July 28, 2026
Four names keep coming up: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok. They all look the same at first glance — a text box you type into and a chatbot that answers back. But they're made by different companies with different priorities, and that shows up in how they behave.
Here's what each one actually is, and how to use it.
Made by OpenAI. The one that started this whole thing in late 2022.
ChatGPT is the default most people reach for, and that's not an accident — it's the most widely used, which means it has the biggest ecosystem of plugins, custom GPTs, and tutorials built around it. If you search "how do I use AI to do X," the answer you find was almost certainly written with ChatGPT in mind.
How to use it: Open a chat and treat it like a capable generalist. It's strong at brainstorming, drafting, coding help, and answering quick questions. If you want it to remember things about you across conversations, turn on Memory in settings — it'll pick up your preferences over time instead of starting cold every session.
Made by Anthropic. Less of a household name, but the one a lot of people switch to once they've compared notes.
Claude tends to read less like "AI output" and more like something a careful person wrote. It's noticeably good with long documents — paste in a 40-page contract or a messy set of notes and it won't lose the thread. It's also the one built for people who actually build things: Claude Code, its command-line tool, lets you point it at a real codebase and have it write and edit files directly.
How to use it: Lean on it for anything long-form — writing that needs to sound human, summarizing dense documents, or working through a decision that has a lot of nuance. If you write code, Claude Code is worth trying even if you've never touched a terminal before.
Made by Google. Woven directly into Gmail, Docs, and Search.
Gemini's edge is freshness. Where ChatGPT and Claude have a knowledge cutoff baked into training, Gemini pulls in live web results more naturally, so it's a better bet for "what's happening right now" questions. It also shows up automatically inside Google products — you may have used it without opening a dedicated app at all.
How to use it: If you already live in Gmail and Docs, use the Gemini button that's already sitting in the sidebar instead of switching apps. For anything time-sensitive — recent news, current prices, this week's events — it's the one most likely to get it right.
Made by xAI, built into X (formerly Twitter).
Grok's personality is the most distinct of the four — it's built to be a little more irreverent and less filtered than the others, and it has direct access to real-time posts on X. That makes it unusually good at reading the temperature of a live conversation happening right now, which none of the others can do the same way.
How to use it: Reach for it when you want a read on what's being said on X right now, or when you want an answer that doesn't sand off every rough edge. It's less of a fit for formal writing or long documents — that's Claude's or ChatGPT's job.
Start with whichever one you already have access to — if your company pays for ChatGPT or Gemini, start there. From there:
You don't have to pick one forever. Most people who use AI seriously end up with two open in different tabs, depending on what they're doing that day.
At Clearly, AI, I go deeper on all of this — which tool to use for which task, and how to actually get good output instead of generic filler. If you're trying to figure out where to start, that's a good place to go.