files and instructions while each person’s chats stay private, or you want custom MCP connectors in Cowork and the desktop app as well as on the web.
  • If your team is split, the prices match, so decide where the project itself lives and let each person keep the assistant they work best in. The section on teams that already use both covers how.

ChatGPT Business vs Claude Team: what does each plan include?

ChatGPT Business Claude Team
Standard seat $20 per user a month billed yearly, $25 monthly $20 per seat a month billed yearly, $25 monthly
Higher-usage seat Premium: $100 a month billed yearly or $125 monthly, “5x more usage than Standard seats, no 5-hour usage limit” Premium: $100 a month billed yearly or $125 monthly, “5x more usage than standard seats”
Team size 2 to 200 paid seats 2 to 150 seats
What a seat includes ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work and Codex, with GPTs, projects, apps and deep research, and Space for pages you edit together (rolling out) Claude, Cowork and Claude Code, with Claude Design, Slides and Docs (in beta), projects, skills and connectors
Shared projects Members see the project’s chats, files and instructions; up to 100 collaborators and 40 files Members share the project’s files and instructions; each person’s chats stay private unless shared
Connectors and MCP Apps for Google Workspace, Slack, GitHub, Microsoft 365 and more; full MCP with write actions in beta, set up and published by admins, web only Connectors for Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, GitHub, Microsoft 365 and Slack; custom MCP connectors that an owner adds and each member connects
Admin SAML SSO, domain verification, central billing, admin roles, usage analytics, spend controls; SCIM on Enterprise SSO, domain verification, central billing, usage analytics, spend controls, connector controls, organisation-wide skills; SCIM on Enterprise
Training on your data “OpenAI won’t train on your workspace’s data.” “No model training on your content by default”
Usage limits, in their words Instant chat is “virtually unlimited”; that “does not make reasoning, Pro, ChatGPT Work, Codex, or other tools unlimited” Limits “reset on a rolling five-hour session window, and paid plans add weekly limits on top”; Standard gives “more than Pro”
Export “Self-service data export is not available in ChatGPT Business workspaces.” The Primary Owner can export the organisation’s data

What does a shared project actually share?

This is the biggest practical difference between the two plans, and it matters more than any row on price.

In ChatGPT Business, a shared project is a room everyone can read. Members with chat access “see and interact with the project’s chats, files, and instructions”, so you can open a colleague’s thread, see who started it and branch it to try something else. Shared projects use project-only memory: ChatGPT draws on the project’s own chats and files and leaves each member’s personal memory out. Outside shared projects, each person’s chats stay their own.

In Claude Team, a shared project is a shared starting point. Members see the project’s files and instructions and chat inside it, but “your chats within that project will be private and inaccessible to other members of your organization unless you manually share them”, and a shared chat is a snapshot of the messages up to that moment. Claude’s memory belongs to each person, with a separate memory for each project (on Team, once an owner turns it on), so your own chats in a project can build on each other. You can read a colleague’s chat once they share it, and your own chats draw on it only after someone adds what matters to the project’s files.

So a call your colleague made in yesterday’s chat is readable in a ChatGPT shared project, and in a Claude one it stays in their chat until they share it or someone writes it into a project file. Each side has its own steps for sharing a ChatGPT project with someone and sharing a Claude project with a colleague.

Can you add your own tools over MCP?

Both plans can, behind different gates.

  • Claude Team: custom connectors use remote MCP and exist on every Claude plan. On Team, an owner adds the connector’s address once in the organisation’s settings, then each member clicks Connect and signs in with their own account, so Claude can reach only what that person can reach. To change a connector’s details, an owner removes it and adds it again.
  • ChatGPT Business: full MCP support, including write actions, is “rolling out in beta”. On Business only admins and owners can turn on developer mode, create a custom app and publish it to the workspace; members then use it on the web, because MCP apps are web only. For now, a published app cannot be edited on Business: to change it, an admin recreates and republishes it.

MCP, if it is new to you, is an open standard that lets AI apps connect to outside tools and data.

What are the usage limits?

Both vendors describe allowances that depend on the model and the task. Anthropic says “there’s no fixed message count”; OpenAI says “a fixed number of messages is not a reliable measure of remaining usage”.

  • OpenAI calls Business “Unlimited subject to abuse guardrails”, and its help centre narrows that: “Virtually unlimited access applies to Instant chat and remains subject to safeguards against misuse.” Reasoning models, ChatGPT Work and Codex have included allowances, and a workspace can buy credits for more.
  • Anthropic says every plan has limits that “reset on a rolling five-hour session window, and paid plans add weekly limits on top”. On Team, limits apply to each member separately, so one person reaching their limit leaves everyone else’s allowance alone, and the organisation can turn on usage credits.

Can you take your data with you?

  • ChatGPT Business: “Self-service data export is not available in ChatGPT Business workspaces.”
  • Claude Team: the Primary Owner can export the organisation’s conversations from its settings; individual members have no self-serve export.

Either way, keep the originals of what you upload somewhere you control. The chats, and whatever was settled in them, are harder to move. If a switch is on the cards, work out how to move your projects from ChatGPT to Claude before anyone cancels a plan.

What if your team already uses both?

This is where a comparison table stops helping. Say your strategist lives in ChatGPT and your designer lives in Claude, and each is faster in the assistant they chose. You have three honest options.

  1. Pay for both. Anyone who needs both holds two Standard seats, one on each plan, which together cost $40 a month billed yearly or $50 monthly, and each plan still needs its own two-seat minimum. You also keep two shared projects in step by hand, pasting the updated brief into the second one every time the first one changes.
  2. Pick one and move everyone. One set of seats. The people who move give up the assistant they were fastest in, and their chat history mostly stays behind: ChatGPT Business has no data export, and on Claude Team only the Primary Owner can export.
  3. Keep the project outside both. Put the brief, the documents and the tasks somewhere neither vendor owns, and let each person open it from the assistant they already use. Both plans can reach an outside source over MCP, with the gates above. It pays off only if that place is where everyone writes back, so the next person’s AI finds today’s version.

Where Alcoven fits

Alcoven is built for the third option. It holds a project’s brief, documents, tasks and history, shared by the people and agents on it, and it sits beside ChatGPT and Claude. You add Alcoven to Claude, or to ChatGPT on plans where an MCP tool can write, and sign in once to reach every project you’re on; on Claude Team an owner adds Alcoven once for the whole organisation first, and on ChatGPT Business an admin adds and publishes it. People who work in Claude Code or Codex clone the project with git and push. Your own AI does the reading and writing (Alcoven runs no model for this), and whatever it changes comes back under your name, for everyone on the project. Every document keeps every past version, and when you open one in the Alcoven app you see what others changed since you last read it, and who. Readers, clients and agents join free, and working from your own AI over git or MCP costs nothing on any plan. Start a project free

Sources

Checked on 30 September 2026.