Perplexity

A research assistant that answers questions from live web sources and shows the citation for every claim, so you can click through and check it yourself.

Assistants & chat Apps

Checked 25 Sep 2026

Open perplexity.ai

What you'd use it for

Answering a question you will have to defend in front of someone else, with the source page attached to every claim.

Ask a question and get an answer where each claim carries a numbered link to the page it came from
Point the search at academic papers, social threads or the open web before it answers
Run a Deep Research report that reads across dozens of sources and returns a structured brief in two to four minutes
Upload a PDF or a spreadsheet and question it alongside live web results
Keep a Space for one running topic so follow-ups stay in the same thread of sources

The verdict

Perplexity is the right instrument when the answer has to survive someone checking it. The citations do not make it more accurate than a general assistant; they make its mistakes findable, which is a different and more useful property. Pro at $20 a month buys Deep Research and the premium sources, but the free tier already shows citations, which is most of what you came for. The cost is discipline, because an answer with a link under it reads as settled and it is not until you open the link.

What it costs

Tier	Price	For	Includes
Free	$0/month	Occasional lookups where a cited answer beats a list of blue links.	Search with citations in every answer, access to basic models, limited daily usage.
Pro	$20/month	One person doing research as a regular part of the job.	Deep research, choice of top AI models, expanded Perplexity Computer access, 4,000 bonus credits, document and app creation.
Max	$200/month	Research-heavy work where the Pro limits bind.	Maximum Computer usage, 10,000 monthly credits plus 35,000 bonus credits, expert-level research, frontier models.
Enterprise Pro	$34/seat each month	Teams that need SSO, permissions and a no-training guarantee.	Everything in Pro plus user permissions, SSO, SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR and PCI DSS compliance, dedicated support.
Enterprise Max	$271/seat each month	Organisations running research at volume under enterprise controls.	Everything in Enterprise Pro at the Max usage level.

Read from Perplexity's own pricing page on 25 Sep 2026. Vendors change prices without notice.

What you need to start

An email address, or a Google or Apple login, for an account that keeps your history and Spaces; searching works signed out and the free tier asks for no card
Pro at $20 a month before Deep Research, Labs, or more than a few file uploads a day

A search runs before you have signed in at all, and the free account that keeps your history takes about thirty seconds with an email or a Google login, with nothing to configure afterwards.

Your first run Type in the question you would otherwise have opened six tabs for; the answer comes back inside a minute with a source under each claim, and the first thing to do is open two of them.

Where it breaks

Citations are the product, and citations are only as good as the pages behind them — Perplexity will cite a content-farm article as readily as a regulator's website, so the check it enables still has to be performed by you. The credit system sits alongside the subscription rather than inside it, so heavy use of the newer agentic features can exhaust an allowance mid-month. Perplexity's own site actively blocks automated fetching, which makes verifying its published prices harder than it should be.

Browser, iOS, Android, a desktop app, and Comet, Perplexity's own browser. Premium sources including PitchBook and Statista are bundled into the paid tiers, which is part of what you are paying for.

First entry in this reference. There is no previous check to compare it against.

When not to use it

It is the wrong instrument for work with no external source to cite, such as drafting your own copy, thinking through a decision only you hold the facts for, or writing and debugging code, where the citation machinery costs fluency and returns nothing. It is a poor fit for anything confidential, because the method is to send your question out to the live web. And if your questions are mostly about your own business rather than the world, an assistant you can load your documents into will serve you better.

The useful thing about this one is a constraint rather than a capability: every claim arrives with a link, and the link is the point.

That changes what you can responsibly do with the answer. A general assistant tells you that the notice period is thirty days; Perplexity tells you that, and shows you the page it read. For anything you are going to act on — a regulation, a competitor’s published pricing, a specification — that gap is the difference between an answer and a citation you can put in front of someone else.

Who it is genuinely for

People whose work involves finding out. Quoting on unfamiliar work, checking a supplier, preparing for a meeting with someone whose industry you do not know, writing anything where being wrong in public is expensive.

The discipline it requires

It is a faster route to sources, not a substitute for reading them. The failure mode is trusting the summary because a link is present, and the link is to a page that was itself guessing. Open two of them. It takes a minute and it is the whole reason to use this instead of ChatGPT.

On the pricing

Pro at $20 a month is the tier that makes sense for one person; everything above it is buying usage rather than a different tool. If your research needs are occasional, the free tier already shows citations, which is most of the value.

Alternatives

Assistants & chatApps

ChatGPT

OpenAI's assistant in a browser tab, a desktop app and a phone app, where you ask questions, draft text, and hand it files or spreadsheets to work through.

Checked 25 Sep 2026

Assistants & chatApps

Google Gemini

Google's assistant, usable on its own and also inside Gmail, Docs, Sheets and Drive, so it can draft and summarise against files you already keep in Google.

Checked 25 Sep 2026