Claude Chat vs Cowork Explained (& when to use each one)

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]One of the things I've been struggling with recently is Claude chat versus Claude Co-work and when to use each one and what the difference between them are. To be honest, I use Claude Co-work for a lot of my stuff now. But I've been talking and training a lot of people to use Claude and it's a question that keeps coming up because people are aren't sure. So, we're going to go through that in this video. We're going to go through the different features and I'm going to give you a mental model for you to understand when you should be jumping into Claude Co-work versus when you should be going into Claude chat.

[00:00:30]Now, the cool thing about both is you can use them both under one subscription. So, you don't need to pay extra or do anything else to actually use Claude Co-work. You can use a normal pro plan on Claude and have access to all of this. Now, the first thing to talk about is how you access them.

[00:00:47]Claude Co-work has to be used on the desktop app. So, this is what I'm showing you here. This is the Claude desktop app. And on the top right hand side here, you can see it's very small.

[00:00:56]I'll zoom in a little bit so we can actually see. On the top right hand side here, you can see you've got chat mode.

[00:01:01]This is just the same chat mode as you would find in the Claude web browser, for example. It works exactly the same, but it just runs on the desktop app, which you can download for Claude. Now, when you go back to the top left hand side of your bar here and hover over the top, you'll actually see that you can click this next toggle. They've made them really small, which is quite frustrating. You can see you can hit the co-work toggle, and this opens up what feels like a similar window, but it has some important nuance in here because it runs in the same application, but instead of running completely on the cloud. So Claude chat runs completely with all of your files, your conversations, everything sit on the cloud in Anthropic servers. That doesn't happen with Claude co-work. Everything runs locally on your computer. So it's actually using the power of your computer combined with the LLM power of Anthropic and Claude to actually complete tasks. And this is because Co-work actually runs with Claude code under the hood. So essentially you're getting the enjoyable UI and experience of a normal LLM chat like the normal claw chat or if you use chat GPT it's very similar to that but that UI is paired with a coding model underneath and this is where it gives it so much more power in that it can do more than one focused task at a time sequentially.

[00:02:24]Not only can it write and produce files for you, it can actually code up scripts and Python scripts and essentially write code to achieve a task, which is where that extra power comes from. Now, in here as well, to start using co-work, you actually have to work in a file on your computer. So, you can see for me when I go to choose a different folder, it opens up the ability for me to actually work on a particular folder on my computer. Now, for me, I have one specifically called co-work, which I go into, and this is where I store all of my files and information. So, instead of having my Claude chat with Claude projects built into it, these all live on my desktop. So, you can see all of my client folders here are there for me to dig into. So, I can go and select a particular client that I want to be working on. the knowledge information behind that client. Everything we produce and create in Claude is stored in my folder which Claude co-work accesses. So that's the number one big difference is accessing files on your computer. Which means it can also read, edit, delete, control, change files, folders, everything on your computer if you give it access. Whereas when I'm working in clawed chat, I actually have to work either in this architecture. But I can't get it to reach onto my desktop and do stuff there. And to actually set up clients, I have to use the project feature and actually upload files to the clawed interface and UI, which keeps it neat and tidy. Like this is a neat and tidy UI to just be able to use, but it's much harder for me to go and edit these knowledgebased files. or when I'm outputting work, if I'm outputting files, for example, or word documents or PDFs, I actually have to make sure I download them or save them somewhere outside the CL clawed architecture to make them usable and to get them to work. Now, all of this might seem like a small difference in that great, that's just a difference in where I save my files and where my files work from. But it actually has a dramatic effect on how it can actually work because Claude chat gives that traditional AI sort of feel to it. You go in, you put a prompt in the chat UI, you prompt back and forth.

[00:04:33]Claude uses a bit of its logic and its brain. You have some ideas. It maybe saves it to memory and it gives you a response. And then you follow this very single loop. You prompt, it gives an output, it might save the information.

[00:04:45]You prompt, it gives an output, you might save the information. It's kind of just doing one thing at a time, which makes sense to us human brains. Like, I'm working on this task. I'm going to do this one thing. With co-work, you get that power of Claude code underneath.

