ChatGPT Business vs Claude Team: Seat Costs for a Small Consultancy

Price will not decide it: ChatGPT Business and Claude Team both list Standard seats at $20 a user a month billed annually ($25 monthly) and Premium seats at $100 ($125), each with a two-seat minimum. Both promise no training on your content by default. Choose on usage limits, admin controls and a same-task test, and buy one.

ChatGPT Business was called ChatGPT Team until OpenAI renamed it on 29 August 2025, which is why people still search for ChatGPT Team against Claude Team. The differences that cost real money sit in usage limits and in what an admin can see. Neither vendor's summary page settles those for your firm, but a two-hour test with a made-up phrase does.

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Seat prices side by side, with the sums for two, four and eight people

OpenAI's business pricing page and Anthropic's pricing page agree to the dollar. Standard seats are $20 a month billed annually or $25 billed monthly. Premium seats are $100 annually or $125 monthly. Both let you mix seat types in one workspace, and both need at least two seats. ChatGPT Business runs to 200 seats and Claude Team to 150, a gap that rarely matters for a small consultancy.

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The same table is true for either product, which is the useful result. Choosing between them cannot save money on seats, so the real question is which one wastes less of your team's time. Buying both for four people costs $160 a month on Standard seats alone, and few small consultancies use two assistants well. The tutorial on seat costs and trimming at renewal explains why over-buying is hard to undo: in both products a seat reduction takes effect only at the next renewal, with no refund for the unused time.

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A cheap way to test is to pay monthly for a month. Two Standard seats on monthly billing is $50 in either product, so testing both costs $100. Annual billing saves 20% a seat, but only after you know which one your team will actually open.

Where the money really differs: usage limits and extras

Because list prices match, limits are what you are really buying, and the two vendors describe them differently.

• ChatGPT Business: OpenAI's pricing page describes everyday text chats as unlimited, subject to abuse guardrails. Standard seats include baseline access to ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work and Codex, and you can buy workspace credits for usage beyond the included limits. Premium seats have more usage and no five-hour limit. OpenAI also says that from December plan usage will share one limit across ChatGPT and Codex, so check how the new rule applies to you.
• Claude Team: Anthropic's help page says a Standard seat gets 1.25 times the Pro plan's per-session usage, and a Premium seat gets 6.25 times, with a weekly limit across all models. Limits are per member and cannot be pooled, so one idle seat does not lend its allowance to a busy one.

Both products include coding agents (Codex on one side, Claude Code on the other) that a consultancy with no developers can ignore. Context windows differ too: OpenAI lists 256K tokens for its reasoning models in Business, while Anthropic's Team help page still quotes 200K and its pricing table now says up to 1M, depending on the model. Treat all of these as indicative, since each vendor counts and uses context differently.

A heavy day, illustrated

Consider two consultants. One reads a 120-page client report, builds a market summary and rewrites it three times in an afternoon. The other drafts short emails and meeting notes all day. A Standard seat probably covers the second without trouble. The first is the one who may see a limit message mid-task, and the cost of that is not the seat price but the interruption. Rather than guess, keep a tally for two weeks: each time someone hits a limit, they add a line to a shared note with the date and task. After two weeks you will know whether one Premium seat, at $80 a month more than Standard on annual billing, is justified or whether the cap is a rare nuisance.

The result of that tally is a better buying signal than any vendor comparison, because it measures your own work. If nobody hits a limit in a fortnight, stay on Standard. If one person hits it twice a week, one Premium seat costs less than the hour a month they lose switching tools.

What else is in the seat: features a consultancy will really use

Both plans carry a long feature list, most of which a five-person consultancy will never touch. These are the parts that map onto consulting work, as each vendor describes them on its own pages.

• Research and long documents: ChatGPT Business includes deep research, file uploads, data analysis and company knowledge, and OpenAI lists a 256K context window for its reasoning models in Business. Claude Team includes all Claude features and models, with research, web search and search across the work tools you connect.
• Office add-ins: OpenAI lists extensions for Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Google Sheets in Business. Anthropic's plan table lists Claude for Microsoft 365 and Claude for Microsoft Outlook on Team, so both cover the Microsoft apps most consultancies live in. Test the add-in on a real client workbook before you rely on it.
• Connected tools: Claude Team lists connectors for Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, GitHub, Microsoft 365 and Slack. ChatGPT Business lists connections to Google Workspace, Slack, GitHub and Microsoft 365. OpenAI now calls these connected apps, formerly connectors.
• Spend and admin controls: Claude Team lets admins set spending caps at organisation and user level. ChatGPT Business has usage analytics and spend controls on its feature list.

The list shows a pattern: nearly every feature a consultancy might want exists in both. When the lists look equal, the difference tends to be in how the work feels day to day, which is why the same-task test later in this tutorial is worth an hour of your time and the feature tables are worth five minutes.

