The complete Claude guide

What's changed since September 23 🆕

A lot has moved since the last version of this guide. Here's everything new or different.

• Claude Opus 5.5 (22 Sep) — first model in the new 5.5 family. Performs at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 on most work. Costs 40% less than Opus 5 to run. Cache reads: $0.20/M. Input: $4/M. Output: $20/M. Fast mode available in Claude Code at 2.5× speed.
• Claude Sonnet 5.5 (28 Sep) — faster, lower-cost complement to Opus 5.5. Cache reads now halved to $0.10/M (was $0.20/M), making it ~20% cheaper on most agentic work. Input: $2/M. Output: $10/M.
• Claude Haiku 5.5 (7 Oct) — fastest, cheapest model Anthropic has released. ~75% cheaper than Haiku 4.5 on average. $0.10 input / $0.50 output per million tokens for requests up to 100k tokens. First Haiku with adjustable effort. Designed for high-volume tasks: summaries, classification, subagent work.
• Monthly API credits for Max and Team (7 Oct) — Max 5× users get $100/month in API credits. Max 20× users get $200/month. Team subscribers get up to $500/month pooled. Credits do not roll over. Link your API organization in Settings → Billing.
• Plugin directory (25 Sep) — you can now submit plugins to the Claude directory through a developer portal, track them through review, and see usage analytics once live.
• Claude Design, Slides, and Docs now in Artifacts (16 Sep) — all three are now available from any conversation on every plan including Free (Enterprise is opt-in). You no longer need a separate mode. Ask in any chat and Claude will create designs, presentations or living documents right there.
• Salesforce plugin in beta (15 Sep) — 37 pre-built sales skills, brings your accounts, opportunities and pipeline into Claude. Available on all paid plans for Salesforce-approved organizations.
• Smart reports for Enterprise (10 Sep) — analyze how a team uses Claude: cost per session, friction points, repeated patterns worth packaging as shared skills. Enterprise-only.
• Cowork and chat unified (16 Sep, rolling out) — Claude Cowork is being merged into the main Claude experience. On Pro and Max, there's one place for quick questions and big tasks. Team and Enterprise temporarily keep separate Chat/Cowork modes. Once your account moves over, you can't switch back.

Start here: Claude is a family of products now 🧭

If you think of Claude as a chat box, you're seeing about a fifth of it. Here's what's under the name today:

• Claude: the main app on web, desktop and mobile. Chat and Cowork are being merged into it (more on that below). This is where you ask, write, research, and hand off longer jobs that end in real files.
• Claude Code: the coding agent. It works in your terminal, your editor, the desktop app and the web, with access to your real files.
• Claude Design, Claude Slides and Claude Docs: three separate products for visual work, presentations and documents. All three are in beta and on paid plans only.
• Claude in Chrome: a browser extension that can read pages, click, type and fill forms for you.
• Claude for Microsoft 365: add-ins inside Excel, PowerPoint and Word, with Outlook in beta.
• Claude Science: a desktop app for scientific research. In beta.

"Claude Cowork is now just Claude" 🔀

That's Anthropic's own wording, and it's on the pricing page right now.

Until recently there were two separate modes: Chat for conversation and Cowork for handing off real work. Cowork is where you describe the result you want, step away, and come back to finished files. Anthropic describes it as bringing "Claude Code's agentic capabilities to knowledge work beyond coding."

Those two modes are now being merged into one conversation. Here are the facts as of today:

• It's "rolling out gradually, starting with Pro and Max plans on web, desktop, and mobile."
• Team and Enterprise "keep chat and Claude Cowork as they are today" for now.
• Once your account moves over, "you can't switch back to separate 'Chat' and 'Cowork' options."
• In the merged experience, there's no web search toggle. "Claude searches the web when it helps."

