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5 Best Perplexity AI Alternatives Worth Using in 2024

ByDhruvir Zala Updated on
Perplexity AI Alternatives

Perplexity AI is great. It lets you search the web, do deep-dive research on any topic, and retrieve answers from specific sources (like Reddit).

But it is not quite what you are looking for.

Maybe Perplexity misses a feature you crave.

Or maybe, you want something with similar features minus the higher cost.

Whatever your reason, the following is an ultimate guide exploring the 5 best Perplexity AI alternatives you will not regret using.

How we picked Perplexity alternatives

Perplexity is easy to use. We ensured that the learning curve for the alternatives is lower or equal to Perplexity.

Perplexity positions itself as an AI search engine. The alternatives we featured are thus equipped with features like Web Connect, copilot, private search, ad-free experience, etc.

Perplexity AI is also an AI research assistant with the ability to get answers from specific sources (like academia). Our alternative recommendations also show the research potential.

Perplexity AI leverages top LLMs like GPT-4, Claude-3, and Google Gemini. We made sure that the alternatives also integrate with these or similar LLMs to provide high-quality search results.

While not the primary front, Perplexity can also be used as a generative AI tool. Some if not all of our mentions can generate content, such as text and images.


*NOTE: We avoided featuring tools that are specifically used for generating content with AI. These are apps like, but not limited to, ChatGPT, Claude, and Google’s Gemini. These are not a direct substitute for Perplexity AI.

1. You

You.com

Pros

  • Highly personalized AI assistant that allows you to create custom assistants with specific instructions.
  • Access to a wide range of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs).
  • Create custom assistants for specific tasks.
  • Generative AI tools for writing, coding, image generation, and image upscale.

Cons

  • While it has powerful AI capabilities, You currently lack advanced search features like search focus (the ability to search within specific sources like Academic papers or Forums).


You is an AI-first search engine and a personalized AI assistant. It allows you to get answers to your most specific questions with advanced customization and cited sources.

Perplexity Pro allows you to select and get output from different State-of-the-art LLMs.

You also provide access to various LLMs like:

  • GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo and GPT-4o
  • Claude 2, Claude 3 (Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku)
  • Llama 3
  • Gemini 1.5 Flash, Gemini 1.0 Pro, and Gemini 1.5 Pro
  • DBRX-Instruct
  • Command R, Command R+
  • And Dolphin 2.5.

In fact, their free plan also allows you limited access (five pro queries per day) to all the above models.

But it does something that Perplexity cannot—creating assistants for specific tasks. With You, you can create custom assistants (like GPTs) with custom instructions.

Creating a custom assistant in You.com

By default, You come with four assistants:

  • Smart (for quick and reliable responses)
  • Genius (for solving multistep problems)
  • Research (for in-depth topic coverage)
  • and Creative (to transform your ideas into visuals).

The search method is the same as Perplexity, except that You do not provide search focus abilities (the ability to search only Reddit, for example).


And if you were guessing, You allow uploading and analyzing your files (one file at a time).

Features

  • YouChat: A natural language interface that generates human-like responses to your prompts on any topic, allowing for follow-up questions and interactive learning.
  • YouWrite: An AI writing assistant that helps you quickly create content like emails, blog posts, novels, essays, and social media posts.
  • YouImagine: An AI art tool that utilizes Stable Diffusion to generate realistic images based on your prompts.
  • AI Image Resolution Enhancer: A tool that uses AI models to upscale image resolution without compromising quality.
  • Custom Assistants: You enable you to create custom assistants like Smart (for quick and reliable responses), Genius (for solving multistep problems), Research (for in-depth topic coverage), and Creative (to transform ideas into visuals).
  • Personalization: An instructions box (like ChatGPT’s custom instruction) to get personalized outputs. You smartly learn from your instructions and get better over time.

Platform Availability

  • Web app.
  • Mobile app: Android and iOS (iPhone and iPad).

Pricing

You price and plans

You come with a forever-free plan. YouPro costs $20/month ($15/month when billed annually).