[00:05:00]So, the UI and the feel of it feels the same. You give it a prompt into the chat UI. Claude brain, Claude's brain goes to work. But then we get the power because it can actually simultaneously it can read and edit files. So in claude chat we might be generating a spreadsheet but then if we go back and we want to edit that spreadsheet in the normal claude chat we pretty much have to generate a whole new one. We can't just go and edit a quick column in there or get it to do some work in that same spreadsheet. It's going to output a whole new file.

[00:05:32]Whereas in Claude Co-work, not only can it read the files and analyze them and all that sort of stuff, extract information, it can edit it. So you could have a spreadsheet, you could say, "Here's some more information, or these are the edits I want to make," it can go into that spreadsheet and make edits directly in that live file, that live spreadsheet without creating a new one.

[00:05:50]So it becomes an actual worker, an assistant, an AI employee for you.

[00:05:55]Adding to that, it can work across multiple app tasks. It can go to multiple connectors. It can run multiple scripts. It can spawn multiple AI agents at one time to all work at the same time for you and essentially automate the workflow. And when you get into the core features of these both, you'll see that actually Claude Co-work has a couple of extra buttons on the left hand side here. One of them is scheduled tasks. So you can set up these tasks that have pretty intense things and they require updates to files. They require multiple tools to be used. they require multiple agents to go and research and find information and verify it. You can actually set them on a schedule, which is really important because when you can schedule a task and it can go and do this amount of work autonomously, then it really does move the needle. Instead of me having to sit and prompt back and forth task by task, chat by chat with Claude chat, Claude co-work can kind of just go off and do all the work. It could go into my calendar, go into my emails, find all the information, send me a daily briefing, and write drafts to all my emails and schedule stuff in my calendar all from one scheduled task.

[00:07:04]Whereas Claude chat can't reach that power. So Claude chat kind of has this single loop of I'm doing one thing, one brainstorm, one piece of writing at a time. Whereas co-work is almost it can work on its own to actually run this loop across multiple areas, multiple files and actually run complex workflows and take multi-step actions. So let me give you an example of what that means and I'm going to show you a task. Let's try and actually run the task in both platforms here. Let's go into co-work and I'm going to select. So, first thing I've got to do is actually I've got to select the folder that I'm working in because I need to work on a folder on my desktop rather than in just the cloud there. So, I'm going to say let's work in my AI Elliot folder, please. And I'm going to set that off. It's going to go and start. It's going to go and make sure it's accessing that folder and it's going to find all the information, the knowledge base that I've got contained in that folder on my desktop. Can you go and scrape LinkedIn? I'm looking for you to scrape 100 job listings of traditional UK office jobs. Fetch all that information and put it into a spreadsheet. Then I would like you to analyze the job descriptions that we pull down for any mentions of AI requirements such as mentions of AI tools like chat GPT cla Gemini perplexity or any other AI terminology that might signal that employers are looking to hire people with AI skills because I want to do research on how many employers or what percentage of employers are actually looking to hire people with AI skills in the UK. Once you have this information, I want you to analyze it and bring me back the headline stats and data and actually visualize it all in a interactive HTML dashboard in a single page that really brings this research and data to life.

[00:08:57]Now, there's quite a lot of steps and a lot of work to do in there. It's got to access tools, it's got to scrape, it's got to create, it's got to edit, it's got to build. Now, if I take that same job and I try to run that, we'll actually set that task off and running.

[00:09:10]If I take that job and I try and run it in clawed chat, it's probably really going to struggle. Even though I've given it a similar project setup and knowledge base, it's probably really going to struggle with this. But I'm going to try it anyway to show you the difference in power that's coming through. So, we're in Claude chat in a Claude project here now. So, it's got the reference about my business and information. If I was trying to do this in Claude chat, what I would actually probably try and do is go and scrape the data and it might be able to handle that. I might have to do that manually externally to get my data. Then I would have to give it the spreadsheet of data and get it to do the analysis and give me the analysis back. Then I'd have to stop for a second. And then I'd have to say, "Okay, now I want you to produce my report. And then we'd have to stop for a second. And then I'd have to keep this chat and talk going back and forth for a long time to actually get it to do the job. We'll see actually how far it gets on this task before it runs out." After a few minutes, we're already starting to see the difference in performance in these two systems. when I'm in the Claude chat here. So, this is Claude chat. I'm actually in conversation we were having to run this task, the UK jobs AI skills demand analysis and it appears to be running like it says stop Claude responses here, but can't see anything. It feels like it's all just got too much or it's actually pulled out the information here and it's finally loaded the information as I'm talking, but Claude reached its tool use limit for this turn. So, it's just stopped working. is run out of the ability to work any further, which is a problem because now I have to hit continue. So although it might continue and it might eventually get through this task very sequentially, I can't step away from my computer. I can't do anything else because I've got to monitor it and keep basically working back and forward with it to actually get through all these different tasks sequentially, one chat at a time. So eventually, so essentially I have to prompt it again to say, "Hey, continue doing the job." It's like having a worker that after five minutes puts down tools and said like, "I'm a bit tired. I'm going to have a break."

