Is ChatGPT Teams right for your business? An honest 2025 review

AI is everywhere, and every business is trying to figure out how to use it to get more done. OpenAI’s offering for workplace collaboration is ChatGPT Teams, a tool designed to bring its powerful AI into a shared, secure space for companies. But with so many AI tools popping up, is it actually the right one for you?

This guide cuts through the hype. We’ll give you a straight-up overview of ChatGPT Teams, looking at its features, where it shines, and where it honestly falls a bit short. By the end, you’ll have a much clearer idea of whether it’s a good fit for your business.

So, what is ChatGPT Teams?

In a nutshell, ChatGPT Teams is OpenAI’s subscription plan for businesses. It used to be called ChatGPT Team and was later renamed from ChatGPT Business, but the goal is the same: give teams a secure, shared workspace to access OpenAI’s best AI models.

It’s built for company use, which makes it different from the personal ChatGPT Plus plan. Here’s what you get:

• Access to the good stuff: Your team gets higher message limits on powerful models like GPT-4 and can use creative tools like DALL·E 3 more freely.

• A private workspace: It provides a central hub with admin tools, so you can manage who’s on the team and handle billing in one place.

• Your data stays yours: This is a big one for businesses. OpenAI promises they won’t use your conversations or company data from ChatGPT Teams to train their models.

• Custom GPTs: You can build and share custom versions of ChatGPT that are tailored to your company’s needs, using your own internal documents and data.

• Connections to your files: It can link up with company knowledge sources like Google Drive, SharePoint, and Dropbox, so its answers can be based on your team’s actual work.

The promise: How ChatGPT Teams is supposed to boost productivity

The idea behind ChatGPT Teams is to go beyond one person using AI and unlock benefits for the whole group. It focuses on a few key areas to make your team work smarter, not harder.

A secure playground for your team’s AI experiments with ChatGPT Teams

For any business, keeping company data safe is a top priority. ChatGPT Teams tackles this with a dedicated workspace where all team activity happens. You get the admin controls you need to manage users and it meets solid security standards like SOC 2 Type 2 certification.

Most importantly, OpenAI is very clear that they don’t train their models on data from Teams customers. This gives businesses the peace of mind to use the tool for sensitive tasks without worrying about their private information getting out.

Building custom GPTs with ChatGPT Teams for specific jobs

One of the coolest features of ChatGPT Teams is the ability to build and share your own "GPTs." Think of these as little expert assistants you can customize for specific roles or tasks in your company.

For example, you could create:

• A MarketerAI that knows your brand guidelines and past campaign data inside and out, ready to draft ad copy or social media posts.

• An HRAI loaded with your company policies and job description templates to help out with recruiting and onboarding new hires.

• A SalesManagerAI that’s an expert on your product features and common customer questions, perfect for training new sales reps.

You can share these custom GPTs across your whole workspace, making sure everyone is using AI in a way that’s consistent and on-brand.

This video demonstrates how you can create and share custom GPTs within your organization using ChatGPT Teams.

Digging into data with ChatGPT Teams without being a data scientist

ChatGPT Teams comes with a feature called Advanced Data Analysis, which lets you upload files like spreadsheets, CSVs, and documents. From there, anyone on your team can ask questions in plain English to get quick analyses, create charts, and find insights. It’s a simple way to empower your marketing, finance, or operations teams to make decisions based on data, without needing to learn complex software.

The reality: Where ChatGPT Teams falls short

While ChatGPT Teams sounds great on paper, feedback from real users has highlighted a few common limitations that are worth thinking about before you sign up.

The collaboration in ChatGPT Teams isn’t very collaborative

This one’s a bit of a head-scratcher. Despite the name, the "collaboration" in ChatGPT Teams isn’t what you might expect. Users on the OpenAI Community forums have pointed out that you can’t really work together in real-time like you would in a Google Doc. Sharing usually just means sending a read-only link to your chat history. That’s fine for showing someone your work, but it doesn’t help when you need to actively build on an idea together.

