I didn’t think I would give up on NotebookLM. It felt magical from the day it was introduced. Like many power users, I fed it my PDFs, notes, and research papers and let it do a neat summary and become famous. Audio Reviews lift heavy loads.
But over the past few weeks, that magic has started to hit the ceiling. As my research required less passive summarization and more active execution, cracks began to appear in the notebook format.
I recently migrated my entire research workflow to Claude Projects and the transition has been so positive that it has made my old workflow obsolete. Anthropic’s Projects is the power user upgrade you didn’t know you needed.
Claude Projects collaborates
Don’t just find information from sources
after Using NotebookLM and Claude Projects side by sideI realized that these two tools are built on different philosophies.
You can think of NotebookLM as a high-end reading room. If you feed it hundreds of pages of documents, it’s effective at summarizing dense text and connecting hidden dots between different files.
If your only goal is to study, understand, and self-check your data, NotebookLM is hard to beat. But the moment you actually do something with that information, you hit a wall.
it is there Claude Projects is coming. He doesn’t just want to help me read my information; wants to help build its next iteration.
I realized this distinct difference while building a project for a client’s jewelry business, Swami Jewels, on both platforms. I threw the same background documents, product details, and notes into both tools to see how they would perform in real-world tasks.
So I asked both of them to find the relevant earring information and make it more attractive. NotebookLM struggled right away. It basically repeated what I wrote in a slightly different order.
And Claude immediately understood the task. She extracted relevant earring details from the document, matched the tone of our brand, and then used her creative thinking to write superior, punchy copy that was ready for publication.
Next, I pushed them on some hardware and asked for ideas to redesign our website’s homepage based on our brand documents.
NotebookLM did a good job. This gave me a general, straight bulleted list of things I should probably include on the website.
Claude completely blew it out of the water. Instead of vague advice, he laid out the whole plan. He clearly described the exact sections, gave me specific title tags like H2 to use, told me which visuals should go where, and wrote the actual copy for the hero sections.
It gave me a blueprint that I could immediately hand off to a developer or use to start coding myself.
NotebookLM is great for helping you understand where you are. But when it comes time to take action and create futures, Claude Projects is in a league of its own.
Claude Projects supports third-party software
It works with Canva, Adobe and even GitHub
NotebookLM is a walled garden. This forces you to play seriously within the Google ecosystem. It works flawlessly if you have research or project files living on Google Drive, or if you’re capturing transcripts from a YouTube video.
But let’s be honest: real-life projects don’t just happen in Google Docs. In my daily workflow, my assets are scattered across different platforms.
When I’m managing a branding project or putting together a complex research deck, my data is alive and moving. I have code repositories in GitHub, design assets and templates in Canva, brand guidelines in my Adobe account, and shared team assets in Google Drive.
Putting all this together with NotebookLM means a tedious routine of exporting, converting and manually uploading static PDF or text files. Claude Projects solves this by playing nice with third-party apps that I actually use.
I can close a repository to attract documents, feed project pitches and asset frameworks to ensure that the copy and layout ideas that Claude creates remain strictly on brand. For real-life projects, this open ecosystem is a game changer.
Instead of wasting time trying to convert my files to a format that Google likes, I can leave my assets where they belong and let Clod put them together.
Big AI knowledge shift
At the end of the day, a large context window is only as good as what you can actually do with it. NotebookLM will always be the place for quick deep dives and accessible summaries, but for me, Claude Projects wins for my complex workflows.
Also, I like how Claude Projects is neatly integrated into the Claude desktop app, while NotebookLM is barebones on the Gemini web and you have to go to the main page to unlock all its features.
For me, notebooks serve their purpose, but the project space is where the real work happens now.
- OS
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Windows, macOS
- Individual price
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A free plan is available; $17/month Pro plan
Claude is an AI platform that competes with ChatGPT and Gemini.
