The connectors built into Claude and ChatGPT inherit each person's existing permissions in the tool being connected: if someone can already open a file or record in the source system, their AI can read it, and if they cannot, it cannot. That is a sound default, and for a company whose tools are already locked down person by person, it may be all you need. It also means your AI access is exactly as granular as your messiest source tool — and for most small companies, the shared spreadsheet everyone can open is not granular at all.
Synquil holds one synced copy of your data instead of passing questions through to each tool, so access is defined once, over that copy, down to individual columns — and every question anyone's AI asks lands in a single log.
If your source tools already enforce exactly the per-person access you want, built-in connectors give you that for free: nothing to configure, nothing to keep in step, and no second system to maintain. They also read the live state of a tool at query time, with no sync schedule in between. The trade-off shows up when the permissions you want do not exist in the source — sharing three columns of a spreadsheet rather than the whole file — when you want one place to see and change who can see what, when a question needs data from more than one tool at once, or when you need a single record of what your team's AI has been asking.
Connector behaviour and plan availability are described as documented by the AI vendors at the time of writing and change often. Check their current documentation before making a decision, and tell us if anything here has gone out of date.