ChatGPT Enterprise vs ChatGPT Plus: which should businesses use?

OpenAI has given businesses a dilemma with the launch of the new ChatGPT Enterprise tier. Do they stick with ChatGPT Plus or scale up to the new subscription tier, with the extra features that brings?

Here, we’ll examine exactly what ChatGPT Enterprise offers in addition to ChatGPT Plus and whether businesses looking to exploit AI are better sticking or twisting. Especially if they are wondering whether to embrace Microsoft 365 Copilot, which remains in the testing phase.

ChatGPT Enterprise vs ChatGPT Plus: data security

One of the big reasons why businesses are nervous of AI tools such as ChatGPT is fear over what’s happening to their data. Could business data be intercepted in transit? How’s it stored by OpenAI? Will it be used to train future language models and thus potentially leak sensitive information in replies to other customers?

OpenAI attempts to allay many of these fears with ChatGPT Enterprise. The ChatGPT Enterprise product page highlights that the service is “SOC 2 compliant and all conversations are encrypted in transit and at rest”.

However, as The Register points out here, much of that is also true of ChatGPT Plus. All conversations with ChatGPT are encrypted in transit, no matter what tier you’re on. Likewise, stored conversations.

That said, the ChatGPT Enterprise privacy policy states that “​​authorized OpenAI employees will only ever access your data for the purposes of resolving incidents, recovering end user conversations with your explicit permission, or where required by applicable law”. In other words, there is a way of accessing potentially confidential business information and you’re relying on OpenAI to have processes in place to secure that data properly.

Admin features

Perhaps the best reason for businesses to upgrade to ChatGPT Enterprise is the administration and collaboration features it offers.

Enterprise has a dedicated admin console, letting companies add or remove users without having to individually create each account and re-enter payment details, for example. An analytics dashboard will also provide insights into how much the service is being used, allowing companies to make more evidence-based judgements on whether it’s a worthwhile investment.

Enterprise also allows employees to share chat templates and build common workflows. This could be a huge timesaver, meaning staff don’t need to start from scratch on repetitive tasks. Shared workflows should also lead to more consistent results from the AI, allowing an AI expert or prompt engineer to create workflows that can be used right across the company.

Usage caps

One of the big reasons to upgrade to GPT Plus in the first place was to dodge those annoying messages that the service was down to due heavy demand. However, ChatGPT Plus is not unlimited: usage is capped at 50 messages every three hours.

ChatGPT Enterprise has no such usage caps, and what’s more it allows longer inputs, four times the size of those available to ChatGPT Plus customers.

It also provides unlimited access to advanced data analysis, previously known as the Code Interpreter. This is a very powerful feature that allows you to upload files such as Excel spreadsheets and have the AI analyse the data or produce data visualisations, such as a map generated from postcode data.

ChatGPT Enterprise vs ChatGPT Plus: price

Now we come down to brass tacks. How much does all this new functionality cost?

ChatGPT Plus has a flat $20 per user, per month fee. It’s not so straightforward with ChatGPT Enterprise, where potential customers are invited to contact the OpenAI sales team to discuss pricing. Doubtless it will depend on the number of seats you require and your geographical location, amongst other factors.

OpenAI says it will be “onboarding as many enterprises as we can over the next few weeks”, so it may be that you can’t get instant access, either. We suspect that the company will only add new enterprises gradually to avoid overwhelming the system with new users.

Verdict

To be clear, we’ve not used ChatGPT Enterprise, so can’t be definite on which provides the better service. However, judging by the features on offer, it seems likely that – as the name suggests – ChatGPT Enterprise will largely benefit bigger companies who have large teams of employees looking to deploy AI tools. For smaller firms with only a handful of users, ChatGPT Enterprise could well prove to be overkill.

Much will depend on the price negotiated with OpenAI’s sales team, of course. And with Microsoft expected to launch its enterprise-grade, ChatGPT-based AI tools — to be clear, I’m talking about Microsoft 365 Copilot once more — in the coming months, it might also be worth waiting to see what the competition offers.