Claude: guides & tutorials

Most scraping guides stop at the one-off run. The real leverage is recurring data: the prices, reviews, and listings that change while you are not watching. Cowork's scheduled tasks turn a single scrape into a standing job.

Agent Skills are modular capabilities that extend Claude: each Skill packages instructions, metadata, and optional resources that Claude uses automatically when they are relevant to your request. Instead of re-explaining how you like to scrape every time, you encode it once, and Claude reaches for it on its own.

This guide builds a scraping skill that calls Apify, and points you at the official plugin if you would rather not start from scratch.

Anthropic ships both Claude Code and Claude Cowork on the same agentic architecture, which confuses a lot of people into thinking they overlap. They do not. The difference is who each is for and where it runs.

Claude Cowork is Anthropic's "hand Claude real work" surface: it runs on the same agentic engine as Claude Code but with no terminal, so it can take on multi-step tasks and finish them for you. Cowork can already search the web and, with computer use, drive a browser a page at a time. What it has no answer for is bulk structured extraction: paginating a result grid, holding a schema across thousands of rows, rotating proxies, and surviving anti-bot defences. That is exactly what Apify adds: a store of pre-built scrapers Cowork can call as tools.

This guide connects the two and turns "get me this web data" into a spreadsheet, with no code.

Create a free Apify account (free monthly credits) →

Both Claude and Gemini can open your spreadsheet and answer questions about it. That is where the similarity ends.

Claude dissects complex, multi-sheet financial models and catches errors a human auditor might miss. Gemini lives inside Google Sheets natively and can fill entire columns with AI-generated data using a single formula. They are solving different problems, and choosing the wrong one for your workflow will cost you hours.

This comparison is based on official documentation from Anthropic and Google (verified May 2026), published benchmarks, and hands-on testing patterns reported across analyst and developer communities. No vendor-supplied claims are taken at face value.

Quick verdict:

Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers extend Claude Desktop and Claude Code with live access to external tools: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data, web scraping, email, spreadsheets, and more. For marketing and sales teams, the right MCP server combination turns Claude into a research assistant, CRM manager, and content producer, all from a chat interface.

This guide covers 10 high-impact MCP servers for non-engineering business functions, with installation instructions and real-world usage examples. If you do not have a Claude account yet, you can try Claude free for a week and set these up the same day.

TL;DR:

Prerequisites:

• Claude Desktop installed (download)
• MCP works on Claude Free with usage limits; Claude Pro (~$20/mo) raises limits for heavier business use
• Budget 15+ minutes per server (OAuth / Google Cloud setup often takes longer than API-key-only servers)

Claude Code's Skills system turns it from a coding assistant into a configurable business operations agent. Skills are sharable instruction packages (Markdown files with scripts, templates, and evaluation criteria, invoked as slash commands) that you install in your project's .claude/skills/ directory. New to the tool? You can try Claude free for a week before committing to a paid plan.

This guide covers the 10 most impactful skills for marketing, prospecting, and business growth. Skills 1–5 include complete, ready-to-install SKILL.md files. Skills 6–10 are quick-reference starters, so expand them with your own guardrails and output formats before using in production.

TL;DR:

Prerequisites:

• Claude Code installed (curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash on macOS/Linux/WSL, or irm https://claude.ai/install.ps1 | iex in Windows PowerShell) with a paid Claude Pro ($20/mo) or Claude Max (from $100/mo: 5x plan at $100, 20x plan at $200; see anthropic.com/pricing)
• Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers configured (Apify, Google Sheets), as needed per skill. Six of the ten skills below call the Apify MCP server for web data, so set that one up first: see connect Apify to Claude Desktop.

Andrej Karpathy coined "vibe coding" in early 2025 — the practice of describing what you want to an AI and letting it generate the code, barely reading the output, and just running it until it works. By April 2026, developers are using Claude Code to go from idea to deployed, revenue-ready SaaS MVP in days, not months.

This guide provides the practical framework: what actually works, what breaks, and the phase-by-phase approach that turns "vibes" into a product people pay for.

TL;DR:

Prerequisites:

• Claude Code installed with Claude Pro ($20/mo) or Max ($100/mo)
• GitHub account
• Vercel account (free tier)
• Supabase account (free tier)
• Comfortable reading and editing code (TypeScript/JavaScript), working with CLI tools, and following API documentation. You don't need to write complex algorithms from scratch — Claude Code handles most generation — but you should be able to review and adjust the code it produces.

Claude Desktop supports Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and connectors for both free and paid users. For small teams, this means Claude Desktop is no longer just a chat window. With the right MCP servers it becomes a central operations hub that can read and act on Slack, Google Drive, Notion, CRM tools, and live web data without writing code.

This guide shows how Claude Desktop plus the right MCP servers can substitute for key workflows in five common paid SaaS tools (or significantly reduce your reliance on them), with setup instructions for non-technical teams and honest assessments of where this approach falls short. To be clear up front: MCP lets Claude Desktop work with these tools on your behalf. It does not literally delete every SaaS subscription, and we flag the cases where you still need the original tool.

TL;DR:

Prerequisites:

• Claude Desktop installed (download)
• Claude Free, Pro ($20/mo), or Team ($25/user/mo) subscription. MCP works on Free, but heavy daily use hits the message limits fast, so Pro or higher is realistic for business use. New to Claude? You can try Claude free for a week.
• 15 minutes per MCP server setup
• No app development required. You will edit a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) config file and run npx commands in your terminal.

No single AI coding tool wins at everything in 2026. Claude Code dominates terminal-first agentic workflows. Cursor leads in IDE-integrated code generation. GitHub Copilot offers the broadest IDE support and deepest GitHub integration. Windsurf delivers the best price-to-feature ratio for indie developers.

This guide compares all four based on official feature documentation, community benchmarks (linked), and developer reports from Reddit, Hacker News, and Discord, not marketing claims. Updated for May 2026.

Quick verdict: