Consensus vs Perplexity

The split is corpus and output shape, not raw model quality. Consensus searches an index of 400M+ peer-reviewed papers plus licensed full text from major publishers, and pulls in PubMed and Scopus; its signature move is the Consensus Meter, which takes a yes-or-no question and sorts papers into agreeing, disagreeing, and neutral — a fast read on whether the evidence is settled or contested. Deep Search goes further: it builds a search strategy from your question, expands key terms, identifies conflicting arguments, and walks the citation graph. Medical mode narrows to roughly 50,000 clinical guidelines and top medical journals. Perplexity is built on live web pages: every claim gets an inline numbered footnote you can open, which is the right tool for verifying something that changed recently. Around its query box sit a Search/Computer toggle, a model selector, Projects that keep a line of inquiry across sessions, Automations for recurring runs, Artifacts that render content in place, @ connectors, and file upload for images, PDFs, and text. Consensus has no equivalent to Automations or Projects, and Perplexity has no academic index, no Consensus Meter, and no medical guideline filter. One tool gathers studies; the other verifies web claims.

Both products are freemium, and the supplied data does not list specific plan names or prices for either — so the practical comparison is what each free tier lets you do before you hit a wall. Consensus gates depth: the Consensus Meter and a basic search are the daily-use layer, while Deep Search (strategy building, term expansion, conflict identification, citation-graph walking), Skills workflows, and saved collections are the sort of thing a literature review leans on, and those are where upgrade pressure will appear. Perplexity's levers are volume and workflow: repeated Automations, Projects that persist across sessions, larger file uploads, and Computer handoffs for polished deliverables are the features that scale with paid use. For a solo graduate student, Consensus's free tier is likely enough for scoping and a handful of Meter questions. For a journalist or analyst running the same query on a schedule, Perplexity's Automations are the feature that justifies paying. Ask each vendor for current tier limits before committing a team budget; neither set of facts here includes per-seat or campus-license pricing, and Consensus explicitly targets university and library buyers provisioning campus-wide access, which is a separate negotiation from individual plans.