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Perplexity: Pros and Cons

I’ve had Perplexity Pro for over a month now and I’ve dived deep into it. I’ve made it my primary search engine on my computer’s Chrome browser. I’ve downloaded their Mac and iOS apps and given them a prominent place on my digital yard. I’ve started using it for every search under the Sun (except for map searches, which are going to Apple Maps these days). So here are some quick Pros and Cons from my experience –

Pros

  1. Perplexity is very good at search and more specifically, at nuanced search.
    • I am looking for a printer for my home and I gave it a printer I like, a price point I prefer (less than the sample printer), and some features I want in it.
    • It was able to search for and summarize the features of similarly priced printers and let me know what the best option for me is.
    • I separately did the search myself and came to pretty much the same conclusion!
  2. Perplexity Pro isn’t ad-driven.
    • I’m paying for this service. I mean, technically I’m not because I got it for free for a year through a deal, but come Oct 2025, I will probably pay $20/mo for it.
    • While the price point is not great, it feels nice to be able to pay for a service as critical as web search and not have to wade through a bunch of ads to get to a relevant link. (Take a hint Google. I pay for YouTube Premium, why the heck wouldn’t I pay for Google Premium?)
  3. Perplexity lets you organize your searches and system prompt them.
    • Spaces are a way to organize your searches. You can retroactively add a search to a space.
    • I currently have three spaces – Investment, programming, and “software tools”
    • Each space allows you to set a custom AI model and a “system prompt”. For example, you could say “You are an investment advisor. Help me plan investments in stocks, bonds, market funds, and any other type of investment which can give me high returns in the US with a medium amount of risk.” and set the model to GPT-4o.
  4. Perplexity can write small scripts and improve upon them.
    • This is par for the course for every LLM right now, but it’s still a nice to have. It takes the friction away from doing a lot of random experimentation. I asked it to write a script to batch use “Imagemagick”, it did so. I asked it to change the script from bash to zsh, it did so. I asked it to add parameters, print stuff out, supress warnings, it did all of that.
    • That said, I once asked Perplexity to install and run a python package. While it acted like it’s installing the package, when the time came to actually run it, Perplexity balked and told me it doesn’t have runners.
  5. Perplexity taps into other LLM models.
    • In case you didn’t know, Perplexity is web search engine with access to other large language models, instead of building their own. As part of Pro, you can pick and choose which model you want to use to answer the question. Depending on what you pick, you can get different responses. It’s worth noting though, that I ignore this and let Perplexity decide which model to use to give me a response and it just does so and does a good job of it.
  6. Perplexity spills the tea.
    • Perplexity has the news. No, I don’t mean the Perplexity Discover feature, which is a sort of MSN/Apple News competitor in that it collects and recommends news items for me to read, but which invariably feel not particularly well tailored.
    • I mean that I can ask it the latest news on a particular topic and it does a really good job of pulling and summarizing “up to the day” news items on the topic.
  7. Perplexity really understands complex questions.
    • Here’s the question I asked about the printers – “Find a wireless printer for my home, similar to Epson EcoTank ET-2850. It should have a touchscreen display and a way to wirelessly print from computers and phones. It should be able to print double sided pages automatically. It should use a refillable ink tank that I can use third party ink with. Lastly, it should be less than $200.”
    • I did not expect it to get all the points. It did.
  8. Perplexity understands files.
    • Someone sent me a PDF file that was a bunch of land surveys, notes about where the land will be acquired and where it’ll be left untouched, and timelines and other details.
    • I couldn’t made head or tail of the file. So I gave it to Perplexity and asked it some deeply relevant questions.
    • Perplexity actually gave me all accurate answers about the file and helped me understand the issue at hand.
    • I verified the info I got from Perplexity with some neighbors and it turns out Perplexity got everything right!
  9. Perplexity has access to Wolfram Alpha!
    • Someone recently posted online that Perplexity doesn’t do math properly. A colleague commented – “Why the heck would you even ask an LLM to do math?? That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work!”
    • But Perplexity isn’t just an LLM. It’s a Search Engine with an LLM interface. That means it should be able to tie into all kinds of other services, including those that current Search engines do.
    • Services like Wolfram Alpha, arguably the best math tool on the web.
    • I asked Perplexity “What is sqrt(45) times 11,546?”
    • It went straight to Wolfram Alpha and gave me 2 versions of the response.
    • It even gave me the link to Wolfram Alpha, to let me run the query myself.
    • I verified the result with Google Search’s Math Solver.
    • Same result.

