Comet Browser Free vs Pro vs Max: What Paying Perplexity Actually Buys You

The Comet browser has cost $0 since 2 October 2025, so the install decision is already made for you. The real decision is whether to pay Perplexity $20 or $200 a month on top. Comet's pricing does not sit on the browser at all. It sits on the agent, and the agent is where Perplexity publishes the least about what you get.

Short answer

Install Comet free if you want an AI sidebar that reads and summarises the page you are on. Pay for Pro at $20 a month only if you need stronger models for research inside the browser. Pay for Max at $200 a month only if you will genuinely delegate multi-step tasks to the background assistant every week.

This guide is written for practitioners: the person who will actually use Comet daily and has to decide whether the subscription earns its place. A founder approving a team rollout faces a different question, covered in the analysis of Comet's enterprise admin controls and attack surface.

Comet pricing in one table

Comet is a Chromium-based browser from Perplexity with an AI assistant built into a side panel. The browser is the free part. Everything Perplexity charges for is model access, agent capacity and features that run while you are not watching.

That split matters because most "Comet pricing" pages online still describe the July 2025 launch terms. Those terms lasted less than three months.

Compiled from TechCrunch's October 2025 launch report and later coverage cited below. Perplexity's own pricing and help pages refused automated access during research for this post, so check the live plan table before paying. The last row is the point: no consumer tier publishes a number.

The free Comet browser: what $0 covers

The free plan is a full browser, not a trial. You can import your Chrome profile, keep your extensions on desktop, and set Comet as your default. Perplexity's search engine is the built-in default, which TechCrunch noted at the July 2025 launch.

The free tier is genuinely generous for reading. It is thin for doing. That distinction is the whole pricing model.

The sidecar assistant is the free product

The sidecar is a panel beside the page. It can summarise the article you are on, answer questions about it, and compare what is open across tabs. At the free launch, TechCrunch reported that the free experience was limited to the sidecar assistant, plus Perplexity's Discover, Spaces, Shopping, Travel, Finance and Sports features.

For most people, that is enough. If your daily use is "summarise this long page" or "what does this pricing page actually say", you do not need to pay. I would start every reader here, and most should stay here for at least two weeks.

What the free plan does not include

The free plan does not include the background assistant or the email assistant. It also runs on Perplexity's default models rather than the advanced models that Pro and Max can select.

The bigger gap is predictability. Third-party plan summaries disagree on whether free users get any agentic task allowance at all, and Perplexity does not publish a free-tier task count. If a free agent task stops halfway, you cannot tell whether you hit a limit or the site broke the agent. The pattern of vague free allowances is examined in more depth in the breakdown of how AI free tiers meter compute.

What Perplexity Pro adds to the Comet browser

Pro costs $20 a month. Inside Comet, it buys two concrete things and one vague one. The concrete things are Comet Plus and advanced model access. The vague one is more agent capacity, with no published number attached.

Comet Plus is bundled, and it is worth $5 a month

Comet Plus is Perplexity's publisher content subscription. TechCrunch described it in October 2025 as a $5-per-month standalone subscription that Pro and Max subscribers get automatically. Free users can buy it on its own.

That makes the honest price of Pro, for someone who wants Comet Plus anyway, $15 a month of model access. For someone who does not care about Comet Plus, the bundle is worth nothing. Do not let a bundled extra justify a plan you would not buy without it.

Advanced models come with weekly ceilings

Pro lets you choose advanced models for answers and research. Those models are where the limits bite. In May 2026, Pro users reported that 10 to 20 queries a day exhausted their weekly quota on advanced models, according to PiunikaWeb's report on the complaints. Regular models were unaffected.

Perplexity's spokesperson attributed the change to accounts "tied to promotional-code offers" and to "fraud and unauthorized resale of those codes". That explanation may be accurate. It still confirms the structural point: Pro limits exist, they are enforced weekly, and the subscriber learns the number by hitting it. This is the same shrinkflation pattern traced across the industry in the analysis of AI usage limits shrinking under flat prices.

What Max adds, and why the background assistant is the real line

Max costs $200 a month, ten times Pro. Comet launched as a Max-only product in July 2025, and Max remains the tier where Perplexity puts its delegation features first.