Getting started on every platform 📲

• Web: claude.ai. Nothing to install.
• Desktop (Mac, Windows, Linux beta): install it. It's the only place Claude can work with files on your computer, use its built-in browser, or operate your computer (computer use). The minimum versions are macOS 11, Windows 10, and Ubuntu 22.04 or Debian 12. On Free, the desktop app gives you chat only. Claude Code and Cowork start at Pro.
• Mobile: iOS and iPadOS 18 or later, Android 8 or later.
• Chrome: the Claude in Chrome extension, on paid plans. It doesn't work in other Chromium browsers or on mobile.
• Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Outlook: add-ins, on paid plans.
• Terminal and code editors: Claude Code works in the terminal and in VS Code, Cursor and JetBrains.

The plans, and what you get 💳

Prices checked on 23 September 2026. All prices are in US dollars.

What's included, from the pricing page:

• Free includes Sonnet and Haiku (no Opus, no Fable), up to 5 projects, web search, memory, skills, connectors and artifacts.
• Pro adds Opus, Claude Code, Cowork, Claude Design, Slides and Docs, Claude Science, Claude in Chrome, Microsoft 365, Research, and at least 5× the Free usage per session.
• Max gives you 5× or 20× Pro's usage, and Fable is included in your plan (see the models section).

How usage limits work ⏱

Claude doesn't give you a message count. It gives you a usage budget, and there are two limits running at the same time:

1. 1A five-hour window. "Every plan has usage limits that reset on a rolling five-hour session window."
2. 2A weekly limit on paid plans. It "resets at a fixed time each week that is assigned to your account."

• Your whole account shares one pool. Web, desktop, mobile and Claude Code all use the same budget. A long coding session in the afternoon means less chat that evening.
• Longer conversations and bigger models use the budget faster. A long thread on Opus uses much more than short questions on Sonnet.
• When you hit a limit, you have three options. You can "wait for it to reset, move to a higher plan, or, on paid plans, turn on usage credits to keep working at standard API rates." Usage credits are prepaid, you can set a monthly cap, and there's a daily limit of $2,000.

The models, explained properly 🧠

How Fable is paid for depends on your plan:

• Max (and Team and Enterprise Premium seats): Fable is part of your plan. "You can use up to 50% of your weekly usage limits on Fable models at no extra cost."
• Pro (and Team Standard seats): "Fable models run on pay-as-you-go usage credits from the start." In other words, Fable costs extra on Pro from the first message.
• Free: Fable isn't available.

Effort and thinking 🎚

Every current model thinks before it answers. What you control is how hard it thinks.

Effort levels: Low · Medium · High · Extra high · Max. Extra high and Max are available on Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1, Opus 5 and Sonnet 5. Haiku doesn't have an effort setting.

The default depends on the model:

• Opus 5.5 defaults to Medium.
• Fable 5.1 defaults to High in Claude Code, and to Medium in Claude on the web and in Cowork.
• Most other models default to High.

Context windows: how much Claude can hold at once 📏

The context window is how much Claude can read and remember within a single conversation. In the Claude apps, on paid plans:

No ads 🚫

Short section, because the answer is simple. On 4 February 2026 Anthropic wrote: "Claude will remain ad-free. Our users won't see 'sponsored' links adjacent to their conversations with Claude; nor will Claude's responses be influenced by advertisers."

That applies to every plan, including Free. ChatGPT, by comparison, now shows ads on its free and cheapest plans.

Cowork: handing off real work 🛠

Here's what's available in Cowork, whether yours still shows it as a separate mode or it's already been merged in:

• Long-running tasks that keep going while you do something else
• Sub-agents: Claude splits a big job into parts and works on them in parallel
• Real files as the output: spreadsheets, documents and decks
• A built-in browser in the desktop app
• Computer use, where Claude operates your computer. It's "in beta on Pro and Max plans" on macOS and Windows
• Scheduled tasks, projects, plugins and connectors

Two prompts to try:

Projects 📁

"Projects are available to all users, including those with free Claude accounts. Free users can create a maximum of five projects."

A project holds three things:

• Instructions that apply to every chat inside it
• Knowledge files, meaning reference material Claude can use in any of those chats
• All the chats you have about that piece of work

Memory and incognito chats 🧩

Memory is on by default on Free, Pro and Max. On Team and Enterprise it's off by default, and an owner has to turn it on.

