Perplexity
perplexity.ai
Answers a question by searching the web and footnoting every claim
copilot.microsoft.com
Web-grounded assistant that answers with numbered links you can open.
Microsoft's assistant, grounded on Bing results, so answers arrive with footnoted sources you can click through and check. That makes it a sensible pick when the provenance matters more than the prose. It also generates images and will summarise whatever page you are on from the Edge sidebar. A handful of turns work signed out; anything longer, and any saved history, needs a Microsoft account.
Questions
A genuinely usable free tier with paid plans for volume or team features. Signed-out conversations are short and are not saved; longer sessions need a Microsoft account.
Yes. Microsoft Copilot sends your input to its own servers to process it. That is fine for public material; for anything containing personal data, use one of the on-device tools instead.
Signed-out conversations are short and are not saved; longer sessions need a Microsoft account.
Alternatives
Same category or same task, ordered by how closely they overlap.
perplexity.ai
Answers a question by searching the web and footnoting every claim
chatgpt.com
The general assistant most people mean when they say they used AI
claude.ai
Anthropic's assistant, strongest on long documents and careful writing
gemini.google.com
Google's assistant, wired into Search, Gmail, Drive and YouTube
mistral.ai
Mistral's assistant — fast, EU-hosted and free to start with
deepseek.com
Open-weight reasoning model you can use free in a chat window