[00:11:08]And it won't go back to work until you go and prompt it and say, "Hey, go back to work." Whereas, if we go back over to co-work in the exact same time, this is back in the co-work chat. Now, you'll see we've actually already got the full analysis done. It's actually run and built all of the spreadsheets and information. So, we've got our research that it's scraped from LinkedIn, brought it into a spreadsheet to give us all this information. It's got an analysis summary here with us as well. It's actually then analyzed all of that spreadsheet to spot the patterns and information that only 7% of jobs in the UK actually mention any AI in any form.

[00:11:45]And then it's built us our interactive dashboard that we can keep keep using for presentations or you know I didn't give it much design direction. So it's not like perfectly designed but we could design this much better but it's actually performed a coding task as well. And the beauty of this in coowwork is we haven't had to say can you do the next bit can we work on the next bit. We just gave it one long running task with multiple steps multiple tools and it's done the job for us. And the beauty of this is because these files now live on our desktop, like this spreadsheet lives on my desktop. I don't have to worry about saving it or losing it in the cloud or something. It's just there hardcoded on my computer. I could actually turn this into a scheduled task as well. For example, we could probably do it in the chat here and say, can you turn this into a scheduled task that updates my shed spreadsheet and dashboard every Monday morning? We could turn this into a scheduled task. Again, runs every Monday morning. So it will run every Monday morning and keep that exact same spreadsheet and that exact exact same dashboard live and up to date for us. And you could push that to connectors as well. So you could go and click the plus button in the bottom here. Go and open up different connectors and say actually I want to make sure you're updating my notion page or send it in an email to this person every week or every month to give them an update on whatever that data and information is. Plus, you can see that it could go off and write email campaigns and basically whatever you want it to do. Co-work is a blank canvas for everything you want to do versus over in Claude chat, we're actually still not really working. I said continue, but it it seems to kind of reach its limit of what it can do. It can do one job at a time really well as long as it's not super super heavy, which is how we can start to define our mental model about when you should switch to co-work versus chat. Claude chat is great for writing and editing, research and read reasoning. It might do a bit of coding help, help you debug some code or write a small dashboard or a small app. It can analyze files. So you can give it files to analyze and get insights from. And it can create files, but those are two separate tasks that it has to work on. And it can't go and then edit files live for you. And it can work on multi-step tasks within a small scope. So, we've got to be thinking of a very sequential task like here's some data. Can you analyze it and write a report for me? That's the sort of level that you're working at. Whereas co-work, as we've just discussed, it has local file access. So, it's using the power of your computer, the power of Claude, and is able to read, write, and edit the files on your computer. It can do sub agent coordination. So, it can spawn multiple AI agents to run and work at the same time. So it's going to be able to work faster across multiple things to actually create and keep live these professional outputs over longunning tasks that can be scheduled and access projects in memory. Claude chat has project in memory but it can't do longunning tasks with all that schedule in there as well. So how I like to think about it when should you use claude chat over clawed co-work? Well I like to think of claude chat as one car on a single lane road. it can do one task really well. Whereas Claude Co-work is like having a highway with five lanes and it can run one car in one lane or it can spawn five cars and run in all the lanes at the same time at different speeds with multiple files, multiple tools, multiple automations and you can just give it a destination and it will just figure out itself how to get there.

[00:15:13]You barely even need to set the GPS or keep giving it directions. Claude chat.

[00:15:18]As we've just seen, every so often you need to go, hey, turn left here. Keep going forward. Otherwise, it will just stop working. And if you want to dig deeper into Claude Co-work about how to set up your local file access, the sub agents, the long running tasks, all this stuff, then I've got a full deep dive into how to start using Claude Co-work for yourself right Here.