I've been using AI tools heavily for studying this past year, and I’m still discovering new features and methods every day. All three of the big players, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude, have some kind of canvas or visual workspace now. And all three pitch it, in some way, as useful for learning and studying.

I’ve used Gemini’s Canvas, ChatGPT’s Canvas, and Claude’s interactive visuals separately, but never actually pitted them against each other to see which one is best suited to my work. This isn’t about "which AI is better" - I don’t really care about that here, and don’t think there’s a universal answer to this anyway. The question was more whether the visual and interactive output these features produce is actually useful when you're trying to learn something. And it didn’t turn out quite the way I expected it to.

What even are Gemini's Canvas, ChatGPT's Canvas, and Claude’s visuals?

And the materials I’m working with

Gemini’s Canvas is a separate workspace that opens a new window inside your chat. It morphs into whatever you need it to be - a slide deck, a document editor, and even an interactive app if you want to build one. It’s separate from the chat, but you can still utilize the chat to improve or iterate on whatever you’re doing in the Canvas.

ChatGPT’s Canvas is similar to Gemini’s. A separate workspace where you can edit and format text or code. Now, with newer models like GPT-5, it also has preview mode for code, so you can visually interact with whatever you built. Both Gemini and ChatGPT render React and HTML code.

Then there are Claude’s interactive visuals, which I’ve been using since they dropped. They generate inline, right inside the chat, as SVG or HTML elements with actual moving parts, sliders, toggles, animations, and clickable components. The whole thing lives in the conversation rather than off to the side.

And, of course, I’m using all three with some design study materials - the Design Thinking stages in particular. I wanted to tackle something with enough structure but that also requires visual demonstration and practice for me to learn. The stages are empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.

ChatGPT handled it better than I expected

I underestimated it

I’ve been neglecting ChatGPT a bit lately because honestly, Claude and Gemini have just been handling my queries better. And the first couple of times when I tried the ChatGPT Canvas, it didn’t give me as much to work with as I’d hoped. This time, it was better - not by much, but better than I expected.

At first, I just wanted explanations, so there wasn’t really a need to use the Canvas for the first couple of stages. But even though ChatGPT primarily works with text in the Canvas, you still have some options to transform it into something more visual. I used some of the customization options to turn its summaries into infographic-style images, which I can now use wherever I want - even upload them back into ChatGPT as context references for a new chat. None of it was interactive, though, and the mind map did look a little rough around the edges.

The ideate and prototype stages of design thinking have some dense theory, but these phases are learned through visual practice too. So this is where I put ChatGPT’s Canvas to the actual test. I kept it pretty simple: I prompted it for a live, interactive idea whiteboard - basically like Miro or FigJam, but personalized to my learning materials. It was just to help me sort the elements of a product into categories. ChatGPT created something that actually helped me understand the problems and solutions of a hypothetical product, and in which order to tackle them.

And once it came to the prototyping part, I was able to apply what I had just ideated on my custom whiteboard. ChatGPT was also kind enough to ask me a bunch of follow-up questions to iterate on the prototype, and the design preview was interactive this time. Unfortunately, the Canvas does gobble up tokens, so that’s something to be wary of on the free plan, which only gives you a 16k context window (depending on the model).

Gemini handled it like a pro

And it gave me more to work with

Going into this, I already knew how Gemini’s Canvas handles these types of study sessions and what I wanted to create with it. To standardize this as much as I could, I used the same prompts - so I started with the first stages of design thinking. Gemini has dedicated features for turning your Canvas docs into infographics or quizzes, so I jumped on that right away. Sure you could generate quizzes in ChatGPT, but it’s an intentional, additional step that might miss some context from the doc, whereas it’s baked into the document editor in Gemini.

When I asked for a diagram, Gemini instantly knew what I needed and changed the canvas from a text editor to a coding space with automatic preview (whereas you have to manually enable preview in ChatGPT). It also did a better job with the diagram visually and made it interactive. But where it most impressed me was when I asked for the custom whiteboard tool so I could practice ideation. Not only did it look more aesthetically pleasing, but it was easier to navigate thanks to the drag-and-drop function.

I will give props to ChatGPT for creating a more functional prototype from the get-go. Gemini’s prototype of my hypothetical product required more iteration, but it still ended up more well-rounded in the end, both aesthetically and functionally. In fact, this back-and-forth actually made me go back to my whiteboard, which garnered a better understanding of my own design process. Free users like me can also keep a session like this going for much longer because the free tier has a context window of up to 1 million tokens (with rate limits though).

Claude’s interactive visuals disappointed me the most

It wasn't smooth sailing

Given Claude is the only AI here I have a subscription for at the moment, I assumed it would pull miles ahead, but it was actually frustrating. It started out with a very detailed and structured study guide for the first stages of design thinking. Given that the visuals are inline, they’re not editable like with the other Canvas tools. Editable and formattable text would have been best in this case, so I gave it some follow-up prompts asking for exactly that - and Claude delivered by making all the boxes editable. Thing is, there isn’t much use for this if I can’t get the full text outside of Claude as, say, a plain text doc. Impressive, nonetheless.

For the diagram, the first one it generated was just…ugly, and the layout was weird. So I reprompted, and it turned out to be the best diagram out of all three tools - not visually or structurally per se, but it was more beefed up. This is likely due to my access to Sonnet 4.6 Adaptive, which automatically applies deeper reasoning to complex requests - that probably accounts for some of the extra detail.

Then it came time for the interactive elements; first up was my custom whiteboard for the ideation stage of design practice. This is where I ran out of tokens…on the paid plan. Granted, Claude goes into more detail so it does use more tokens for every output. But it was still annoying that my session got cut short and I had to wait two hours to continue. After all of that, it still ended up disappointing me with the whiteboard tool - it looked half-developed and the buttons were awkward to use. So I had to reprompt it again, and the new whiteboard was even worse because it was very compressed, so I just let it go at this point.

When it came to actually prototyping my product idea, I knew this was where Claude would pull ahead. I’ve been using it to “vibe-code” my design projects for months now. Usually, Claude creates apps in a separate window, but it managed to build a fully interactive product in the chat with its inline visuals.

The winner was clear to me

I’ll give ChatGPT credit where credit is due - I underestimated it going in, but its Canvas feature is actually quite robust with diverse applications. Claude ended up disappointing me the most - I don’t think it fully understood the assignment, which was surprising because I’ve gotten so much use out of its visuals up until now. But it's worth mentioning that its interactive visuals are still in beta at the time of writing, so we can probably expect it to be touch-and-go for now.

Gemini took the crown for me. Its canvas is fully developed, it handles anything you throw at it, morphing into whichever type of tool you need it to be, and provides you with all the relevant tools such as quizzes and infographics. It was designed exactly for this type of task - a study session that’s heavy in theory, requires visual demonstration, and interactive practice.