Artifacts 🧱

When Claude builds something you can use — a small web page, a calculator, a chart or an interactive tool — it shows up as an artifact. That's a working object you can use, not just text on a screen.

• Plans: all of them, Free included. Code execution has to be on.
• Sharing: on Pro and Max you can choose "Only you" or "Anyone with the link." On Team and Enterprise you can also share with your whole organisation.

Research and web search 🔎

Web search is on every plan, Free included. In the merged experience it just happens when it's useful, and there's no toggle.

Research is Claude's deep mode for complex questions. It runs many searches, reads through the results, and gives you a report with citations. It's "available for users with paid Claude plans," and web search needs to be on.

Skills, connectors and plugins 🔌

These three are related, and they now live in one directory under Customize.

• Skills are saved instructions for a specific task. You can use them and make your own on every plan, including Free, as long as code execution is on. The one exception is recording a skill by showing Claude what to do — that's Pro, Max and Team only, and only in Cowork on Mac.
• Connectors link Claude to your apps — Google Drive, Slack, Notion — so it can read your data and take actions there. Available on all plans. Free users can add one custom connector.
• Plugins bundle everything together. "Each plugin bundles skills, connectors, and sub-agents into a single package." They're on paid plans only. They first launched on 30 January 2026 as a research preview.

Scheduled tasks ⏰

Scheduled tasks let Claude do things on a schedule without you: "hourly, daily, weekly, on weekdays, or manually."

• Plans: Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise. Not Free.
• Runs while you're away: "Scheduled tasks run remotely, so they run on their cadence even when your computer is asleep or the Claude Desktop app is closed."
• The catch: "If a scheduled task requires local files or apps, it will only run locally." So a task that needs files on your computer only runs while your computer is on.

Claude Code 💻

Anthropic's coding agent. It reads your code, writes and edits files, runs commands and tests, and works through a job step by step.

• Plans: Pro, Max, Team, Enterprise, or a Console (API) account. Not Free. It also works through Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud and Microsoft Foundry.
• Where it runs: the terminal, VS Code, Cursor and JetBrains, the desktop app, the web, Slack, and the iOS and Android apps.
• Requirements: macOS 13 or later, Windows 10 1809 or later, or Ubuntu 20.04 or later, with at least 4 GB of RAM.

Claude Design, Slides and Docs 🎨

These used to be one product. Now they're three, all in beta, paid plans only:

• Claude Design makes "designs, interactive prototypes, one-pagers, and other visual work." It launched on 17 April 2026. It no longer does slides — Anthropic now says "to make presentations, use Claude Slides."
• Claude Slides makes presentations.
• Claude Docs makes documents.

Claude in Chrome 🌐

A Chrome extension that can read the page you're on, click, type, move between pages and fill forms.

• Paid plans only (Pro, Max, Team, Enterprise). It isn't available on Free, even for basic chat, despite what other guides say.
• It works in Chrome only. Not other Chromium browsers, and not mobile.
• The side panel is in beta.

Microsoft 365: two different things 📊

• The add-ins. Claude runs inside Excel, PowerPoint and Word (with Outlook in beta). Anthropic says they're "now generally available on all paid plans." Paid plans only.
• The Microsoft 365 connector. This lets Claude read from SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook and Teams. It's "available on all Claude plans," Free included. It needs a work Microsoft account, so personal @outlook.com accounts won't work.

Claude Science 🔬

"Anthropic's desktop app for scientific research, currently in beta", on Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise. Claude writes and runs analysis code in an isolated sandbox, pulls data from scientific databases, connects to computing clusters, and saves every version of its results.

Voice 🎙

Voice mode is in beta, on every plan, in the mobile app, the desktop app and the web. Fable models can't be used in voice mode.

Images: Claude doesn't generate them 🖼

This is the thing beginners most often get wrong. Anthropic says: "Claude doesn't generate photos or illustrations the way image-generation tools do."

• Reads images. Screenshots, photos, charts, handwriting, receipts.
• Builds visuals from code. Diagrams, charts, infographics and layouts in HTML or SVG.

