S
SConsensus vs Perplexity AI
Pricing, features, platforms and who each one suits — side by side.
C
Choose Consensus if…
- you want a free plan to start with
- you're in its core audience: students, academic researchers
P
Choose Perplexity AI if…
- you're in its core audience: researchers, knowledge workers
Side by side
Feature Consensus Perplexity AI
Pricing modelFreemiumPaid
Starting price$20/mo—
Free plan
Free trial
API
Open source
PlatformsWeb, APIWeb, API
CategoryResearch AssistantsAI Search
CompanyConsensusPerplexity
Based in——
Founded—2022
Part of——
Key features
C Consensus
- Search across 400M+ scientific papers
- Pro Search and Deep Search synthesized answers
- Ask Paper chat with a single study
- Consensus Meter for scientific agreement on yes/no questions
- Study Snapshots summarizing findings and methods
- Citation Graph of paper relationships
- Citation export in RIS, BibTeX and CSV
- API and MCP access
P Perplexity AI
- Answers questions using live web search
- Search API with Standard and Fast Search modes
- Agent API running OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and other models
- Built-in tools: web, image, people and finance search
- Code sandbox sessions for agents
- pplx-embed embedding models
- Orchestrator API with per-token billing
- Decisions API that charges for input tokens only
Plans and prices
From each vendor's site. Prices change — confirm before buying.
Consensus
Free$0
Pro$20/mo or $144/year (~$12/mo billed yearly)
Deep$65/mo or $540/year (~$45/mo billed yearly)
TeamsCustom
EnterpriseCustom
Perplexity AI
Search API$5.00 per 1K requests (Standard); $1.00 per 1K (Fast Search)
Agent API toolsFrom $0.50 per 1K calls
Embeddings API$0.004–$0.05 per 1M tokens
Decisions API$0.01–$0.02 per 1M input tokens
Strengths and limitations
Consensus
- Free plan includes unlimited Papers searches
- Indexes over 400 million scientific papers
- Citation export to RIS, BibTeX and CSV
- API and MCP calls included on every plan
- Free plan limited to 10 Pro messages and 3 Deep reviews a month
- Pro plan includes only 15 Deep reviews a month
- No mobile apps listed; web only
- Support offered in English only
Perplexity AI
- Published per-request and per-token API pricing
- Requests rejected with a 429 error are not billed on the Orchestrator API
- Access to models from several vendors through one Agent API
- Decisions API output tokens are free
- Search API bills successful requests even when they return no results
- Per-token model rates are on separate pages rather than in the main pricing overview
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