MevaSearch vs Perplexity: AI search engine vs answer engine

Who is behind Perplexity and MevaSearch

Perplexity is developed by the American company Perplexity AI, Inc. Besides its answer engine, it offers the Comet browser and mobile apps, among other things.

MevaSearch is a Polish search engine developed by WebOrbiton and created by its owner, Igor Oprządek. It focuses on search and is funded only by subscriptions. There are no ads, we do not build user profiles and we do not keep a search history linked to your account.

A ready made answer or results

Perplexity searches the web for you and writes an answer with citations, and you can keep asking follow-up questions. For the query YouTube, it showed a card linking to youtube.com at the top, followed by a long answer with headings, a table and citations to sources such as Britannica. That is handy for complex questions, but for simple queries you get a lot of text where a link is usually enough, and the model decides which sources make it into the answer.

At MevaSearch you see the results first, from the Brave Search API, its own Polish index WebAtlas, Wikipedia and, when you want to see more, the independent Mojeek index. For technical, scientific or book related queries, specialist sources are added, such as Stack Overflow, MDN, OpenAlex, Europe PMC and Open Library. A short AI summary appears above the results, and when you want to talk it through, you move to the chat.

AI models

On paid Perplexity plans you can choose between models from different companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, as well as Perplexity’s own models.

At MevaSearch, every AI feature runs on Claude by Anthropic. That covers short summaries above the results, MevaSearch AI chat, which remembers the conversation and cites a source for each piece of information, related searches and photo search. Requests reach Anthropic from our servers without any account details, and under Anthropic’s commercial terms, data sent through its API is not used to train its models.

Privacy and ads

According to its privacy notice, Perplexity collects your queries and uploads, device data, your general location based on your IP address and data from cookies and pixels. The company says it also uses data to improve and create its services, including its AI models. Identifiers and information about your internet activity may be shared with advertising partners for targeted advertising, which you can opt out of in the cookie consent pop-up. Incognito mode in the app and in Comet does not save your activity across sessions.

MevaSearch requires an account because it is a paid service, but it does not build a user profile, does not keep a search history linked to your account, shows no ads and does not work with advertising partners.

Prices

Perplexity has a free plan with limits. Pro costs 20 dollars a month or 200 dollars a year, and Max costs 200 dollars a month. For businesses there are Enterprise plans, including Enterprise Pro at 40 dollars per person per month.

MevaSearch Lite costs 4.99 dollars a month and includes 500 searches and 200 AI answers. Plus costs 14.99 dollars for 1,500 searches, 1,000 AI answers and two extra profiles. Pro costs 24.99 dollars and gives you unlimited searches, 3,000 AI answers and four profiles. The Lite plan comes with a free trial of 3 days, and MevaSearch prices include VAT.

Families and businesses

With MevaSearch Plus and Pro you can create extra profiles, each with its own login, and Kids Mode locks SafeSearch at the strictest level and blocks access to payment settings. For businesses, there is a separate plan at 89.99 dollars a month with a shared pool of 9,000 searches, 9,000 AI answers, 10 team profiles and VAT invoices issued by the payment provider.

Where Perplexity is stronger

Perplexity is excellent at questions that require pulling information together from many pages, lets you choose models from different companies, has a free plan, polished apps and its own Comet browser. If you mostly ask complex questions and want a finished answer straight away, it is a very strong tool.

What makes MevaSearch stand out

MevaSearch is a full search engine without ads, where you see and choose the sources yourself, and AI helps rather than replaces the results. On top of that you get specialist results for developers and researchers, NetKrypton warnings about scam websites, the option to pin or hide domains, !bang shortcuts, dead link markers and removal of tracking parameters from links. There are also separate tabs for images, videos, news, music and podcasts, family profiles, a plan for businesses and an interface in 19 languages. And the cheapest MevaSearch plan costs a quarter of Perplexity Pro.

Which one should you choose

If you mostly ask complex research questions and want to choose your AI model, go for Perplexity. If you search the web every day, want to see the sources, do not want ads or advertising partners, and want AI to help you with the results, MevaSearch will suit you better.

With the 3 day trial of MevaSearch Lite, you can compare both tools side by side.