Perplexity AI vs Semantic Scholar

Side-by-side comparison of Perplexity AI and Semantic Scholar: pricing, features, API access, and community ratings.

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	Perplexity AI AI-powered search engine that answers questions with cited, up-to-date sources. Visit	Semantic Scholar AI-powered academic search engine for scientific literature Visit
Category	Search & research	Chat assistants
Pricing	Freemium	Free
Starting price	USD 20/mo	Free
Free tier
Audience	All audiences	All audiences
API available
Open source
Self-hostable
Model provider	Perplexity / OpenAI / Anthropic	Allen Institute for AI (AI2)
Founded	2022	2015
Headquarters	San Francisco, US	Seattle, USA
Key strengths	·real-time web search ·cited sources ·Sonar API ·follow-up questions	·AI-powered semantic search across 200M+ academic papers ·Free public API for programmatic access to paper metadata ·Citation graph and influence analysis ·Auto-generated TLDRs for rapid paper comprehension