Microsoft Copilot
copilot.microsoft.com
Web-grounded assistant that answers with numbered links you can open
Free tier
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perplexity.ai
Answers a question by searching the web and footnoting every claim.
A search engine shaped like a chat box: you ask, it searches, and each sentence in the answer carries a numbered link back to the page it came from. The suggested follow-ups are genuinely good at showing you what you should have asked first. Plain searches run without an account, but the deeper Pro mode, file uploads and choosing a specific model all need one, and the daily Pro allowance is small.
Questions
A genuinely usable free tier with paid plans for volume or team features. The deeper Pro search mode is limited to a few runs a day without a subscription.
Yes. Perplexity 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.
The deeper Pro search mode is limited to a few runs a day without a subscription.
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