Perplexity

Perplexity is an AI answer engine: it runs web searches for every query and writes an answer with numbered citations, so it sits between a search engine and a chat assistant. Researchers, analysts, students and journalists use it for fact-finding, while Pro subscribers can choose which underlying model answers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Perplexity's own Sonar models), run Deep Research reports, upload files and use Perplexity Computer to build documents, dashboards and small apps. Comet, Perplexity's browser for Windows and macOS, adds an agent that browses and completes tasks, and a WhatsApp bot and native apps cover mobile.

The Free tier allows practically unlimited quick searches but only a small daily quota of Pro searches and Deep Research runs. Perplexity publishes its individual plans on annual billing: Pro at $17 a month and Max at $167 a month, each billed yearly, with Max adding the highest usage limits, 10,000 monthly credits and early access to new products. Students and educators verified through SheerID pay $10 a month for Education Pro. Enterprise Pro starts at $40 per seat a month ($400 a year) with SSO, admin controls and Internal Knowledge Search across connected sources such as Google Drive, SharePoint, Dropbox, GitHub, Notion and Slack; Enterprise Max is $271 per seat a month.

What to know: citations reduce but do not eliminate errors, the model roster and usage quotas change often enough that any figure here is a snapshot, and Perplexity faces ongoing copyright disputes with several major publishers.

Perplexity earns its place when the answer has to be checkable. Every response carries numbered citations you can open, which makes it the right tool for fact-finding, competitor and market research, and any question where being confidently wrong is expensive. Used that way it replaces the first hour of a research task rather than the whole task.

It is a narrower purchase than a general assistant, and that is the point. ChatGPT does more things — images, voice, custom assistants, a larger ecosystem — while Perplexity does one thing with a source list attached. If you already pay for a general assistant, the question is whether sourced research is a big enough part of your week to justify a second subscription; for most people it is not, and for researchers it plainly is.

Read the price before you commit. The individual plans are published on annual billing — $17 a month for Pro, $167 for Max — so the figure you see is a yearly commitment rather than a month-to-month rate, and the plans are sold for personal use. A team that needs shared workspaces, SSO and search across its own files is looking at Enterprise Pro from $40 per seat a month, which is a different decision entirely.