The background assistant runs tasks while you work

Perplexity announced the background assistant alongside the free launch, for Max subscribers only. A spokesperson described it to TechCrunch as "a team of assistants working for you", managed from a central dashboard. It runs several tasks in parallel, notifies you when they finish, and lets you step in or take over.

This is the only feature in Comet that changes how you spend your time rather than how fast you read. The sidecar answers questions. The background assistant does chores. If you have no chores you would trust an agent with, Max is a $2,400-a-year model upgrade, and I would not buy it on that basis.

The email assistant and early access

Max also carried an email assistant that drafts replies, sorts the inbox and schedules meetings, plus early access to new features. Early access is a real benefit for an enthusiast and a real cost for anyone who wants stable behaviour. New agent features ship rough.

Agent features with inbox access also widen what a malicious web page can reach. Before you connect email to any browser agent, read the explainer on prompt injection against AI agents. The risk is not unique to Comet, and it scales with what you connect.

Comet vs Chrome: compare paid tier to paid tier

Most "Comet vs Chrome" comparisons set free Comet against free Chrome and declare Comet the winner because it has an agent. That comparison is out of date. Google has added Gemini to Chrome and gated its own agent behind a subscription, the same way Perplexity did.

What free Chrome now does

In its 18 August 2026 announcement, Google said Gemini in Chrome was available to all Android users in the US. The free features include summaries of long articles, answers about the page you are on, and connections to Calendar and Keep.

That overlaps heavily with Comet's free sidecar. If you are a US Chrome user who only wants page summaries, switching browsers buys you less than it did a year ago.

Where Google gates its agent

Chrome's agent is called auto browse. 9to5Google reported on 28 January 2026 that it was rolling out to Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers in the US, with a daily limit on agentic actions and no published number. Google extended it to Android in August 2026, again for paid US subscribers.

So the fair comparison is Comet Pro or Max against Chrome with a Google AI subscription. Both vendors publish a limit's existence without its size. My view is that Comet still wins for research-heavy reading, because Perplexity's citations sit inside the browser. Chrome wins if your work already lives in Google's apps.

Comet on Android and iOS

Comet reached Android in November 2025 and iPhone on 18 March 2026, free on both. Engadget's report on the iOS launch notes the app summarises pages, helps with research, shopping and scheduling, and can be set as the default browser.

Mobile changes the plan math in one way. On a phone you read more and delegate less, so the sidecar does most of the work and the case for Max weakens. The iOS app also has no third-party extension support and no native iPad version, per Engadget. If your desktop setup depends on extensions, the phone will feel like a different product.

Your plan follows your Perplexity account across devices. That means paying on one platform buys the same tier everywhere, and it also means a weekly model limit spent on your phone is gone on your laptop.

A workflow test you can run on your own plan

Perplexity does not publish consumer task counts, so the only reliable measurement is your own. Run the same five workflows on the free plan for one week before you pay. Record what happens, not how it felt.

The last row decides the Max question. If you cannot name a weekly task you would leave an agent alone with, the background assistant has nothing to do. Count your hours honestly, the way the case for publishing AI rate limits argues vendors should count theirs.

Where this comparison is weakest

Three limitations, stated plainly.

First, this post did not run timed, side-by-side tests on each paid plan. The table above is compiled from launch reporting and later coverage, and the workflow table is a protocol for you to run, not a set of results. A post that claimed measured limits per tier without publishing the method would be inventing numbers.

Second, Perplexity's pricing and help pages blocked automated access during research. Every plan detail here comes from Tier 2 reporting, mostly TechCrunch and Engadget. Third-party pages circulating exact per-plan agent counts cite no primary source we could open, so they are left out deliberately. Plan tables at Perplexity have changed several times in a year, and features listed here as Max-only at launch may have moved down to Pro since.

Third, the argument against Max assumes you value your own time below $2,160 a year of delegation. For a consultant billing by the hour who runs repetitive web research, the opposite may hold. The disagreement is legitimate, and the workflow test is the way to settle it for yourself. The broader confusion over what credits and limits actually buy is covered in the guide to AI credits, tokens and billing units.

Frequently asked questions

Where to start

Install Comet on the free plan today and import your current browser profile. It costs nothing and removes the only reason to read further comparisons.

Then keep a one-week log of the five workflows above. If the free sidecar handles your week, stop there. If you hit model limits on research, try one month of Pro. Only consider Max if your log names a recurring task you would hand off for an hour without checking on it.

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