Claude is an AI assistant built by Anthropic for analysis, coding, writing, and research. Available through a web interface, mobile apps, desktop app, and API. The model family includes Claude Opus, Claude Sonnet, and Claude Haiku, each optimized for different performance and cost tradeoffs.
For coding specifically, Claude excels at analysis, explanation, code review, and generation within conversation. The 200K token context window (expandable to 1M with Opus 4.6) means it can analyze entire codebases, review large pull requests, and maintain coherence across long technical documents. Artifacts lets you create and iterate on code, documents, and visualizations directly within the conversation.
Claude is not an IDE tool. It does not provide inline completions, cannot read your file system, and has no agent mode for autonomous code execution. For those capabilities, Anthropic offers Claude Code (a separate terminal based coding agent). Claude the assistant is best understood as a reasoning partner for complex analysis, technical writing, and code review rather than a real time coding companion.
Claude Free provides Sonnet access with usage limits. Pro costs $20 per month for expanded Opus and Sonnet access. Max plans at $100 and $200 per month provide higher usage caps. Team is $25 per seat per month. Enterprise is $30 per seat per month.