Choosing Claude Features: Chat, Research, Projects and Artifacts

1.Start from chat: the quick-answer baseline

Every other feature in this lesson builds on a plain conversation with Claude. You ask, Claude answers, and the exchange stays inside that one chat. Most questions need nothing more. When the answer depends on current information, you can turn on web search in the same chat. Anthropic's guidance describes web search as the right tool for straightforward, factual queries that one or two tool calls can answer. Examples include the weather, details about one company, recent headlines, or last night's game result.

Web search also suits you when you want to steer. You tell Claude roughly what to look up, and Claude runs the searches and analyses the results. Extended thinking covers the opposite case: hard reasoning, such as maths, debugging or weighing ethical arguments, where nothing needs to come from the web. Extended thinking on its own is the choice when you only want Claude to think harder about the question, with no searching and no integrations.

So the baseline already gives you three settings: a plain answer, a quick lookup with web search, or deeper reasoning with extended thinking. The features in the rest of the lesson cover jobs this baseline handles poorly. Those are investigations that need many searches, context you would otherwise re-upload every time, and output you will keep refining and hand to someone else.

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2.Research: agentic, multi-source investigation with citations

Research is what you use when one or two searches will not settle the question. Claude works agentically. It runs several searches, and each one builds on the last. Claude decides what to investigate next, explores different angles of your question, and works through open questions systematically. Anthropic positions it for gathering that takes five or more tool calls over one to three minutes. The output is a longer report that brings many sources together with proper citations, so you can check each claim against where it came from.

Research is not limited to the public web. When you have connected internal sources, such as Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs, Claude searches them alongside the web. That makes it suitable for jobs like comparing business competitors, updating out-of-date internal documents with current information from the web, or prioritising action items from your calendar and email. You can also combine Research with extended thinking. Claude then plans its approach carefully before it gathers information, which suits work like analysing several scientific papers.

To turn it on, click the plus button at the bottom left of the chat box and choose Research. A blue indicator appears at the bottom of the chat window, and clicking it again turns Research off. Then ask your question. Research has a cost. It counts against the same limits as an ordinary conversation, but it uses them up faster because Claude retrieves many sources and writes a full report. Don't use it for a question that web search answers in one call.

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3.Projects: shared context for recurring work

Research is for one large investigation. Projects are for the opposite situation: work you come back to repeatedly. A Project is a self-contained workspace with its own chat history and knowledge base. You upload documents, text, code or other files to the Project's knowledge base once, and Claude uses them as background in every chat inside that Project. You can also set project instructions that shape every chat in the Project, for example a formal tone or answering from the point of view of a particular role or industry.

Note exactly what is shared. The knowledge base and the instructions apply to every chat in the Project. The chats themselves do not share context with each other. If you paste a document into one chat, a different chat in the same Project will not see it. Information carries across chats only when you add it to the project knowledge base. The name and description you give a Project are labels for you, and Claude cannot see them.

Projects are available on every plan, including Free. Free users can create up to five. Paid plans add retrieval augmented generation (RAG). When project knowledge approaches the context window limit, Claude switches to RAG mode automatically and searches your files for the relevant parts instead of loading everything at once. This can expand capacity by up to 10x, with no setup. Team and Enterprise plans add sharing. A creator can share a Project with specific people, by bulk email list, or with the whole organisation, using two permission levels: Can view and Can edit.

Consider a team where everyone keeps re-uploading the same reference files into their own chats. The fix is to put those files in one Project's knowledge base and share the Project. Sharing requires a Team or Enterprise plan, and members with Can view access can still chat inside the Project.

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4.Artifacts: durable, editable deliverables

Projects keep your inputs in one place. Artifacts do the same for your outputs. An artifact is something Claude makes that you would show to someone else: a design, a deck, a document, a dashboard or a small interactive tool. It opens beside the conversation, so you can keep chatting while it stays visible. You can edit it, return to it later and share it. Claude creates an artifact when the content is substantial and self-contained (usually more than 15 lines), likely to be edited, iterated on or reused outside the conversation, understandable without the chat around it, and likely to be referred back to.

You can change an artifact in several ways. You can ask Claude to change it. In artifacts made from a template, you can type, edit a slide or move elements on a canvas yourself, and the artifact updates live. In a document, you can highlight a passage and choose Edit with Claude, so Claude knows exactly which part you mean. If you want to try a different direction without losing your current work, edit an earlier message. That creates a separate version of the chat with its own artifacts. Everything you make is saved in the Artifacts tab in the sidebar, so you can reach it from any conversation.

Two practical details matter. First, artifacts need Cloud code execution and file creation turned on under Settings > Capabilities, or under Organization settings > Capabilities on Team and Enterprise. Second, what you can do depends on the surface. Web and Desktop let you create, edit and share artifacts and start from templates. On iOS and Android you can ask for an artifact and view it, but templates, editing and sharing settings require web or Desktop. Artifacts can also call Claude directly and act as small apps. When other people use a shared app, the usage counts against their own plan limits, not yours.

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5.Putting it together: picking the feature for the job

There is one more option. Claude Cowork brings Claude Code's agentic capabilities to knowledge work beyond coding, and it is available on the paid plans: Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise. The documentation also notes that Cowork and chat are merging on some Pro and Max accounts. On those accounts you ask for what you need, and Claude decides whether to give a quick answer or take it on as a task. For this objective, think of Cowork as the choice when you want Claude to carry out a task, not just answer a question.

In practice, look at what the request involves. A single fact or a quick lookup is a chat, with web search if it needs current information. A question that needs many searches, connected email or calendar data, and a cited report is a job for Research. Context you would otherwise upload again and again belongs in a Project. A deliverable you will keep refining and then share should be an Artifact. These features can be combined. Research works inside a RAG-enabled Project, and any chat can produce an artifact.

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Exam traps

Each one states something that sounds right. Open it to see what is actually true.

1. 1.Turning on web search is enough to use Research on any plan.Why is that wrong?

   Research has two requirements: a paid plan (Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise) and web search turned on. Free users cannot use it.

   Covered in Research: agentic, multi-source investigation with citations

2. 2.Projects are a paid feature, so a Free user cannot organise related chats into a dedicated workspace.Why is that wrong?

   Projects are available on every plan, including Free, which allows up to five. Only RAG expansion is paid, and sharing requires Team or Enterprise.

   Covered in Projects: shared context for recurring work

3. 3.Anything uploaded in one chat inside a Project is automatically available to the Project's other chats.Why is that wrong?

   Only content in the project knowledge base is shared across the Project's chats. Files uploaded inside a single chat stay in that chat.

   Covered in Projects: shared context for recurring work

4. 4.Artifacts are a paid-plan feature.Why is that wrong?

   Every plan, including Free, can create artifacts in a chat. Only templates (Design, Slides, Docs) are limited to paid plans.

   Covered in Artifacts: durable, editable deliverables