Files and uploads 📎

Team and Enterprise 🏢

Team

• Seats cost $20 a month on annual billing or $25 monthly. Premium seats cost $100 annually or $125 monthly and get 5× the usage of a Standard seat.
• A Team plan needs at least 2 members and allows up to 150 seats.
• Every member has their own usage limit — one heavy user doesn't use up everyone else's budget.
• You get shared projects, admin controls, and no training on your data by default.

Enterprise

• $20 per seat per month on annual billing, plus usage at API rates.
• The minimum is 20 seats if you sign up yourself, or 50 if you go through Anthropic's sales team.
• Usage-based plans have "no plan or seat-level usage limits." That's powerful, but it means the bill depends on how much people use it — put a budget owner in charge.
• Keeping all AI processing in the US costs 1.1×.

Privacy and data 🔒

The most important setting. On Free, Pro and Max, Anthropic's pricing page lists model training as "Opt-out." In other words, your chats can be used to train Anthropic's models unless you turn that off. The setting is in Settings → Privacy → "Help improve our AI models."

Prompting Claude well ✍️

Claude responds best to plain, specific briefs. You don't need tricks. Give it four things:

Four habits that make the biggest difference:

1. 1Show it an example. A sample of the tone you want works better than any description of that tone.
2. 2Ask it to disagree with you. "What's wrong with this plan?" gets you more than "Is this plan good?"
3. 3Ask for the finished file. "Give me the spreadsheet" beats "tell me how to build the spreadsheet." Cowork can deliver the actual file.
4. 4Raise the effort when getting it wrong would be expensive, instead of rewriting your prompt five times.

30 things to try this month 🔑

Your files and your computer (Cowork, desktop app)

Writing and content

Business and work

Learning and research

Everyday life

Code (no experience needed)

Your first week 📅

• Day 1: set it up. Install the desktop app. Write your profile and instructions: who you are, what you do, and how you want answers. Check Settings → Privacy and decide on "Help improve our AI models."
• Day 2: make a project. Pick something you're already working on. Add instructions and two reference files. Do the rest of the week inside it.
• Day 3: ask for a file, not an answer. Give it one real job that ends in a spreadsheet, document or deck.
• Day 4: raise the effort. Ask the same hard question at Medium and then at Extra high, and compare the answers.
• Day 5: check its memory. Ask what it remembers about you, and fix or delete what's wrong.
• Day 6: automate one thing. Set up a scheduled task, like a weekly summary or a daily check. (Pro and above.)
• Day 7: find where it goes wrong. Give it a question you already know the answer to and see where it slips. That calibrates everything you do with it afterwards.

The honest bit 🙏

Where to next 📚

This page is the map. These are the deep dives, all tested the same way:

• 5 Claude Code shortcuts most people never find — /btw, /recap, double Esc rewind, /branch and the Ctrl+S stash.
• 25 Claude GitHub repos worth actually using — the skills, memory and automation repos that make Claude better at real work.
• The AI job search system — the auto-apply workflow in this guide needs a paid plan; this is the full resume, ATS and interview system built on one.
• Build a $5,000 AI receptionist in a weekend — Claude Code writes the entire app from one prompt. The best proof of what "agentic" actually means.
• Let ChatGPT & Claude edit your video — Cowork, one prompt, finished reel.

Sources 🔗

Every fact on this page comes from Anthropic's own pages. I didn't use any third-party blogs.

• Plans and pricing— claude.com/pricing
• Support documentation— support.claude.com — Pro, Max, Team, Enterprise, usage credits, all features
• Claude Opus 5.5 announcement— anthropic.com/claude-opus-5-5 — 22 Sep 2026
• Claude Sonnet 5.5 announcement— anthropic.com/claude-sonnet-5-5 — 28 Sep 2026
• Claude Haiku 5.5 announcement— anthropic.com/claude-haiku-5-5 — 7 Oct 2026
• Monthly API credits for Max and Team— support.claude.com — Oct 7 2026
• Model documentation— platform.claude.com — model docs, effort docs, deprecations
• Claude Code— code.claude.com
• Ads policy— anthropic.com/news/claude-is-a-space-to-think
• Privacy— privacy.claude.com · anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms