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What is Perplexity?
Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine and answer engine designed to provide up-to-date answers to your questions in a conversational format. Unlike traditional search engines, Perplexity delivers a single, comprehensive answer that summarizes information from multiple sources.
Perplexity AI uses large language models (LLMs) to interpret questions and then searches the web in real-time to generate responses in human-like language. It focuses on providing accurate information rather than on creative content generation.
After retrieving the latest up-to-date information, you can verify the response’s accuracy by highlighting it and clicking the “check sources” button that appears. Perplexity then shows you a list of sources on the right, with the respective facts highlighted, which makes fact-checking your research a breeze.
Like all major AI chatbots, Perplexity offers both a free and paid tier. Perplexity Pro has significantly more features than the free plan, such as access to many more AI models. We’ll talk in detail about these differences below.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a generative chatbot developed by OpenAI, launched in November 2022. It’s powered by LLMs from the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) family, with the latest versions using the GPT-5 models.
ChatGPT uses natural language processing (NLP) to engage in lifelike conversations, answer questions, and generate a wide range of content, such as articles, summaries, computer code, and images.
When it was first launched, ChatGPT included only a prompt box and nothing else. Users quickly adopted it for creative writing and problem-solving tasks. However, the service now offers many additional features, including a ChatGPT Search and a Deep Research feature using real-time information from the web.
ChatGPT is multimodal, meaning it supports many types of formats, such as text, images, and file uploads. You can also generate highly realistic images using its latest image generation model. Perplexity vs. ChatGPT
Perplexity
Perplexity’s core focus is on providing accurate information based on real-time web search and information retrieval. It responds with summarized responses from various sources, saving you the time of reading through those sources yourself. It also offers a detailed list of source citations in its responses so you can easily link to them in academic research or other papers.
Perplexity often claims to provide highly accurate answers in its responses. However, research from a team at Cornell University has shown that Perplexity’s methods to prevent so-called “AI hallucinations” only slightly reduce the number of hallucinations. Still, our hands-on testing and usage felt snappy, and we didn’t find any inaccuracies in Perplexity’s answers.
All AI models struggle when you prompt them for answers about topics they have no data on. The very nature of machine learning requires accurate data. If no data exists—either in the model’s training data or on the web—then that model is more likely to make errors. When ChatGPT didn’t have access to the internet, Perplexity’s web-access feature made it the clear winner for web-grounded searches. That’s changed now that ChatGPT and other models also offer web access. However, we do find Perplexity’s results more actionable and usable for anyone doing serious research.
As for underlying models, Perplexity once ran on GPT-3.5 in its free version. It’s unclear which model the free version uses now. However, paid users can choose between several models, including Claude 4.5 Sonnet, GPT-5, Grok-4, or Perplexity’s in-house LLM called Sonar, which is “optimized for answer quality.”
Our take on it is that Perplexity isn’t as fast as doing a Google search, but much faster for comprehensive, web-grounded, well-cited answers than any other AI model. It’s a massive time-saver for anyone doing research.
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ChatGPT
ChatGPT is a powerful, all-around AI tool for various generative tasks, including writing, coding, brainstorming, and problem-solving. Its primary benefit over Perplexity is its versatility.
ChatGPT was trained on a vast amount of data that it leverages to provide instant answers. Although Perplexity also uses models trained on data, it prioritizes current web searches for every query.
For example, we asked Perplexity to generate some code for us that ChatGPT could produce quickly and easily. However, Perplexity searched the web first and then generated code based on what it found. Although the code was robust, it took far longer to produce, and it didn’t look much different from the code ChatGPT produced.
ChatGPT provides sophisticated image generation, “Custom GPTs” that let you define custom instructions for a particular task or project, and a handful of other productivity-oriented tools.
Some of the key features provided by ChatGPT also exist in Perplexity but under a different name. For example, Perplexity offers a “Spaces” feature, which is similar to ChatGPT’s Projects feature.
ChatGPT’s responses tend to be longer-winded than Perplexity’s. You can certainly use ChatGPT for web research, although Perplexity is the clear winner in that specific field.
User experience
Perplexity
Perplexity offers a no-frills, search-centric experience that feels like a sophisticated search engine—because that’s what it is. Results appear with clickable links, and Perplexity provides a list of citations along with the results.
Perplexity tends to copy responses obtained from the web word-for-word, so you should be cautious of copying/pasting responses if you’re using it for content creation, or else you might be liable for plagiarism.
Perplexity is aimed primarily at research tasks, not content creation.
Even though Perplexity’s purpose isn’t primarily chat-based, it does have excellent conversational abilities. The main difference between it and other AI chatbots is that its answers are almost always grounded in web search results. It’s worth mentioning again that a search engine would be better for quick results because searches take longer in Perplexity. However, for research tasks, you’ll likely save time with Perplexity because you won’t have to read all the articles in the results to gain an overview of the topic.
Like ChatGPT, Perplexity offers a voice mode. Unfortunately, the voice responses are slow, and there’s no way to speed them up. We instructed it to speed up, and Perplexity said that it did, but the speed was still far too slow for rapid searching.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT provides a conversational interface that allows for intuitive back-and-forth interactions. ChatGPT was specifically trained to provide a human-sounding chat experience, as are any models specifically trained as “chat” models.
Being trained as a “chat” model doesn’t make that model better than another. However, it does mean that the model answers in a more conversational tone.
ChatGPT also offers a voice mode, which feels more gimmicky than useful for serious business purposes. Unlike Perplexity, ChatGPT does let you speed up the responses, but AI’s tendency to provide long-winded answers makes voice-mode painfully slow in general.
In both Perplexity and ChatGPT’s cases, voice mode is useful if you need to access quick answers on the go.
Special features
Perplexity
Perplexity excels at providing real-time information that’s easy to fact-check. That was its original purpose and remains its greatest strength.
However, competition between AI companies means Perplexity has had to add additional functionality to make it more competitive. Many of these features are available only in paid plans.
Here’s a summary of Perplexity’s special features:
Image generation using various models
Perplexity lets you generate images using one of four models: FLUX.1 by Black Forest Labs, DALL-E 3, Gemini 2.0 Flash, or Open AI’s latest image generation model. Unfortunately, Perplexity modifies the prompt you give it, so it’s not possible to provide extremely accurate prompts for generating images. It also only generated square images even when we asked for 16:9 images.
The images generated by DALL-E 3 and Gemini 2 Flash were quite terrible for the prompt we provided, and that’s being polite. However, the FLUX.1 image was good, and the GPT Image 1 version was excellent.
Generating images is a nice add-on if you’re already paying for a subscription.
Perplexity shopping
Perplexity Shopping is an AI-powered shopping feature integrated into Perplexity to streamline online product discovery, comparison, and purchasing. When you search for products on Perplexity, it provides visual product cards with detailed information, including images, prices, seller info, pros and cons, and AI-generated summaries of reviews and key features.
Users in the U.S. can then purchase the product directly inside Perplexity.
Multiple Models
Perplexity Pro users can choose between several different models for their specific needs or let Perplexity figure out which is the best model for the query.
Other features
Perplexity lets you personalize results by letting you type information about yourself, so it can tailor responses to your specific needs.
It can also give you notifications for your deep research topics or finance data.
Pages
Perplexity offers a “Pages” feature that helps you generate content for articles with a single prompt. Other people can then collaborate on the article.
The feature is hidden away and hard to find. You can also do little with the generated article besides share a link to it or copy/paste it to a separate document to work on it.
It’s debatable whether Pages offers more value in content creation compared to simply providing a prompt to ChatGPT to do the same thing.
Still, the feature gives you a decent article outline with citations that you can then work into something better. We asked it to write an article about cats being great companions, and it came up with the following.
Google recently announced that it’s going to start giving the lowest rating possible to websites with predominantly AI-generated content. Despite the claims that AI can create original content, several years of experience have shown that the content it generates is bland and dull. Perplexity’s Pages feature might be useful for a school project. However, for pro content, you’re better off hiring a professional article and blog post writer. Another option is to hire a pro for AI content editing so they can add the much-needed human touch that AI content lacks. Look for a professional web developer on Fiverr
ChatGPT
ChatGPT has increasingly added bells and whistles to its service to make it more appealing for everyday users. Some of those special features are useful while others feel tacked on.
Many of the special features are available in extremely limited mode in the free version, such as image generation and voice mode.
The ChatGPT Plus version offers Deep Research. It also lets you create your own custom GPTs.
A custom GPT is like a “mini ChatGPT” that you can tailor to help you with specific tasks or knowledge domains. You can also connect Custom GPTs to external actions and data.
ChatGPT also offers basic video generation features. However, our tests show this to be more of a hype gimmick than something serious professionals would be interested in. If you need professional videos created, you’re better off buying professional video editing services. ChatGPT excels at code generation, but only for programming languages for which plenty of source code exists on the web.
Customization and integrations
Perplexity
Perplexity offers an API for developers to integrate AI search capabilities into their apps. The API uses Perplexity’s Sonar AI model.
No-code integrations are also possible through external services such as Make.com.
As for the web interface, you can customize Perplexity’s responses by providing some information about yourself in the “Personalize” section of its settings.
Generally speaking, Perplexity offers far fewer customization options than ChatGPT.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT also provides a robust API for integration. The API is more widely adopted, making it easier to integrate with apps than Perplexity’s API. However, Perplexity’s API serves a different use case.
ChatGPT was the first AI assistant on the market, so it was widely adopted more rapidly. That means that more out-of-the-box integrations exist for it.
As for ChatGPT itself, you can customize it by creating Custom GPTs or using third-party Custom GPTs. It also provides a section where you can customize its responses in detail, as shown in the screenshot below.
Fiverr has many AI integration experts to help you set up integrations for both of these tools. Privacy and ethical concerns
Perplexity
Privacy and ethics are contentious subjects in AI, with every AI company being involved in some kind of privacy, plagiarism, or ethical controversy at some stage.
Perplexity has been repeatedly accused of plagiarism and of ignoring web directives that explicitly block it from scraping a website’s content. However, the company has suffered less controversy regarding how it uses user data for training. To ensure your chats don’t get used for AI training purposes, you must turn off “AI Data Retention” in Perplexity’s settings.
ChatGPT
OpenAI has faced numerous accusations of copyright infringement and privacy violations. Evidence has mounted that strongly suggests that OpenAI trained its models using copyrighted data scraped from websites without permission. OpenAI also tends to hide settings that allow it to train its models on your data. There’s a setting to block this on your settings page, but then there’s also a hidden setting buried in the “advanced” section of any Custom GPT that you create.
The company has tried to defend AI-generated content, saying that ChatGPT is creating derivative work. Unfortunately, users keep posting examples of content that seems to be an almost exact duplicate of copyrighted works, such as the images shown below. There’s no guarantee that using ChatGPT for creative tasks will produce 100% copyright-free and plagiarism-free content. Although the tool might be useful for drafting emails or other content where copyright isn’t an issue, you might be safer getting professional writing services or professional graphics design services for creative works. Pricing and plans
Perplexity
Perplexity offers a free version with limited capabilities. The Pro version costs $20 per month if you pay monthly, and it provides 300 Pro searches per day.
Pro searches give you access to advanced AI models. The irony in Perplexity’s paid plan is that you automatically get access to Claude 3.7 Sonnet, ChatGPT 4.1, and several other models.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT also has a free version with limited capabilities.
ChatGPT Plus costs $20 per month, and the pro version costs $200.
Most small businesses won’t need the pro version. However, if you’re one of the rare businesses that might benefit from this version, then check out Fiverr’s AI consulting services to see how you can get the most benefit from it. We prompted ChatGPT and Perplexity with the same prompts for the following tests.
Fact-finding and research
We prompted both tools with the phrase, “Fact-check why Fiverr is a great place to hire freelancers.”
ChatGPT’s answer was bland and filled with emojis. It felt trite and useless.
Perplexity offered a far richer response, grounded in web search results, with corroborative links for every claim.
We took it a step further and used ChatGPT’s “Deep Research” and Perplexity’s “Research” functions for the same query.
Both platforms took an immensely long time to provide an answer. Perplexity warned us that it could take up to 30 minutes of research.
In the end, Perplexity’s Research results were lackluster and little better than using a normal search. However, ChatGPT’s Deep Research was incredibly detailed.
Summaries and paraphrasing
ChatGPT’s summary was extremely detailed. However, with such a lengthy summary, you might as well read the original article.
Perplexity’s summary was succinct, but we felt it lacked depth.
Your choice between the two depends significantly on your workflow and use case.
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Ideas and brainstorming
We asked ChatGPT and Perplexity to brainstorm business ideas for someone with programming and writing skills.
ChatGPT resorted immediately to a truckload of emojis, which made the answer feel juvenile. We’ve noticed that “emoji overload” has become a de facto ChatGPT communication method over the past year, and it makes responses feel childish.
Perplexity’s response contained no external links, so we’re guessing that it fed the query to one of its underlying models and simply provided an answer.
We then asked both bots to access the web for data to inform the response.
ChatGPT proceeded with its usual faux enthusiasm, emojis, and exclamation marks. It did provide links, but Perplexity’s response was more complete.
Talking with ChatGPT felt almost like chatting with an overenthusiastic child who had missed the essence of the conversation. In contrast, Perplexity’s response was more down-to-business, providing actionable info that we could then follow up by digging deeper into the linked articles.
Hire AI specialists on Fiverr today
Everywhere we look these days, new AI tools are emerging.
Many of these tools are actually just wrappers around core APIs provided by OpenAI or other AI companies.
In some cases, it’s possible to recreate these tools yourself and gain the same benefit for a fraction of the cost. You’d only need an AI coder and possibly AI tech consulting. AI has opened up immense possibilities, and Fiverr has the experts necessary to help you implement it. Whether you need help implementing AI internally or are thinking of building the next Big Thing, Fiverr’s freelance experts are ready to do the job for you.
Perplexity vs ChatGPT FAQs
Is Perplexity better than ChatGPT?
Perplexity and ChatGPT serve different purposes. Perplexity shines in web-grounded responses to search queries, while ChatGPT is more conversational.
Is Perplexity as good as GPT-5?
Perplexity’s pro subscription gives you access to multiple AI models, including GPT-5, which OpenAI says performs better than the GPT-4o model.
Which is better—Gemini, ChatGPT, or Perplexity?
Each of these models has its strengths and weaknesses. Gemini is best suited for anyone looking to integrate deeply with the Google ecosystem. ChatGPT is a decent AI for most day-to-day tasks. Perplexity is the best AI model for web-grounded searches and high accuracy.
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January 28, 2026
11 minute reading
