I didn’t think I would abandon NotebookLM. From its introduction, it felt like magic. Like many power users, I fed it my PDFs, notes, and research papers, and let its famously wordy summaries Audio summaries do the heavy lifting.
But in recent weeks, that magic began to peak. When my research demanded less passive summaries and more active execution, cracks in the notebook format began to appear.
I recently migrated my entire research workspace to Claude Projects and the change was so positive that it made my old workflow obsolete. Here’s why Anthropic’s Projects is the power-user upgrade you didn’t know you needed.
Claude Projects is a collaborator
Don’t look for information only from sources.
After using NotebookLM and Claude Projects in parallelI realized that these two tools are based on different philosophies.
You can think of NotebookLM as a high-end reading room. If you feed it hundreds of pages of documents, it is effective at summarizing dense text and connecting hidden dots between different files.
If your only goal is to study, understand, and evaluate your data, NotebookLM is hard to beat. But the moment you actually do something with that information, you hit a wall.
That’s where Enter Claude Projects. He doesn’t just want to help me read my data; wants to help me build the next version.
I noticed this clear difference when I set up a project for a client’s jewelry business, Swami Jewels, on both platforms. I put the exact same background documents, product details, and notes into both tools to see how they would handle real-world tasks.
So, I asked both of them to find the relevant information about the earrings and make it more attractive. NotebookLM immediately ran into problems. I was basically repeating what I had already written in a slightly different order.
Claude, on the other hand, instantly understood the task. He extracted the relevant details from the document’s backlog, matched the tone of our brand, and then used his creative reasoning to write superior, compelling copy that was ready to publish.
Then, I pushed them a bit on the hardware and asked them for ideas to redesign the homepage of our website based on our brand documents.
NotebookLM did a good job. It gave me a generic, flat list of things I should probably include on a website.
Claude pulled him completely out of the water. Instead of giving vague advice, he mapped out the entire design. He clearly outlined the exact sections, gave me specific header tags like H2 to use, told me which images should go where, and wrote the actual copy for the main sections.
It gave me a practical model that I could immediately hand off to a developer or use to start coding myself.
NotebookLM is great at helping you understand where you are. But when it comes time to take action and create what comes next, Claude Projects is in a league of its own.
Claude Projects supports third-party applications
Works with Canva, Adobe and even GitHub
NotebookLM is a walled garden. It forces you to play strictly within the Google ecosystem. If you have research files or projects within Google Drive, or are pulling transcripts from a YouTube video, it works perfectly.
But let’s be honest: real-life projects don’t just happen in a Google Doc. In my daily workflow, my assets are scattered across different platforms.
When I manage a brand project or put together a complex research platform, my data is alive and moving. I have code repositories on GitHub, design assets and templates on Canva, brand guidelines on my Adobe account, and team shares on Google Drive.
With NotebookLM, incorporating all of this means a tedious routine of manually exporting, converting, and uploading static PDF or text files. Claude Projects solves this by playing nice with the third-party apps I actually use.
I can hook up a repository for documentation, feed project submissions, and the asset framework to ensure the copy and design ideas Claude generates stay strictly on brand. For real-life projects, this open ecosystem is a game-changer.
Instead of spending time translating my files into the format Google likes, I can leave my assets exactly where they belong and let Claude do the heavy lifting of putting them together.
The great knowledge shift in AI
At the end of the day, a massive context window is only as good as what you can actually do with it. NotebookLM will always have a place for quick drill-downs and practical overviews, but for me, Claude Projects wins for my complex workflows.
Also, I like how Claude Projects is seamlessly integrated into the Claude desktop app, while NotebookLM is basic on Gemini web and you have to head to the main page to unlock all its features.
For me, the notebooks serve their purpose, but the project space is where the real work now happens.
- SW
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Windows, MacOS
- Individual prices
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Free plan available; $17/month Pro Plan
Claude is an artificial intelligence platform that rivals ChatGPT and Gemini.
