Originally published at PickGearLab — practical AI tutorials for writers, freelancers, and small business owners. Both cost $20 a month. Both are excellent. Both will tell you they’re the best. After eighteen months of paying for both at different points and twelve months of running them in parallel, here’s the decision framework I wish someone had handed me when I first hit the subscribe button. This post is not a feature comparison. The feature gaps close every quarter, and a comparison written today will be outdated by August. Instead, this is a decision tree based on the kind of work you actually do. Walk through the questions. The branch you end up on is the subscription that fits your workflow. TL;DR. If most of your work is short-form (emails, social posts, brainstorming, code snippets) — ChatGPT Plus. If most of your work is long-form thinking (writing, analysis, document review, research) — Claude Pro.…