The paid plan provides unlimited access to all the LLMs, unlimited access to all the default custom assistants, and unlimited file uploads.

If you are a teacher or a student, you can get YouPro at $10/month ($8/month on annual billing).

All you need is your school email address. Learn more from You’s education plan page.

Try You Free

2. Poe

Poe

Pros

  • Gives access to more third-party LLMs than most alternatives.
  • Allows creators to monetize their own bots through the Creator Monetization Program.
  • Tons of different bots created by users from all over the world.
  • Has an internet-connected bot specifically for web search.

Cons

  • It can feel overwhelming with all the different bots to navigate.
  • Response times can be slower compared to Perplexity.
  • Risk of potential biases or errors from the language models and user-generated bots.


Poe is a multi-use AI chatbot with access to more third-party Large Language Models (LLMs) than almost all other Perplexity alternatives, including Perplexity itself.


Poe is one of the few AI tools out there that is super empathetic about its creators. They have this Creators feature that allows you to join their creator monetization program.

Creators feature in Poe

You can create bots that other people can use inside Poe. The more engaging the bots, the more money you make.

That brings me to their bots feature.

Poe is filled with bots—literally everywhere you see, there are bots. This is because Poe encourages creators worldwide to create useful bots.

Again, this feature is similar to ChatGPT’s GPTs and You’s Custom Assistants.

You can search for specific bots or locate them based on their categories.

Exploring bots in Poe

The capabilities of the bots lie way beyond just text-to-text generation. There are bots for image generation, background removal, and other useful tasks as well.

Creating your own bot is easy too. Click Create a Bot and fill out all the details. Unlike You, Poe also further customization when it comes to bot creation. Not to mention, you get paid if your bot(s) goes viral.

Poe also allows you to attach and analyze your files. One of its official bots is Web-Search. Useful if you want to find information with sources.

With that said, Poe can get a bit tricky and overwhelming to use, with countless bots to play around with.

Also, sometimes, I felt the responses took a lot more time, unlike Perplexity which is blazing fast.

It can be a good alternative to Perplexity if you prioritize access to almost all the famous LLMs under one roof.

Features

  • Creator Monetization: Poe has a “Creators” feature that lets you join their program to create and monetize your own AI bots.
  • User-Created Bots: Poe is filled with AI bots created by users from around the world. You can search for specific bots or browse by category.
  • Versatile Bot Capabilities: The bots go beyond just text generation—some are for image tasks like generation and background removal.
  • Web search: With a built-in “Web-Search” bot, Poe enables you to find information from web sources.

Platform Availability

  • Web app.
  • Mobile app: Android and iOS (iPhone and iPad).
  • Desktop app: Windows and macOS.

Pricing

Poe price and plans

Poe offers a free plan. The paid plan costs $19.99/month.

Try Poe Free

3. Phind

Phind

Pros

  • Specialized for developers, providing accurate answers and relevant code snippets for programming questions.
  • Integrates with users’ code and the internet for contextual relevance.
  • Offers debugging and error-handling capabilities.
  • VSCode extension adds real-time debugging within the code editor.

Cons

  • Not as versatile as general AI assistants for non-coding tasks.
  • The paid plan only provides access to LLMs like Claude Opus and GPT-4o.


Phind is a generative AI-powered answer engine to help solve developers’ challenging problems.

And the good news is—it is not limited to developers.

With access to the internet (you can choose to turn it or, off or auto), Phind ensures that you get answers to everything. And it is backed by trusted sources from the web, eliminating the chances of hallucination.

And their Phind Instant model is simply too fast. Enter your query and within seconds, you get your answer with sources on the right and further suggestions questions at the bottom.

Output generated with Phind

Phind has a separate tab named Code for developers and programmers. It allows you to paste in your code (right now it supports Python and JavaScript).

Phind code mode

You can test and run the code directly in your browser.

Not only that, you can even ask questions about your code. Phind also allows uploading your code files and analyze them.

