Are you choosing between Perplexity Vs. ChatGPT?
This choice is more interesting than it seems at first. While these tools may seem similar, they are actually quite different. ChatGPT is a general-purpose AI chatbot, whereas Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine that uses an LLM model under the hood. Yet, you can also chat with it.
Both cost about $20 a month, but given their different capabilities, interfaces, and use cases, which would be best for you, if you had to choose just one?
Here's the overview of both services at a glance:
ChatGPT was released in 2022 and quickly became a symbol of AI chatbots. It's OpenAI's most advanced chatbot, created using their GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) technology.
At its core, ChatGPT is designed to be a general-purpose assistant. You can ask it to:
The tool has changed a lot since it was first released. Today's ChatGPT can do many things, like process images, generate charts, have voice conversations, and even take control of your computer to complete tasks (through the new agent feature). Stack Overflow says that four out of five developers use it for their coding work.
Important: ChatGPT's training data has a cutoff date. While it can search the web, you often need to manually activate this feature or explicitly ask for current information.
ChatGPT's main strength lies in its versatility. In a single conversation, you can have it generate Python code, do creative writing, and generate images.
This design for a general assistant has specific features, like the Canvas mode, a separate workspace window that slides out from the side of the screen. It allows you to work on a document or a piece of code iteratively. You can highlight text snippets and attach a comment. The chatbot will then change or remove them.
This approach has downsides. ChatGPT is very good at everything that it does, but it is not the best.
ChatGPT runs on OpenAI's proprietary GPT models, and which model you get depends on your subscription tier.
Free users get very limited messages with GPT-5, which falls back to GPT-5 mini, a lightweight model that's fast but less capable.
ChatGPT Plus unlocks more messages with GPT-5, plus a model switcher with some legacy models like the o3 and GPT-4o, OpenAI’s most loved model so far.
The Pro tier doesn't add new models but removes usage limits and adds priority access during peak times. Unless you're using ChatGPT constantly throughout your workday, Plus is probably enough.
One limitation: You can't choose different models from other providers. Unlike Perplexity, which lets you switch between Claude, Gemini, or Grok depending on your task, ChatGPT keeps you within OpenAI's ecosystem. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as OpenAI's models are usually good. However, you miss out on each model's unique strengths.
ChatGPT offers two pricing tiers above the free tier:
While in Perplexity, you type questions and receive AI responses in a chat-like interface. Every response automatically searches the web, pulling from over 20 sources and presenting them with clear citations.
Hover over sources to see when they were updated, click through to original articles, and even view the search steps Perplexity took to find answers.
You can limit searches to specific sources depending on what you need.
The interface presents information more like a research report than a chat conversation, with clean formatting and inline citations.
Perplexity also gives you control over which AI model processes your searches.
The free tier includes unlimited basic searches and three Pro searches daily (which dig deeper and pull from more sources).
Perplexity reads through web pages for you and synthesizes the information into easy-to-understand reports.
The search experience includes the "Steps" tab, which reveals Perplexity's search process, showing which queries it ran and why.
Sources display publication dates and recent updates on hover. Academic papers get special treatment with author information and citation counts.
Perplexity makes it very easy to see where information comes from and verify it yourself, while ChatGPT may feel a little obscure at times.
The default model is Perplexity's own Sonar (built on Llama) for fast responses and R1 1776 (based on DeepSeek) for complex reasoning.
You can also use:
There's also an "Auto" option that lets Perplexity choose the best model based on your query.
Perplexity's pricing mirrors ChatGPT's structure but with different value propositions:
We should note that Perplexity's free tier is genuinely useful. It offers three Pro searches daily, and unlimited basic searches, which means you're never completely cut off.
You can make Perplexity act like a traditional chatbot. For example, you can ask it to write or edit texts. However, the interface really isn’t designed for this, as you can see here:
Also, Perplexity wants to search for information and cite sources:
You can ask Perplexity to create images, but it's clearly not the focus — ChatGPT's GPT-Image-1 integration feels native and refined, while Perplexity's image generation is more of an afterthought.
✅ Choose ChatGPT if you:
✅ Choose Perplexity if you:
✅ Consider using both if you:
