Can someone explain Perplexity's benefit relative to other market leaders?

[novagamer]

I work professionally in software engineering mostly on the management side and have been using AI tools off and on for a couple years, really ramping up the last few months as web search opened up tremendous use cases for Claude and ChatGPT.

I don't rely on them for everything, but as an augment for learning and even some daily life stuff (like recipes and tweaks, shopping lists generated in markdown (that can import into Apple notes in iOS 26!) etc. they've been very beneficial and well worth the cost, even beyond the use cases of helping me understand some deep bowel of Python that I wasn't intimately familiar with.

I also use and like Kagi for search, so I don't need another purely web search engine.

As I understand it, Perplexity does not have their own foundation model. When I look at their interface it seems incredibly cluttered and unintuitive, especially vs. the other leading providers. What exactly are people getting out of it, or is it more like they chose this a while ago because it was the most similar to a search engine and have stuck with it due to familiarity?

TL;DR if there's some benefit to adding Perplexity to my arsenal I will, but after reading up on it I can't discern what exactly it has to offer, and certainly can't understand why there continues to be industry chatter about them being a top contender for acquisition.

 

[User #07242024]

Don’t use any of them but Perplexity was the first or among the first in using AI to enhance search engine while other AI services were mostly chat bots with pre-trained data. So I think Perplexity excels in research using the web.

 

[phillytim]

Perplexity is a leader in up-to-date results with its web searches, even without paying for it.

 

[maflynn]

I use chatgpt for a variety of tasks, and I find it to be quite helpful to help poilish up an email, start me on a python, or powershell script. AI gets me about 80% there script wise, and then I finish up. I've tried copilot (not too bad), Grok - horrible so far, and gemini. Out of that lot, I seem to land on chatgpt.

I'll have to check out perplexity. I've heard of them, but they never come to mind when I have a need.

 

[novagamer]

Claude is very good also but you really need at least the Max plan ($100-200) if you're using it heavily or often.

I agree ChatGPT is pretty useful now especially with 5. Agent mode in particular is trash for what they advertise it for (booking you flights) but it iREALLY useful if you're looking for something online that meets specific criteria.

I just used it for something and it didi 15 minutes of work and gave me a full chart with options that was exactly what I wanted, and I didn't even ask it for comparisons. I was pretty surprised.

I'm still flummoxed by Perplexity and what their value prop is in the current market, for traditional web search (e.g. how Google used to be 25 years ago) I think Kagi is very well worth the $5/mo or whatever I pay for it, especially now that some of the AI tooling is doing a portion of my searches so the 300/mo search limit at that price is not a big deal at all and I never hit it anymore.

I was hoping I'd find some die-hard Perplexity user that could explain to me what they get out of it because I can't seem to find anything looking around that isn't very outdated, most of those things being written before AIs even had tool use or could search (~10 months ago+).

 

[phillytim]

Perplexity seems to provide excellent, timely information from web searches; and for free without need of an account. That's my quick take.

 

[Flowstates]

I work professionally in software engineering mostly on the management side and have been using AI tools off and on for a couple years, really ramping up the last few months as web search opened up tremendous use cases for Claude and ChatGPT.

I don't rely on them for everything, but as an augment for learning and even some daily life stuff (like recipes and tweaks, shopping lists generated in markdown (that can import into Apple notes in iOS 26!) etc. they've been very beneficial and well worth the cost, even beyond the use cases of helping me understand some deep bowel of Python that I wasn't intimately familiar with.

I also use and like Kagi for search, so I don't need another purely web search engine.

As I understand it, Perplexity does not have their own foundation model. When I look at their interface it seems incredibly cluttered and unintuitive, especially vs. the other leading providers. What exactly are people getting out of it, or is it more like they chose this a while ago because it was the most similar to a search engine and have stuck with it due to familiarity?

TL;DR if there's some benefit to adding Perplexity to my arsenal I will, but after reading up on it I can't discern what exactly it has to offer, and certainly can't understand why there continues to be industry chatter about them being a top contender for acquisition.

From what I understand, they now have a competitive edge by running their own indexer in light of the 10 query depth change by Google.