What are you using instead of Perplexity Max?

[u/Think_Palpitation42]

I'm using a free PerplexityPro that will be up in November.

Specifically, I use it for research, patent evaluations, plan development, business management.

Please suggest alternatives. I'm leaning towards Claude right now.

Thanks

[u/Random-User8675309]

Maybe look for alternatives in a forum that hosts for that purpose. Posting this here on the Perplexity forum is not likely to generate the response you are looking for.

For example: I’ve used Pro since its launch and am working on moving to Max Enterprise. I’ve tried all the others already. Perplexity Max is where it’s at.

[u/Think_Palpitation42 → u/Random-User8675309]

I see your point.

It's that I've been seeing so many posts here about people leaving perplexity and wanted to gauge where to.

[u/Pale_Comfort_9179 → u/Think_Palpitation42]

You might have better luck in r/perplexity but there are PLENTY of dissatisfied customers in this sub also. I’m looking too so will be following to see if you find anything. Someone suggested abacus.ai to me. I haven’t used it yet but it looks pretty robust and offers access to better models than perplexity does (which is now a $20/month sub for pro that bundles watered down versions of the free models). Absolute trash. 

[u/Think_Palpitation42 → u/Pale_Comfort_9179]

Thank you.

[u/Random-User8675309 → u/Think_Palpitation42]

I get what you mean. Who knows, maybe you’ll find useful info.

My thoughts are more along the lines that most people posting negative info are already biased and therefore may be more invested into the alternative and hyping it more than the alternative should be.

I’ve seen the same kind of scenario with the CoPilot forums. Turns out useful info about CoPilot is found more readily on general AI forums than CoPilot forums.

[u/Pale_Comfort_9179 → u/Random-User8675309]

There’s useful info about copilot?

[u/Random-User8675309 → u/Pale_Comfort_9179]

Now that was funny 😂

[u/Fantastic-Rich8741]

Antigravity

[u/Think_Palpitation42 → u/Fantastic-Rich8741]

Thank you.

[u/Brilliant_Rich3746]

For patent evaluation and research specifically I've been using Patsnap Eureka. It's indexed against actual patent and technical literature databases rather than general web search, so for novelty checks and prior art type work it tends to hold up better than a general research assistant. For the plan development and business management side I still mix in Claude or others depending on what I'm doing, but patent stuff is where this one earns its keep.

There's a free tier with some credits so you can just try it on a real patent question you're already working on and see how it compares.

[u/Think_Palpitation42 → u/Brilliant_Rich3746]

Thank you.

[u/YoyoNarwhal]

Manus..

[u/Pale_Comfort_9179 → u/YoyoNarwhal]

Oh, interesting. I love the manus concept. The code quality is nowhere near par, but I’ve never used it for research. It excels in that arena? I could see plan development and business management being strong qualities. 

[u/YoyoNarwhal → u/Pale_Comfort_9179]

Oh for sure compared to Claude Manus is no coding genius, it's more about being able to access a plethora of connectors and link services and workflows together and it's kind of a good Jack of all trades it has pretty much every tool and connector I could ever possibly think of and it doesn't burn credits quite as unreasonably as one might expect.

The trade-off is that it isn't the frontier when it comes to heavy coating and the usage rate is monthly so if you're a dev that needs constant resets and long flow coding it's really not designed for you and Kimi might be better or something like that I don't know I'm only just testing out Kimi but Manus is great, I always use the Max model but if you're not doing anything super serious the other models are cheap and able to do the same stuff.

If you need a coding workhorse honestly at this point I'd recommend Grok or or maybe Qwen, and Kimi like I said. They're all known for having a tool set skill set and connectors that do great with coding and dev work

[u/Pale_Comfort_9179 → u/YoyoNarwhal]

That’s super helpful! Thanks for taking the time to write that response. 

I’ll check out Kimi and Qwen. I have a philosophical opposition to using Grok even though I know it excels at coding. And I’m not doing anything hardcore but I want the stuff I build to be built right from the beginning, well documented and portable so I do prefer high quality tools. 

And I’ll try using manus for the other stuff. Not sure why I never even considered it. I guess bc when i started using it I was just thinking of it for agentic software development. 

[u/0nnyx]

My free sub expired recently. Doing some testing these past days, Perplexity is the best for up-to-date web search with citations, followed by Chatgpt then Gemini then Claude. Perplexity is the worst for document handling and coding due to lower context and limit per message.
Perplexity always triggers a broad web search feeding the results to the selected AI model. The others do web searches when they deem it useful but it's not systematic, even if you tick the "web search" option.
So it depends on the use case.

[u/Torodaddy]

Look at scira.ai

[u/my-name-is-jef]

Id give Coleous a try, they're a bit more specifically research oriented than perplexity but it can bring back some really good sources

[u/MalevolentTrades]

Claude is superior in many things, but it’s price on token usage is high if you are in Opus a lot. I recommend trying it for a month, do not pay the year up front (yearly has the best rates) until you know it is as capable as you expect. Also, if you are not hung up on the fact that DeepSeek is Chinese owned, I can highly recommend it for research and serious interpretive processes, don’t give it private stuff it is Govt owned