Perplexity vs DeepSeek: Features, Pricing and User Reviews 2026

Perplexity offers plans for both individual users and businesses.

• Free ($0/month): Good for everyday questions, with citations on every answer and access to basic AI models.

• Pro ($20/month): Adds access to Perplexity Computer, more AI models, bonus credits, and searches from premium databases.

• Max ($200/month): Includes the highest level of access, 10,000 monthly credits, and the most advanced AI models.

For teams, Enterprise Pro costs $34 per seat each month when billed yearly, and Enterprise Max costs $271 per seat each month when billed yearly. Both include stronger security, admin controls, and support for searching internal files. Businesses that need extra security and custom setup can contact Perplexity for custom pricing.

DeepSeek is free to use through its website and mobile app, with no cost for chat, writing help, or file uploads.

For developers, DeepSeek offers an API that is billed by usage, based on the number of tokens processed.

• DeepSeek-V4-Flash: Costs $0.14 per 1 million input tokens, $0.0028 per 1 million tokens on a cache hit, and $0.28 per 1 million output tokens.

• DeepSeek-V4-Pro: Costs $0.435 per 1 million input tokens, $0.003625 per 1 million tokens on a cache hit, and $0.87 per 1 million output tokens.

Charges are calculated by multiplying the number of tokens used by the price, and fees are taken automatically from your account balance. You only pay for what you actually use, so there is no fixed monthly fee for the API.