Choosing between Claude Cowork or Chat
Same Claude, two ways of working. Chat is a conversation you steer turn by turn. Cowork is a delegation: you describe the goal, Claude works across your files and tools, and you come back to a finished result.
- CategoryProfessional
- ProductClaude Cowork
- Reading timeWatch time5minmin
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Claude Cowork gives you an agentic way of working with Claude. Compared to Chat (available on the web, desktop, and mobile), Claude Cowork can run on your computer and complete work across your files, browser, and tools. This tutorial covers when to use it instead of Chat.
Reach for Chat when you have a one-off question or want a thought partner as you work through a problem. Also consider using Chat when the task is light on context, without a spread of files or sources. You're in the conversation the whole time, and the output is text you'll read or take elsewhere. Chat starts instantly, it's available across Claude apps (web, mobile, desktop app) and it remembers you across conversations through Memory.
Reach for Cowork when there's a clear deliverable and the work touches your files or tools — a document to produce, a spreadsheet to build from a folder of inputs, research to pull together across several places, an action to take in your browser. You'd rather hand off the whole job and review what comes back.
How a Claude Cowork task runs
Cowork runs on the same agentic engine as Claude Code — the loop that lets Claude plan, work across tools, and check its own output — applied to your files and apps instead of a codebase. A Cowork task can follow these steps:
In Cowork, you can delegate, but stay in control. Claude's actions show up in the sidebar, you can interrupt and redirect at any point, and it asks for your approval before anything consequential — sending an email, posting a message, changing a file outside your working folder.
What only Cowork can do
- Access your local folders — Cowork reads and writes files where they are on your computer, with no upload or download step. Give it a folder and the output is saved next to the inputs.
- Navigate your logged-in browser — with Claude in Chrome connected, Cowork opens pages as you: vendor portals, internal dashboards, forms behind a login.
- Reach your desktop apps — with computer use enabled, Cowork can open and operate native applications on your machine: edit a PowerPoint, fill a form in a desktop tool, click through software that has no API.
- Delegate parallel work — when a task has independent parts (research five companies, check every contract in a folder), Cowork runs them at the same time instead of one after another.
- Run tasks on a schedule — Cowork tasks can run on a schedule you set, so recurring work happens without you starting it.
Get started
Select Cowork in the mode picker on the home page. If you haven't tried Claude Cowork before, install a plugin for your role or pick an ambitious task that spans many steps, files, or sources to get started.