Data terms you can verify yourself

Both vendors give business customers a short list of promises. The table sets them next to a check you can run. Where a vendor's page is silent, the cell says so, because the honest answer is to test.

If a client asks which is safer, the honest answer on the small-team plans is that they are close, and what separates them is how well you configure and test them. The ChatGPT Business admin checklist and the Claude Team admin settings checklist go through every switch in each product.

The two-hour data-terms test, step by step

The point of the test is to see, with a made-up phrase, who can read what. Run it in each product on its own day, with two seats (yours and a colleague's, or a second email you control) and monthly billing.

1. Set up the workspace. Turn on SSO or MFA, name two admins, and write down the date and plan name.
2. Plant a canary. From the second seat, start a chat that includes an invented phrase such as "Heron-Maple 5521 pricing sheet", and upload a dummy file with the same phrase.
3. Look from the admin seat. See whether you can find the chat, the file or the phrase anywhere, including in search, and note exactly where and how. In Claude, run the organisation data export from the organisation settings (Data and privacy) as the Primary Owner and search it for the phrase.
4. Delete it. From the second seat, delete the chat. Check whether the admin seat can still see it, and whether the file remains in a project or library.
5. Remove the member. Remove the second seat and note what happens to their chats and to the billable seat count. OpenAI's help page says removal ends access but does not reduce the billed seats until the owner also removes the seat.
6. Connect one app. Enable a single connector, such as a document store, and check whether the second seat can reach files they should not see.
7. Ask in writing. Email each vendor's sales or support address for the data processing terms and its position on retention for your plan, and file the answers.

Record each step as a pass, fail or unclear, with the date. Two hours per product is realistic, and the output is a one-page table you can show a client. If any step comes back unclear, it is a question for the vendor, not a reason to assume the best.

Projects for client work: one per client, with a naming rule

Both products let you group files, instructions and chats into a project and share it. In ChatGPT Business, shared projects hold up to 40 files and 100 collaborators, members get chat or edit access, and a shared project uses project-only memory so it cannot see anyone's personal memory. Claude's Team plan offers projects, knowledge bases and collaboration features, with sharing across members.

A consultancy with five clients is the case where this matters. Make one project per client and nothing else, name each one the same way (a short client code, then the year, for example "ABC-2026"), and keep each project's instructions to who the client is, what the engagement covers, and what must not be repeated elsewhere. Never put two clients' files in one project, even when the work looks similar, because a draft that borrows a competitor's numbers is the worst failure a consultancy can have.

Here is how the failure looks in practice. A consultant keeps one project called "Proposals" with last year's three client proposals inside, and asks the assistant for a first draft for a fourth client. The draft comes back with a fee table whose day rate matches a previous client's, and a case-study paragraph that names that client's sector. Nothing is leaked outside the firm, but the draft is dangerously close to being sent. The fix is structural: separate projects per client, plus one template project that holds only anonymised structure, so no live client's numbers sit in the context the assistant reads.

This also settles the question of reusing old work. If you want a past client's structure without its facts, strip the facts into a template project first. The guide to reusing past client work without leaking data explains how.

A same-task test across three consulting jobs

Do not choose on one clever answer. Take three real jobs and run each in both products with the same instructions, then count the minutes of editing. The three below suit a consultancy.

• Discovery-call brief: from a client's website text and a short notes file, produce a one-page brief with five questions to ask.
• Proposal draft: from rough meeting notes, produce a first-draft proposal with scope, assumptions and a fee table.
• Workshop synthesis: from anonymised sticky-note text, group themes and propose three recommendations.

Use the same prompt in both. This is the one for the first task:

You are helping a management consultant prepare for a discovery call.
Use only the text below. Produce:
1. A five-line summary of what the company does.
2. Five questions to ask, each tied to something in the text.
3. Two assumptions you are making that I should check.
Do not invent facts. If the text does not say something, write "not stated".

[paste website text and notes]

Score each output on faithfulness to the source (did it invent anything?), minutes to make it send-ready, and tone. A filled-in example from an illustrative run:

The gap of two minutes tells you nothing, and that is the finding. When the tasks come out level, decide on limits and data controls. When one product needs far fewer edits on the work your team actually does, that matters more than any row of the earlier tables. The same-client-task comparison for consultants shows what a more detailed version of this test looks like.

A worked choice for a four-person consultancy

Take a four-person consultancy with one partner, two consultants and an operations lead. The partner often runs long document analysis, the consultants write proposals and the operations lead handles scheduling and summaries.

1. Start the test month: two Standard seats on monthly billing in each product, $100 total, and run the three-task test and the data-terms test.
2. Tally limits for two weeks: the partner hits a limit twice, nobody else does.
3. Choose: the products tie on tasks, so the partner's limit and the admin-visibility result decide it. Suppose the admin-seat test shows ChatGPT Business gives the firm a clear way to view and delete workspace conversations. The firm picks that one.
4. Buy: four seats, three Standard and one Premium for the partner, on annual billing, which is $160 a month and $1,920 a year, against $2,400 for the same mix billed monthly. The saving is $480.
5. Cancel the other: end the second product's monthly subscription before the next billing date.

