Perplexity is a search engine that writes the answer. Claude is an assistant that searches when it decides to. Perplexity Pro will also run your question through Claude Sonnet, so the real choice is often between Claude inside Perplexity or Claude from Anthropic. For the same $20, Anthropic gives you Opus and the whole app. Perplexity gives you Sonnet, a search on every question, and models from six other labs.
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Pick Perplexity if most of what you type is a question about the world, you want sources on every answer without asking, and Claude Sonnet as one option among several models is enough Claude for you.
Pick Claude if most of what you type is a draft, a long document or code, you want Opus without paying $200, and you are fine with search that happens when Claude judges it useful.
Pick neither if you ask a few factual questions a day, because Claude's free plan already searches the web with citations and Perplexity's free plan gives practically unlimited basic searches, so $20 buys volume you will not use.
prices checked 2026-10-13 · by dan scutaru
| Perplexity | Claude | |
|---|---|---|
| price | free tier · from $20/mo | free tier · from $20/mo |
| free tier | Practically unlimited basic searches, 3 Pro Searches per day and 1 Research query per month. No model choice, no image generation, limited file uploads. | Chat, web search, file creation, code execution, memory and up to 5 projects, on Sonnet and Haiku, with a rolling five-hour usage window. No Claude Code, no Research, no Opus or Fable models, no image generation. |
| runs on | web, ios, android, mac, windows, api | web, ios, android, mac, windows, linux |
| Claude models | Sonnet on Pro. Opus only on Max at $200/mo. No Fable | Sonnet and Haiku on Free. Opus from Pro. Fable 5 and 5.1 on usage credits on Pro |
| Web search | Every question, inline citations | Every plan, Free included. Claude decides when to search, or you ask it to |
| Published limits on the $20 plan | None. "Weekly limits (average use)" | None. Five-hour session plus a weekly limit, shared with Claude Code |
| Context window | Not published for the models it hosts | Up to 1M tokens, varies by model |
| Ads | Winding its ad program down by the end of 2026, per FT reporting in February. Not stated on a Perplexity page | None. "Claude will remain ad-free", 4 February 2026 |
| Training on your chats | Searches may be used by default. Opt-out in Account Settings | Your choice in Privacy Settings. If you allow it, chats are kept up to 5 years instead of 30 days |
Yes, if you pay and pick it. Perplexity Pro lists Claude Sonnet in its model selector next to OpenAI, Google and xAI models and its own Sonar 2. Claude Opus is kept for Max at $200 a month. Perplexity's own pages disagree on which Sonnet: the pricing page shows Sonnet 5.5, its FAQ and help-centre table say Sonnet 5, and the help centre says the selector in your account is the source of truth.
What you get is a Claude model writing on top of Perplexity's search, not the Claude app. No Claude Code, no Fable, no published context window. Anthropic's own $20 plan includes Opus.
Yes, on every plan including Free, with citations in the answer. The difference is who decides. Perplexity searches on every question. Claude searches when it judges the topic needs current information, and you can tell it to search or not to.
Two costs come with that. An answer Claude gives from memory has no sources, and it is easy not to notice. And searching spends your allowance: Anthropic's limits page calls tools token-intensive and suggests turning web search off when you don't need current information. On Perplexity, search is the product, with its own weekly Pro Search limit.
Both take a task and work on it for a while, and both now run in the cloud. Cowork is on Claude Pro and Max. Since 6 October new tasks run on Anthropic's servers and reach folders on your computer only while the desktop app is open, and Anthropic is folding it into ordinary Claude chat.
Computer comes with Perplexity Pro as a weekly allowance shown only as a percentage left. Max adds 10,000 credits a month, which Perplexity prices at $100. Neither publishes how many tasks you get. If the work lives in files on your laptop, Cowork. If it lives on the web, Computer.
We could not read Reddit, so this is Hacker News. The Perplexity complaint is about sources. A long-time user wrote in September that answers now arrive fast but the links "frequently don't match the text right next to them". Another compared its deep research with ChatGPT's and found older information from fewer sources.
The Claude complaint is the meter. A developer wrote in October that on the $20 plans they kept running into the five-hour window, with Claude and with OpenAI's Codex alike. And one pattern repeats: people use Claude through Perplexity. A Perplexity Pro user wrote in April that they pick Sonnet over the OpenAI option every time.
For finding and citing current information, yes: it searches on every question and footnotes every answer. For writing, long documents and code, Claude is the stronger tool, with Opus and up to 1M tokens of context on the $20 plan. Perplexity Pro gets you Claude Sonnet inside its search, but not Opus and not the Claude app.
One, not three. Perplexity if most of what you type is a question about the world, Claude if it is a draft, a document or code, ChatGPT if you want one app that also makes images. Perplexity's and Claude's free plans both search the web, so use them for a week before paying.
Its own, Sonar 2, unless you pay and pick another. Pro's selector lists models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Moonshot AI, Z.ai and NVIDIA, and Max adds a stronger OpenAI model and Claude Opus. Free users get Best mode, where Perplexity chooses for them.