Cons

  1. Perplexity is great for Search. Just not Website Search.
    • A lot of times, all I want to do is get to a website. I know Keepa exists. I don’t know if it’s a .com or .somethingelse
    • I know Kindle’s Online Reader exists. I just haven’t visited it on this computer, so I don’t have the URL in my history.
    • Instead of giving me the next hop, Perplexity strives to give me the next hop and a summary of the service, a Chrome extension, the iOS app, and “features and benefits” of the service. I do not need any of this. Just give me the link and let me go!
    • I really wish Perplexity would offering a dumber and faster version of their search for one-word searches or keyword searches like “website for writefreely”. I do not want an AI summary, I do not want options, I just want a jumping point.
  2. While Perplexity is really good at product search, it feels limited to the sites that they have collaborated with. For example, in the first Pro point, I mentioned printers. It seemed like Perplexity only looked at prices on Best Buy. It looked for advice on reddit, NY Times, etc. But pricing came only from Best Buy. So are you really getting the best pricing advice or just more vendor lock-in? Remains to be seen.
  3. Also, one of Perplexity’s offerings is called Perplexity Purchases. It’s basically a customized interface for shopping, where you can apparently compare products and buy from within the Perplexity interface.
    • I have not signed up for the service because of a few key points which made it feel weird.
    • While they take your address and credit card info like any other service, the copy around it says that “Perplexity will purchase it on your behalf. For a limited time, shipping is free!”
    • What this tells me is that I’ll pay Perplexity and they’ll pay the vendor. This is not good because what if disputes arise or I want to return a product? Will Perplexity provide the same level of support that we’ve come to expect from vendors?
    • Also, will this mean that I lose out on points on my Credit Card because the payment isn’t going directly to the vendor? Like if Chase is running a points bonanza on a particular mattress brand, and I buy it. But the payment looks like it went to Perplexity and not to the mattress brand, do I still get the cashback or extra points?
    • Lastly, what the heck does “shipping is free for a limited time” even mean? Why is Perplexity in charge of shipping anyway? Most vendors provide free shipping these days. So if I’m buying from Costco or Best Buy through Perplexity, is there a future where Perplexity would charge me for shipping while buying directly from the vendor would not?
  4. Perplexity has opened our eyes to paid web search. Good for Kagi. If most of the time, I’m using Perplexity to only do web searches, I do not want to pay twenty dollars per month for it. I want to pay less. Ten dollars per month for unlimited searches on Kagi seems like a nice number.
  5. Perplexity doesn’t have a Firefox extension!
    • I use Firefox for my personal browsing. Perplexity doesn’t have an official extension there. Not a problem as I just go to perplexity.ai and then do the search. But we’re all so used to the Omnibar.

Verdict

Perplexity is awesome! It’s got a lot of search results (I don’t know who their backend web-crawler is, or if they’re building the database themselves), advanced search capabilities, and features to make your research easier. It even has some confusing and moonshot features which may or may not pan out, and it is experimenting with ads too, for their free offering.

But. It is not a Google Search replacement. Yet.

There are simpler things that Perplexity brings too much complexity to. If I’m looking just for the weather, or simple math, or the domain of a website, I do not need LLMs or explanations or summaries. I need a quicker interface.

Perhaps Perplexity could hire a few Google Engineers and implement DNS prefetching to improve their page load times. Perhaps they could build simpler, faster interfaces to solve some of our non-LLM queries faster.

Then how valuable would the company be?

Also, since the company has introduced us to the concept of paid web search, I’m now more open with experimenting with search engines like Kagi, which cost less per month and act like traditional search engines. Maybe at the end of my Perplexity Pro free trial, I’ll go experiment with that company and see what comes of it. If I don’t like it after using it for a month or so, I know I’m going to come back to Perplexity.