Pricing & Plans
What is the difference between Claude Free and Pro?
Quick answer
Free gives Sonnet 4.6, Artifacts, memory, and basic tools with a low usage budget. Pro ($20) adds the top Opus model, Claude Code, Research mode, higher priority, and roughly 5x the limits. The jump is about power features and headroom, not a different app.
Free and Pro are the same Claude with different ceilings and unlocks. On free you get Claude Sonnet 4.6 as your model, Artifacts for documents and code, chat memory, basic web search, and file uploads, all within a modest usage budget that a long session can exhaust.
Pro at $20 changes three things. First, models: you gain access to the top-tier Opus 4.8 for the hardest reasoning and coding, on top of Sonnet and Haiku. Second, tools: Claude Code (the agentic coding environment) and Research mode (multi-source sourced reports) become available, and these are significant, not cosmetic. Third, capacity: roughly five times the usage and priority access when demand is high.
So the practical difference is felt in two ways. If you do light writing and Q and A, free's Sonnet 4.6 covers it and you may never notice the gap. If you code, do deep research, produce high-stakes documents, or simply use Claude a lot, you will feel free's ceiling and the absence of Opus and Claude Code, which is precisely what Pro fixes.
For most people evaluating the two, the test is simple: use free until it gets in your way, then upgrade. If it never gets in your way, you have your answer.
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