SIDENOTE: If you’re a developer, or someone into data science and analyzing complex data, check out Julius AI. It’s an AI-powered advanced data analysis and data visualization tool with a conversational, chat interface.

Features

  • Instant Answers: Phind provides instant answers to programming questions, saving developers time and effort in searching for relevant information.
  • Code Snippets: Phind offers relevant code snippets to help developers solve their coding problems and implement solutions quickly.
  • Contextual Relevance: It integrates with users’ codebases and the internet to ensure contextual relevance.
  • Error Handling: Phind has debugging and error handling capabilities built-in, helping developers identify and resolve issues within their code.
  • VSCode Integration: Phind has an extension for VSCode that adds real-time debugging functionality directly within the code editor.

Platform Availability

  • Web app.
  • Other: Visual Studio Code extension.

Pricing

Phind price and plans

Phind has a free plan. However, it is limited when compared to Perplexity’s free plan.

With the free plan, you get unlimited access to Phind Instant and daily limited access to Phind-70B (10 queries a day).

For attaching images and access to models like GPT-4o, GPT-4 Turbo, Claude Opus, and more, you need to upgrade to Phind Pro which starts at $20/month ($17/month on annual billing).

There is also a plan for Enterprise at $40 per member/month.

Phind Enterprise plan
Try Phind Free

4. TextCortex

TextCortex

Pros

  • Intuitive user interface and easy to get started
  • Powerful AI-enabled content creation for various types of writing
  • Highly customizable with different writing styles and tones
  • Affordable pricing with a free plan and unlimited creations on paid plans

Cons

  • Limited free creations, making it difficult for extensive use without a paid plan
  • Lacks support for long-form content and may have plagiarism issues


While primarily a phenomenal AI writing assistant, TextCortex’s capabilities lie way beyond that.

In fact, it can be used as a search engine exactly like Perplexity.

This is thanks to its Web Search feature with a focus filter. This means you can search and get outputs from specific sources like:

  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Wikipedia
  • YouTube
  • Scholar (academic papers)
  • News
  • Patents
  • and even the whole internet.

However, unlike Perplexity, TextCortex takes getting customized outputs to a whole new level.

For one, they have a Marketplace with countless pre-built prompts for categories spanning from marketing to customer service.


You can even create your own template.

Additionally, while searching for information inside ZenoChat, you can be as specific as you want, with:

Persona: TextCortex has almost a dozen built-in personas that you can choose from depending on your prompt’s use case.

Personas in TextCortex

LLMs: TextCortex also allows you to choose from LLMs including but not limited to:

  • Llama-3
  • Mixtral
  • Claude 3 Opus
  • and GPT-4o.
LLM support in TextCortex

Knowledge Base: You can create and add or upload your knowledge base to give further context to TextCortex.

Language Support: TextCortex supports over 25 different languages.

Moreover, TextCortex also allows you to create and fine-tune AI images using Dall E 3 and Stable Diffusion 3.

And the best part?

This was all just the tiny tip of a gigantic iceberg. Once you start TextCortex, you quickly realize that there’s more to it than what I can cover here.

Features

  • Multilingual Support: Create content in over 25 different languages.
  • Social Media and Ad Content: Tools for crafting engaging social media posts and ad copies.
  • Web search: Allows accessing information from the whole web or from specific sources like forums, news, and academic papers.
  • Variety of Templates: Access over 60 templates tailored for different content needs.
  • ZenoChat: Conversational AI assistant to help with content creation.
  • Customizable Writing Styles: Ability to switch between different personas and styles.
  • Voice Activation: Generate content using voice commands via text-to-speech AI.

Platform Availability

  • Web app.
  • Desktop app: Mac and Windows (join the waitlist).
  • Other: Google Chrome extension.

Pricing

TextCortex price and plans

TextCortex offers a forever free plan and a 14-day free trial to a paid plan.

With the free plan, you get 20 daily “creations” (think AI text generations), access to the core AI models, and the ability to create up to 3 different AI “personas” and knowledge bases.

