Anyone used both Kagi assistant and perplexity and can share how was the experience?

I don't use the Kagi assistant yet, just the kind of AI response in search results. But regarding perplexity, I'm a little bit disappointed.

I started to use Perplexity like 1 or 1.5 years ago when it was really good in term of efficiency to find good results with an efficient interface, compared to chatgpt and co. But nowadays I find the assistant response to be not that good at all, with a lot of the links provided or the suggested follow up questions on the same quality as Google SEO top results or ads.

Despite having the paid plan or Perplexity, most of the time I try a request there and then still go to chatgpt or mistral to ask the question again.

For Kagi, when I use the in search ai response, it is mostly good directly.

I tried both and use Perplexity. Perplexity is much more akin to native ChatGPT in which I can create "spaces" for my projects. For example, I just bought an RV and so I loaded up all of the PDF manuals into a space so the LLM can reference those things. Since a few months ago, Kagi is just thread based.

FYI - I use Kagi every day for standard search and love it.

Just typed this up elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43726582

I've subscribed to Kagi for 2 years and subscribed to Perplexity for 2 months. I liked Perplexity a lot—in particular, I think its search AI search is faster and maybe a little better than Kagi's. But the lack of standard search and not being able to do non-search AI work led me to drop it and just keep Kagi. And then Kagi released Ki, their multi-step assistant, which is close to as good.

I use both but cancelled my Perplexity subscription.

Kagi is the better version of Google search, especially if you learn how to use lenses, bangs, and all these features. Kagi Assistant is great if you‘re happy with basic no-frills chat, i.e. no usable voice input, no image gen, no canvas.

Perplexity is not bad, but somewhat stuck in the middle between ChatGPT/Gemini and search. They provide sources for search results which are somewhat more spot-on than what I‘ve seen elsewhere. For example it could find EV chargers with restaurants for a trip I made along a route, which ChatGPT, Gemini, Kagi Assist failed greatly).

I found refining searches with Perplexity terse and it kept forgetting context once you started to reply. They have an AI generated news feed which lured me into more doom scrolling.

Also, be aware that Perplexity free-tier may collect data about you, which Kagi does not.

Tldr; Kagi is a superior search engine worth paying for. Perplexity seems good at queries that require context but quite expensive.

I use both. I only pay for Kagi because I have many models I can use and I can set up different contexts to use them in.

I rarely use Kagi search anymore and instead search via assistant. Both it and perplexity give me much better results than I get from a traditional search engine.

I've never been great at getting what I want from search engines. With assistant and perplexity, I type plain English with context and get what I am looking for a large chunk of the time. That's a godsend to me.

I've found things that assistant does that make it worth paying for. I often use perplexity but what I use it for (deep research) isn't valuable enough at the time to pay for.

I like the perplexity iOS app a lot and use it almost exclusively on my phone which isn't enough use to necessitate needing a subscription.

I’m a Perplexity subscriber, but I’ve decided to favor Kagi. One issue I have with Perplexity is the lack of control over the search timeframes. With Kagi, I can use my own timeframe filters, such as last 2 days, last week, and last month.