Why ChatGPT Teams is a knowledge silo, disconnected from where you work

ChatGPT Teams lives in its own browser tab. Even though it can connect to file storage like Google Drive, it doesn’t actually live inside the apps your team uses every day, like your helpdesk or internal chat. This leads to a clunky workflow that looks something like this:

1. An employee has a question while working in a tool.

2. They have to stop what they’re doing and switch over to the ChatGPT tab.

3. They type in their query and wait for an answer.

4. Then, they have to copy the response and paste it back into their original tool to actually use it.

graph TD

A[Start: Working in primary tool, e.g., Zendesk] –> B{Have a question};

B –> C[Stop work & switch to ChatGPT Teams browser tab];

C –> D[Type question into ChatGPT];

D –> E[Wait for AI to generate an answer];

E –> F[Copy the answer];

F –> G[Switch back to the primary tool];

G –> H[Paste the answer to use it];

H –> I[End: Resume work];

All that bouncing between tabs creates friction and eats up time, which is the exact opposite of what you want from a productivity tool. In contrast, a platform like eesel AI is built to solve this problem by putting AI help directly inside tools like Zendesk or Slack, so your team gets answers where they’re already working.

The strange "Plus vs. ChatGPT Teams" feature gap

Here’s a common frustration for businesses: the Teams plan costs more per user than the individual Plus plan, but it sometimes gets new features later. As users on Reddit have discussed, Plus subscribers occasionally get first dibs on new capabilities. This leaves businesses on the Teams plan paying a premium and wondering if they’re really getting the best value.

A potential budget headache with ChatGPT Teams

The way user management is set up can create a serious budget risk. Forum users have noted that any team member, not just an admin, can invite new people to the workspace. Every new user automatically adds another paid seat to your subscription, and there’s no admin approval step to stop it. For larger companies, this free-for-all on invites could lead to a surprisingly high bill at the end of the month.

ChatGPT Teams pricing, explained

Let’s talk money. Understanding the cost is key to figuring out if it’s worth it for your team.

What the ChatGPT Teams price tag gets you

ChatGPT Teams is priced per person, with a minimum of two users to get started:

• $30 per user, per month if you pay monthly.

• $25 per user, per month if you pay for the whole year upfront (which saves you about 17%).

This price covers access to the shared workspace, admin controls, higher usage caps on the best models, custom GPTs, and the data privacy guarantees that businesses need.

Is ChatGPT Teams actually worth the cost?

Compared to the $20/month for a personal ChatGPT Plus plan, that extra cash is meant to pay for the business-focused features. But with the limitations we just covered, you have to decide if those features really justify the higher price. This table breaks down the main differences.

This video provides a direct comparison of the features and value between the ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Teams plans.

| Feature | ChatGPT Plus | ChatGPT Teams | | :--------------- | :------------------------------------------- | :---------------------------------------------------------------– | | Price | $20/user/month | $30/user/month (monthly) or $25/user/month (annually) | | Users | 1 | 2+ | | Workspace | Personal | Shared Team Workspace | | Admin Controls | No | Yes | | Data Training | Opt-out available | Never trained on your data by default | | Custom GPTs | Create for personal use | Create and share within workspace | | Early Access | Often receives new features first | Can lag behind the Plus plan |

So, Is ChatGPT Teams the Right Choice?

Here’s the bottom line: ChatGPT Teams is a solid, general-purpose AI assistant. It provides a secure environment for teams to handle standalone tasks like drafting content, brainstorming ideas, or doing some basic data analysis. It’s a decent starting point for any company that wants to dip its toes into AI without risking data privacy.

However, its "collaboration" is pretty thin, and it forces your team to work in yet another tab, separate from their main tools. For teams in customer support, IT, or sales, the constant tab-switching can end up creating more hassle than it solves. If your goal is to weave AI deeply into your day-to-day operations to see real efficiency gains, you’ll probably find it lacking.

The alternative: put AI right inside your workflows with eesel AI

For businesses that need AI to be more than just a chatbot in another window, the answer is to bring AI into the tools you already rely on. This is exactly what eesel AI was built for.

Instead of making your team learn and adopt a whole new platform, eesel AI plugs directly into the software you use every day:

• It just works with your tools: Connect eesel AI to your help desk, and your team gets AI-powered help without ever having to leave their workflow.

• Built for specific business needs: ChatGPT Teams is a generalist. eesel AI is a specialist for customer support, ITSM, and internal help. It learns from your past support tickets and company knowledge to automate answers, draft replies that make sense, and triage issues correctly.

• Get started in minutes, not months: You can set everything up yourself. With one-click integrations and a handy simulation mode, you can test eesel AI on your historical data and see exactly how it will perform before you ever turn it on for your customers.

Ready to see how AI can work inside your existing tools, not alongside them? Start your free trial with eesel AI today.