There’s also 50 MB of storage for files, web search integration, translate/rewrite capabilities, and access to 500+ prompt templates.

The paid plan starts at $6.99/month and can go up to $119.99/month.

NOTE: Discounts are available for students, academics, and educational institutions.

Try TextCortex Free

5. Exa

Exa

Pros

  • Natural language search is the star of the show. Just ask Exa in plain English and it’ll hook you up with relevant links and pages.
  • The model is trained specifically on how people describe links online, so it knows exactly what you’re looking for.
  • It beats out other open-source models in finding the most relevant info, according to their claims.
  • Handy tools for specific use cases like news, company research, recruiting, and academic stuff.
  • You can get more info on generated results and even chat with them to get more information/context.

Cons

  • While it’s easy to use, the user interface may feel a little outdated.
  • The model expects queries structured like link descriptions, which can be limiting sometimes.


Exa is an interesting and fun way of searching the internet.

While it does not generate text like Perplexity, it helps you uncover what you’re looking for by providing relevant resources based on your query.

It is a pure AI search engine that also lets you chat with the results generated.

Here’s how it works:

Enter your query and select your category.

NOTE: In Exa, categories are like Search Focus in Perplexity. They let you retrieve answers from either the whole web or from specific sources.

As of writing this, Exa has the following categories:

Categories in Exa.ai
  • All (the entire web).
  • Company (lets you enter the name/website list of a company and find out relevant companies).
  • News
  • Paper (academic papers)
  • Tweet
  • Blog post
  • PDF
  • Github
  • and a Personal site.

This is so useful. Let’s say I want to search for tweets related to AI research tools.

In this case, I can select Tweet as my category and ask it something like “Tweets about the popular AI research tools.”

And bam!

SIDENOTE: Toggle the “Improve my prompt” button to enhance your prompt automatically.

You can even sort the results by their publish date, domain name, and the number of results you want to see at a time.

Wait, there is more.

When you hover over a specific search result, you see three options:

Exa more info icons
  1. an info icon
  2. a chat icon
  3. and a search icon.

Click on an info icon and more information about that specific result will be visible on the right side.

More info about search results inside Exa.ai

It includes:

  • a quick summary of the result.
  • links to conversations around the topic of the result.
  • similar results.
  • and related search suggestions.

Now, click on the chat icon to chat directly with the result(s). Yes, Exa enables you to chat with multiple results simultaneously.

Chat with results inside Exa.ai

Super impressive.

Features

  • Autoprompting: Automatically transforms queries into formats optimized for Exa’s model.
  • Search API: Core product for integrating Exa’s search capabilities into your apps.
  • Search focus: Ability to find information from ultra-specific sources or places.
  • Chat for context: You can chat with the results to get more of those results without even viewing the original webpage of that result.

Platform Availability

  • Web app.

Pricing

Exa price and plans

Exa’s got this free plan where you can make up to 1,000 requests per month and get 10 results max per search.

Then there are the paid plans, starting with the Wanderer at $50/month minimum. For that, you get up to 25 results per search.

The next step up is the Wanderer+, with a $250/month minimum spend. This gets you up to 100 results per search, priority email support from the Exa team, and early access to new features.

Oh, and they do offer discounts for startups and educational institutions if you want to hit them up about that.

Try Exa Free

What’s Your Favorite Perplexity AI Alternative?

This was it – the 5 best Perplexity AI alternatives that prove themselves.

Now it’s your turn.

Which Perplexity AI alternative did you like the most?

Is it You?

Is it TextCortex?

Or is it something else not featured in this guide?

Either way, let me know by leaving a comment below right now.

DISCLOSURE: Some links in this blog post may be affiliate links. This means that if you make a purchase or sign up for a service through these links, I may earn a small commission. However, I want to assure you that this does not affect the price you pay. I only recommend products and services that I genuinely believe in. Learn more.

Dhruvir Zala

Article by
Dhruvir Zala

I started this blog to provide brutally honest reviews of useful Generative AI tools and business productivity software. My objective is to help businesses choose exceptional products.

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