Should you pay for Perplexity Pro?

Let’s break it down 👇

A lot of you ask whether Perplexity Pro is worth the $20/month when you already pay for ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini. 👉 Short answer: it depends on your research volume and whether you’ll actually use Labs and Comet.

Here’s how I think about it.

What actually changes with Perplexity Pro (from my experience)

1. Higher usage limits for Pro search

   

   Perplexity free vs pro features

2. Access to Labs (deep research → structured reports, charts/graphs, assets, and even shareable mini-app style dashboards)

   

   Perplexity Labs Assets

Access to Perplexity Comet

If you ask Perplexity they’ll tell you “Comet is an AI-powered browser that acts as a personal assistant and thinking partner.” So kinda like an AI agent.

Let’s see a few use cases:

• Multi-Platform, Multi-Step Research Automation

Comet can research a topic across various sites (news, blogs, databases), summarize findings, organize the insights, and compile them in a document or send them via email, turning hours of work into minutes.

• Booking Travel & Comparing Flights in Real Time

Comet finds the best flights or accommodations based on complex criteria (airlines, layovers, price), checks various sites, and can follow the workflow almost to checkout, including filling in passenger details

• Summarizing Social Media Threads and Comments

It can TLDR and synthesize hundreds of Reddit or YouTube comments or social media threads, letting users quickly digest large community discussions—great for trend-watching and fandoms.

• Coding Help & Automation on Platforms like LeetCode

Comet can solve coding challenges by analyzing the problem, generating code, entering solutions in the platform, and submitting them, even optimizing for performance compared to typical solutions.

I’ll be posting a detailed deep dive shortly, so keep an eye out 😉

Where Labs shines

Think of Labs as “Deep Research++.” You run a deeper investigation and automatically get:

• A generated report (clean structure you can hand to a manager or client)

• Charts/graphs/assets baked in

• The ability to turn research into lightweight, shareable dashboards (almost like mini-apps)

  

  Perplexity shareable dashboards

If your work involves doing the research + packaging it (not just reading it), Labs starts to pay for itself.

Who should actually upgrade?

Definitely consider Pro (trial it for a month):

• Students / Academia / Researchers: Frequent literature scans + you need to compile findings into formal outputs.

• Market / Competitive / Financial research roles: You’re pulling real-time data often and producing reports/slides/briefings.

• Anyone with a recurring “research → report” workflow: Labs saves time on formatting and deliverables.

Probably fine on Free:

• General users replacing Google for quick answers and link summaries.

• Marketers who aren’t doing heavy market studies (campaign ideas, copy help, light checks are fine on free).

• Anyone already paying for ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini and using their deep research features—if that combo covers you, keep your $20.

One feature everyone is sleeping on….

Spaces with collaborators
Perplexity Spaces are like “projects” (similar idea to ChatGPT or Claude projects). You can set instructions, upload files, and hold a persistent context.

But did you now you can actually add multiple collaborators to a Space. And it’s available to both free and paid users. That’s notable because you need a Teams Plan to collaborate within ChatGPT. If you work with a small team/client and need a shared, persistent research context, this is a very cool Perplexity advantage.

Decision guide (fast)

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