How to Set Up Claude

Go to claude.ai and click Sign Up. You can register with an email address or use your existing Google or Apple account. No credit card is required.

After a quick email verification, you land directly in the chat interface and can start a conversation immediately. The free tier gives you access to Claude Sonnet, which is fast and capable enough to evaluate whether Claude fits your workflow.

Claude offers several models at different capability levels. Sonnet handles everyday tasks and is the default on the free tier, while Opus provides deeper reasoning for complex work and requires a paid plan. You do not need to choose between them yet. Start with whatever the free tier offers, and upgrade when your tasks consistently benefit from more depth.

Start on the free tier to evaluate the experience. If you decide to upgrade, Pro at $20 per month is the right choice for most individuals.

Pro unlocks Opus (the most capable model), Projects for persistent workspaces, Claude Code, Cowork for desktop automation, and Deep Research. You also get roughly five times the free tier’s daily usage. Most users know within two or three days of regular use whether the free tier covers their needs.

Move to Max ($100 or $200 per month) only if you use Claude for the majority of your workday and regularly hit Pro limits during focused sessions. The two Max tiers provide five times and twenty times Pro capacity, respectively.

For teams, the Team plan at $25 to $30 per user per month adds shared workspaces, admin controls, and centralized billing (minimum five users). Enterprise plans are custom priced and include data residency, SSO, and compliance certifications.

This is the step most people skip and later regret. Before uploading documents or connecting external tools, configure your data handling preferences. Click your profile icon in the bottom left corner, select Settings, and review the privacy controls.

On the free and Pro tiers, Anthropic may use your conversations to improve its models unless you toggle this off. Team and Enterprise plans exclude conversations from training by default with contractual protections.

If you handle sensitive business information, complete this step before your first real work conversation. For regulated industries (healthcare, finance, legal), Enterprise plans provide data residency controls, audit logging, and compliance certifications. The whole thing takes under a minute.

Claude works entirely in your browser, but the desktop app is noticeably faster to access than keeping a tab open. Get it for macOS or Windows from claude.ai/download.

The desktop app adds keyboard shortcuts that launch Claude from any application, voice mode, and direct file uploads from your file system. On paid plans, it also enables Cowork, which lets Claude interact with files and applications on your computer to complete multistep tasks autonomously.

If you use Claude more than a few times per day, the desktop app pays for itself in saved friction within the first week. There is also a Chrome extension (currently in beta) that lets Claude assist with browsing and web research directly in your browser.

Claude is available on iPhone, iPad, and Android through the App Store and Google Play Store. Sign in with your existing account. Conversations, Projects, memory, and plan features all sync across devices automatically.

The mobile app adds voice mode and camera input. Point your camera at a whiteboard, a printed document, or a receipt, and Claude can analyze it directly in the conversation.

This is particularly useful for capturing meeting notes on the go or getting quick answers about physical documents when you are away from your desk. Anything started on your phone picks up exactly where you left it on desktop.

This is the single most impactful configuration step. In the left sidebar, click Projects, then Create a project. Name it after your primary work context, something like “Q3 Product Launch,” “Client Proposals,” or “Engineering: Auth Service.”

In the project instructions field, write the context that should apply to every conversation in this workspace. Include your role, your team structure, key conventions, and formatting preferences. For example: “I am a product manager at a Series B SaaS company. Our sprints run two weeks. I prefer concise responses. Use metric units.”

Specificity matters here more than anywhere else in the setup because vague instructions like “be helpful” produce almost nothing useful. The more concrete your project context, the less time you spend redirecting Claude in individual conversations.

Upload two or three reference documents (a project brief, style guide, or technical spec). Every conversation you start inside this Project draws on these instructions and files automatically, so you never paste the same context twice.

Projects require Pro or above. If you are on the free tier, skip this step for now. You will know you need it when you find yourself explaining your role and preferences at the start of each new conversation.

Claude remembers facts and preferences across conversations through its memory feature. Tell it things directly in any chat: “Remember that our fiscal year starts in April” or “I prefer tables for data comparisons.”

Manage stored memories under Settings. Delete entries as they become outdated or inaccurate. Memory and Projects serve different purposes. Memory stores personal facts and preferences that apply everywhere (your name, your role, how you like responses formatted), while Projects store work specific context for a particular effort.

You can also customize Claude’s default writing style under the Style settings. This lets you adjust how Claude writes across all conversations, whether you want responses that are more formal, more concise, or calibrated for a specific audience. Combined with project level instructions, these settings mean Claude adapts to your communication style rather than the other way around.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) lets you connect Claude to your external tools and data sources. In the chat interface, look for the connectors menu (usually accessible from the tools or integrations panel). Available connectors include Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, GitHub, and dozens of others, with new integrations added regularly.

Start by connecting the one or two tools you rely on most. Once a connector is active, Claude can pull context from that tool directly into your conversations. Ask it to “summarize my unread emails from this morning” or “find the Q3 budget spreadsheet in Drive” or “what meetings do I have tomorrow.”

Google Drive is usually the fastest connector to set up and the one most users find immediately useful.

It helps to know that MCP integrations are strongest for retrieval and analysis. Claude can search your files, surface email threads, and check your calendar, but most connectors are read oriented rather than action oriented. The primary value is giving Claude context about your actual work so its responses draw on real data instead of assumptions.

If you write code, Claude Code is available on Pro and above. It ships as a command line tool, a VS Code extension, and a JetBrains plugin, and it is also accessible through the desktop and web chat interfaces.

Claude Code reads your entire codebase, writes and edits files, runs terminal commands, creates tests, and commits to git. It works across languages and frameworks.

Start by pointing Claude Code at a small project and asking it to explain the codebase structure. Then try a focused task such as a refactor, a test suite for an untested module, or a bug fix from your issue tracker. This gives you a feel for how it navigates and modifies code before you hand it larger changes.

For teams, Claude Code is also available as a Slack integration, letting developers ask codebase questions directly in team channels.