A different outcome is as reasonable. If the partner's long documents were handled more cleanly by the other product and the data test passed, buy that one instead. What the process protects you from is the usual mistake: paying for both because nobody ran a test, then using neither properly. The tutorial on whether Claude Team is worth it for a small business and the tool-stack guide listed under further reads cover the stage before and after this decision.

Costs of switching and cancelling

Annual billing locks you in for a year, because a seat reduction waits for the annual renewal in both products. So the cost of choosing wrongly is the whole year's seats, not a month. Three habits limit the damage.

• Buy the minimum seats on annual billing and add more later, since adding is quick and cutting is not.
• Keep client knowledge in your own documents and a template project, not only inside chats, so that moving between products costs a day, not a month.
• Check export before you rely on it. OpenAI's help pages describe Business export differently in different places, so run it on a dummy workspace and see what you actually get.

Finally, keep the written results of both tests. When a client asks how you protect their material, a dated one-page record of what you tested is a better answer than a vendor's marketing line.

Questions consultants ask before buying seats

Is ChatGPT Team the same as ChatGPT Business?

Yes. OpenAI renamed ChatGPT Team to ChatGPT Business on 29 August 2025 without changing the plan itself. Older articles that talk about ChatGPT Team describe the same product, usually at older prices, so use OpenAI's current business pricing page for the seat costs.

Can a one-person consultancy buy either plan?

Not with a single seat. Both need at least two seats, so a solo consultant pays for two, about $40 a month on annual billing or $50 monthly, or stays on an individual Plus or Pro plan. An individual plan lacks the shared workspace, admin console and the no-training default.

Should every consultant get a Premium seat?

No. Premium is $100 a seat a month annually and exists for people who hit usage limits. Give it only to the person who sees limit warnings in a normal week, check the other seats after a month, and keep Standard for everyone else. You can mix seat types in either product.

Which has stronger data protection for client work?

On paper they are close: both say business content is not used for training by default. The difference is in what you can inspect. Neither small-team plan offers audit logs, so test admin visibility and deletion yourself, and ask each vendor for its data processing terms in writing before client material goes in.

Further reads

• How Consultants Use AI to Write Proposals in Under an Hour — Put the chosen seat to work on proposals.
• How Consultants Use AI for Client Research Before Discovery Calls — A research routine for the discovery-call test task.
• Is ChatGPT for Business Worth It? Decision Rules for a Small Firm — Decision rules for whether any business plan is worth it.
• Claude vs ChatGPT for Startups: Which Plan for a Team of 3 to 10 — The same comparison for a team of three to ten.
• ChatGPT Plus vs ChatGPT Business: Which Plan Does a Team Need? — Whether personal Plus plans could do the job instead.
• Claude vs ChatGPT for Business Writing, Proposals and Reports — Which assistant suits proposals and reports.
• The AI Tool Stack a One-Person Consultancy Actually Needs — The wider AI tool stack a small consultancy needs.
• Is ChatGPT Available for Commercial Use? What Owners Should Check — Commercial use is allowed, but plan terms decide training, confidentiality and indemnity. A checklist for owners, with the vendor terms linked.
• Claude or ChatGPT for a Law Firm: Which One to Pay For — Team seat costs, long-document limits, privacy defaults and Claude for Legal plugins compared, with a weighted three-task trial a small firm can run.
• AI ESG Report Drafting for Sustainability Consultants — From a client's data table to an ESG narrative: a claim register, number tracing, wording tests for green claims and what assurance providers will still ask.
• AI for MEP Engineers: Specification First Drafts and Checks — Draft an MEP specification section from a design brief, then run a clause-by-clause check against the standard the contract names.
• Best AI App for Grant Writing: What Each Does Well on a Funding Bid — The same funding bid drafted in ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, with the funder-criteria checks a grant writer still has to do by hand.
• Best AI Model for Business Consulting: Pick by Task, Not by Hype — Three consulting tasks to run through ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, with long-document limits, client confidentiality and plan costs checked on vendor pages.
• Can Consultants Use ChatGPT With Client Data? NDAs and Settings — A clause-by-clause NDA check and a redaction workflow for consultants who want to use ChatGPT on client work.
• ChatGPT Subscription Options: Which Tier Fits a Business Team? — The ChatGPT tiers from Free to Enterprise, judged for a small team on seats, admin tools and data controls.
• AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.

Sources: OpenAI's business pricing page and help articles on ChatGPT Business, the Claude pricing page, Claude help articles on the Team plan and data retention, and OpenAI's enterprise privacy page, read on 1 November 2026.