I started using Claude instead of these 5 apps — and I'm not going back

By  Rob LeFebvre Published Apr 29, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT Rob LeFebvre is an editor and writer focusing on consumer and enterprise technologies for a broad range of outlets. He’s been writing online for more than 15 years; before that he was a special educator for kids with severe disabilities. Rob has been an Editorial Director at Lifewire, a news writer at Engadget, and a senior contributor at Cult of Mac. He's written about PCs, Macs, mobile phones, and games, created newsrooms from the ground up, and has extensive experience reviewing hardware, software, and games across his career.  Sign in to your MakeUseOf account I use a lot of different apps for a lot of different purposes. Juggling apps is something we all can relate to, right? I've used Grammarly for editing, Adobe Acrobat for PDFs, Perplexity for research, note taking apps (Obsidian, Notion) I rarely open, and Pocket for reading content later, which I'd always meant to use more before it shut down. Some of these apps offer paid subscriptions, some are free, but they all cost time and brainspace to manage, maintain, and switch between. Sure, "there's an app for that" made sense for a while, with different tools for different jobs. Now, though, we've got LLM and AI tools like Claude. After using Claude for a while, I found out I could use if for things beyond just the basics. Instead of just summarizing a large contract, for example, you can ask Claude to annotate the whole thing. You can get Claude to do some competi...