Your team can use the Claude AI app, just not on personal accounts

The Claude AI app is free to download on iPhone, Android, Mac and Windows, and the free plan is enough to find out whether it suits you. Our view is that, for a business, the app matters far less than the account behind it, so put your team on a Team plan before client details go anywhere near it.

Claude is the AI assistant made by Anthropic, and the app is the same assistant packaged for your phone or computer, so when you're signed in your chats, projects and memory sync between devices. Most people searching for it want to know whether it's free, whether it'll run on their machine and whether it's better than ChatGPT, and each of those has a short answer. For an owner, though, the more useful question is which account your staff are typing into.

The short version

• The Claude AI app is free on every platform it supports, and the free plan includes web search, memory and file creation, with usage limits that reset every five hours.
• On Free, Pro and Max accounts each user decides whether their chats can train Anthropic's models, and data used that way is kept for five years.
• Claude Team costs $25 a seat a month, or $20 billed annually, and doesn't train on your data by default.
• ChatGPT's prices are almost the same and it has the same split between personal and business plans, so choose by what your team actually prefers using.
• Install the app widely, but move work use onto one business account before client details go into it.

Is the Claude AI app free?

Yes. Anthropic's download page says the apps work on every plan, including Free, with some features kept for paying customers. The free tier also gives you more than most people expect, because Claude's pricing page lists web search, memory across conversations, file creation, connections to other apps, and Claude's design, slides and docs tools.

What the free plan limits is how much you can use it. Allowances reset on a rolling five-hour window, and the free plan is pitched at "everyday questions". Pro is listed at $20 a month, or $17 a month billed annually, and gives at least five times the free usage per session, while Max starts at $100 a month.

If you upgrade from inside the iPhone app, Apple handles the billing, and the UK App Store listing shows Pro at £20 a month or £199.99 a year, Max 5x at £119.99 and Max 20x at £249.99. So before tapping subscribe on a phone, we'd check what the website charges at checkout. That's no knock on the app itself, which had 4.7 stars from 33,000 ratings on the same listing when we checked, and sat second in the free Productivity chart.

Where does the Claude app run, and what does each version add?

You'll get the desktop versions from claude.com/download and the phone versions from the App Store or Google Play, and you sign in with the same account everywhere. As of October 2026, Anthropic's download page and its voice mode help article list the following.

The desktop app is where the heavier work happens. Cowork is Anthropic's tool for handing Claude a longer task to work through on your computer, and its sessions are stored on the device, though on Linux both Cowork and Claude Code need a paid plan. The phone app, on the other hand, is built for talking. Voice mode is in beta on every plan and works hands-free by default, and once they're connected it can reach Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Slack. Free accounts can connect one tool and paid plans can connect more.

The account your staff use matters more than the app

Microsoft's UK research found that 71% of UK employees have used unapproved consumer AI tools at work, and 51% still do every week, in a survey of 2,003 employees that Censuswide ran in October 2025. More than a quarter, 28%, said they did it because their employer offered no approved option, and only 32% were worried about the privacy of the company or customer data they were pasting in.

That's why the account matters with Claude. In August 2025 Anthropic changed its consumer terms for Free, Pro and Max accounts, so each user now decides whether their new chats can be used to train Anthropic's models. If they say yes, that data is kept for five years, and if they say no, chats are still kept for 30 days. Team and Enterprise accounts come under Anthropic's commercial terms, so the change doesn't apply to them, and the pricing page lists "no model training by default" as a Team feature.

So a sales manager who pastes a client's pricing into a personal Pro account on their phone is making a data decision for your business, under terms you've never read. Claude Team costs $25 a seat a month, or $20 billed annually, and covers 2 to 150 people. It adds central billing, single sign-on so staff log in with their work account, and admin control over which apps Claude can connect to.

Can't we just ask staff to switch training off?

Well, it's a fair objection, and it partly holds. Anyone on Free or Pro can turn model training off in their privacy settings, and Anthropic says deleted conversations won't be used for future training, so a careful sole trader on a free account is in a reasonable position.

For a team, though, a personal setting is a promise you can't check. You can't see who has opted in, and Anthropic says turning it off later doesn't remove data that's already been used for training. When someone leaves, their chat history about your clients goes with them, on an account you never controlled. Against all that, a ten-person firm on annual billing would pay $200 a month for Team, and Microsoft's respondents said they saved an average of 7.75 hours a week each on admin, which makes it a small bill.

Is Claude better than ChatGPT for a small business?

For most office work either will do the job, and the prices are almost identical. AI Toolbox's October 2026 pricing guide puts ChatGPT Plus at $20 a month and ChatGPT Business at $25 per user monthly or $20 annually, with a two-seat minimum, and notes that OpenAI doesn't use Business workspace data to train its models. In other words, both companies draw the same line between personal and business plans.

We'd pick one, buy its business tier, and stop paying for a mixture of personal subscriptions that turn up on expense claims. To choose, give both free versions the same real jobs for a week, such as a tricky client email, a summary of a long contract and a first draft of a proposal, and whichever one your team keeps going back to is the right choice.

What the Claude app is good for on a normal working day

Microsoft found the most common uses were drafting workplace messages at 49%, reports and presentations at 40%, and finance tasks at 22%, and the Claude app handles all of these well. The phone version adds something a browser tab can't, because on the drive home you can talk through tomorrow's diary with your calendar connected and find the transcript waiting in your chat history when you sit down. On the desktop, the bigger step up is handing Claude a folder of documents instead of pasting text into a box.

It stops being an app and becomes a project when you want Claude working inside your own systems without anyone typing, for example reading every new enquiry, updating the CRM and drafting the quote. That's the AI automation work we do at Swarm Labs, and it usually means connecting tools you already pay for, which our integrations library covers. If your team is still getting to grips with Claude, our post on learning Claude with hands-on tutorials is a good next read.

Get the app on everyone's phone, on the right plan

Install the Claude app, let people try it on the free plan, and set a date for work use to move onto a Team account. That one change takes your team's AI use out of personal accounts you can't see and puts it into one you pay for and control. And if you'd like Claude doing some of the work without anyone asking, talk to us about what to automate first.

Sources

1. Claude: Download Claude
2. Claude: Plans and pricing
3. Anthropic: Updates to our consumer terms
4. Apple App Store UK: Claude by Anthropic
5. Claude Help Centre: Using voice mode on Claude mobile apps
6. Microsoft UK Stories: Rise in shadow AI tools raising security concerns for UK organisations
7. AI Toolbox: ChatGPT pricing