This review is part of a larger series of LinkedIn newsletters titled AI in Market Research: Reviews of AI tools, platforms, and solutions that market researchers should use today.
Perplexity Pro is the type of tool we will likely see more of as more organizations build on top of leading AI solutions such as those offered by OpenAI. Even with all the immense power ChatGPT provides, you’re still left with the feeling that you’re just leveraging a command prompt. And I know, at least for me personally, I’m always looking for better ways to organize my chat sessions, the research and insights I’ve collected, etc.
The Perplexity team, by contrast, gives us an interface that is more guided and powerful alongside one that makes it easier to summarize and review the information you’ve collected.
For example, if you’re coming up to speed on a competitive landscape, Perplexity makes it relatively trivial to get an initial sense of the “word on the street.”
You can also quickly constrain your search by a set of internet assets. For example, say you wanted to get a sense of how folks on Reddit thought about Claude vs. ChatGPT with the query – “Which is better, Claude or ChatGPT – base your responses only on Reddit threads.” You can also say, “Limit these threads to only those that were created in the last three months.”
Overall, I’ve found Perplexity to be a better tool if I’m looking to aggregate recent information that is on a public website. By contrast, ChatGPT is better for creative brainstorming, creating avatars to interact with, asking more complex queries about topics and historical market dynamics, uploading datasets for analysis, etc.
Perplexity Pro also allows users to create Perplexity Pages. This feature creates a “starter article” that takes all the information from your search efforts and formats it into prose with sections and subsections.
A few other strengths of Perplexity Pro include:
- The ability to choose various models from OpenAI (ChatGPT) and Anthropic (Claude)
- Dedicated search options for Video, Reddit, the entire web, etc.
- The ability to group threads into Collections for easier retrieval later or for sharing.
In sum, I turn to Perplexity nearly as often as ChatGPT, and it’s definitely something to have in your AI toolbox as a market researcher or market research team leader.
So here’s my review:
- Usability = Four Stars. Lots of capabilities, but the UI does feel a bit cluttered at times in terms of surfacing those capabilities.
- Power = Five Stars
- Flexibility = Three Stars. Perplexity does what it does really well, but I wouldn’t consider it very extensible or flexible beyond it’s core feature set.
- Cost = Five Stars. Roughly the same cost as every other AI “chat” tool.