GPT-5 vs Claude: Which AI Should You Trust With Your Marketing?

If you’ve been running your business long enough, you’ve seen the pattern: a shiny new tool launches, everyone rushes to try it, and within days you realize… maybe it wasn’t ready for prime time.

That’s exactly how the release of GPT-5 felt.

The GPT-5 Rollout: A Rough Start

When GPT-5 launched, it promised better answers, faster performance, and smarter reasoning. And for brand new chats, it worked… okay.

But if you tried to pick up an ongoing conversation—especially the kind where you’d already spent hours feeding it context—it acted like you’d never met.

That’s a deal-breaker when you rely on AI to help run client ad campaigns, analyze data, and build out strategies. In my case, I wasted multiple attempts on a simple task (turning a photo of a to-do list into text). After eight tries, GPT-5 gave me a… PDF of the image. No text at all.

I switched over to another AI I’d used years ago—Claude—and got the result in two seconds.

Rediscovering Claude

I hadn’t paid for Claude in years, but the jump in quality surprised me. It’s not perfect—each chat is siloed, so it doesn’t remember your past conversations even within the same project—but that’s sometimes an advantage when you need a clean slate.

Where Claude really shines:

• Analytical tasks: crunching ad performance data, calculating lead values, finding patterns

• Clear explanations: telling you why something is working or not

• Fast, accurate text conversions: like my to-do list example

The Side-by-Side Reality

Feature	GPT-5	Claude
Remembers past project context	✅	❌
Handles ongoing chats well	❌	✅
Analytical number-crunching	Good	Excellent
Creative brainstorming	Excellent	Good
Speed on simple tasks	Hit or miss	Consistent

What I’m Doing Now

I still use GPT-4 for most of my marketing and creative work, but Claude has earned a permanent spot in my paid toolkit for analysis-heavy tasks.

The real takeaway? No single AI does everything best. Just like you wouldn’t trust one employee to handle every role in your business, you shouldn’t expect one AI to be your only tool.