Consensus
Perplexity AI
Pricing
PricingFreemium
PricingFreemium
Free Plan
Free Plan
Free Plan
Side-by-side comparison based on pricing, features, and community data.
Consensus and Perplexity AI are both AI education tools. Consensus is Freemium; Perplexity AI is Freemium. Consensus is purpose-built for academic research with indexed peer-reviewed papers and a consensus meter that flags study robustness.
Consensus is purpose-built for academic research with indexed peer-reviewed papers and a consensus meter that flags study robustness. Perplexity is a general-purpose AI search engine pulling from the live web with real-time answers. Pick Consensus if you need rigorous literature reviews, systematic evidence synthesis, or institutional-grade research tools—it serves 10M researchers at 170+ universities. Pick Perplexity if you need quick, conversational answers across news, current events, and general knowledge with source citations. Consensus sacrifices recency for depth; Perplexity sacrifices academic rigor for breadth and speed. They solve different problems.
Pick Consensus if you're conducting peer-reviewed literature reviews, meta-analyses, or need to distinguish robust findings from outliers across 250M indexed papers.
Pick Perplexity if you need real-time answers on current events, multi-domain questions, or conversational research across the live web with cited sources.
| Feature | Consensus | Perplexity AI |
|---|---|---|
| Paper coverage | 250M indexed peer-reviewed papers | Real-time web search (no paywalled access) |
| Full-text access | Licensed from publishers | — |
| Study quality assessment | Consensus Meter shows agreement across papers | Source-cited but no robustness ranking |
| Recency | Indexing lag for new papers | Real-time web results |
| Mobile app | — | ✓ iOS & Android |
| LLM choice | GPT-4 only | GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Sonar |
| API availability | — | Perplexity Sonar API + Zapier |
| Document upload | — | ✓ PDF, images, files |
Synthesized by AI from verified tool data · cached per pair
Limited searches per month, basic features
Unlimited searches, GPT-4 summaries, advanced filters
Team access, custom integrations
Limited Pro searches per day (~5), access to standard model only
600+ Pro searches per day, choice of advanced AI models (GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini), file uploads, image generation
Same as Pro monthly at discounted rate
Team/org features, SSO, admin controls, data privacy guarantees
