Perplexity
Perplexity is an answer engine that reads the web for you and writes a sourced summary, with footnote-style citations under every claim. Free tier covers everyday lookups; Pro ($20/mo) unlocks unlimited Pro Search, Deep Research, and the Comet browser agent. The Sonar and Search APIs let developers wire the same real-time web Q&A into their own products.
Use Cases
Replacing Google for research-style questions where you want a sourced answer instead of ten links
Running competitive and market research with Deep Research to compile structured multi-source briefs
Pulling current news, prices, or stats with citations you can hand to a colleague or client
Reading academic literature by filtering Sonar to arxiv.org or other scholarly domains
Building a web-grounded Q&A feature into your own product via the Sonar or Search API
Letting the Comet browser agent click through pages and pull facts while you work on something else
Pros
Inline citations under every claim make fact-checking a one-click habit rather than a separate step
Free tier is useful for daily lookups, not a crippled demo
Model Council lets a single query run through three frontier models side by side for comparison
Deep Research produces structured, multi-source reports in minutes instead of hours of manual tab-juggling
Sonar and Search APIs expose the same real-time web Q&A to developers with domain and recency filters
Cons
Chats are used to train models by default and you have to dig into settings to opt out
Citations occasionally point to SEO spam or low-quality sources that look authoritative at a glance
Pro Search caps on the free tier (about 5/day) push you to upgrade faster than you might expect
Perplexity Computer and the highest agent quotas only show up on the $200/mo Max tier
Answers can flatten nuance from primary sources into a single summarized voice, so verification still matters
Platforms
Web
Mobile
Desktop
Extension
API
Compliance & Certifications
SOC 2
AICPA
GDPR
European Union
HIPAA
U.S. HHS
CCPA / CPRA
State of California
Perplexity is what Google would feel like if it stopped showing you ten blue links and just wrote the answer, with footnoted sources you can click to verify. The free tier handles most one-off lookups, but Deep Research, the Comet browser agent, and unlimited Pro Search all sit behind the $20 Pro plan, and your chats train models by default unless you turn that off in settings.
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