Claude maximalist here. Web/Desktop version for brainstorming and laying out foundation of projects and more backoffice stuff for clients (chat and co-work), Claude Code for all the heavy lifting in coding (automations/scripts/frontend/backend) v0 for kickstarting designs of frontends, perplexity as a default search in my browser, Nano Banana for image generation through API (chatgpt images sometimes for fun only), NotebookLM when I need to parse different sources of info (audios, videos, pdfs, etc) into formatted text or insights (to feed back to Claude). Sometimes Gemini, Grok and ChatGPT to get second opinions on some harder topics - but to feed back to Claude again haha.

from my POV, they are both fairly similar, both agentic assistants with the same engine and power. I find using Claude Code straight from the IDE (VSC, Cursor, etc) a more native feeling and usage, and slightly better for my workflow. Claude code on desktop feels more like a self‑contained “coding surface”, whereas inside the IDE feels more embbed into the coding workflow. If you plan on going heavy on coding, i'd use the IDE extension or terminal version, if you plan on doing mixed work (docs, planning, browsing, small scripts) then probably desktop version as it has better/simpler UI