Perplexity Pro vs ChatGPT vs Consensus vs Elicit
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Perplexity Pro
$20/mo Perplexity tier: unlimited search + model choice.
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ChatGPT
The most widely used AI assistant — now on GPT-5.6, from OpenAI
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Consensus
AI search engine that shows what the science actually says
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Elicit
AI research assistant for academic literature reviews
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| RECATOOLS Score | 8.3 / 10 | 9.2 / 10 | 7.3 / 10 | 7.6 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Paid | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium |
| Free tier | Limited free searches available | GPT-5-class model with daily message limits | 20 searches per day with basic features | Basic: unlimited search + 2 automated reports/month; ~125-200M-paper corpus |
| Paid from | $20/month | $20/month (Plus); free, Go, Pro, and Team/Enterprise tiers also offered | Pro $15/mo ($10/mo annual); Deep tier for power users/researchers | Plus $12/mo; Pro $49/mo; Team $79/mo |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Users | 1m+ Pro subscribers | ~900M weekly active users (1B+ monthly active app users as of mid-2026) | 500k+ users | 200k+ researchers |
| Founded | 2022 | 2022 | 2022 | 2018 |
| Maker | Perplexity AI | OpenAI | Eric Olson, Christian Salem | Ought (non-profit) |
| Verdict | Perplexity Pro is the $20/month (or $200/year) tier: unlimited Pro Search, roughly 20 Deep Research queries daily, file and image upload, and a choice of frontier models — GPT-5.4, Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and So... |
ChatGPT is still the default AI assistant, and the July 2026 release of GPT-5.6 (Sol, Terra and Luna tiers) keeps the flagship current across writing, coding and agentic work. No rival matches its feature breadth — voice... |
Consensus answers research questions by pulling from peer-reviewed literature rather than the open web: type a question, get a synthesized answer with citations, a Consensus Meter showing what share of studies actually a... |
Elicit owns the literature-review niche: it searches 138 million papers, pulls methods, sample sizes and findings into structured comparison tables, and links every extraction back to source text, which makes verificatio... |
| Full review → | Full review → | Full review → | Full review → |
Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.