Perplexity has announced that its Comet AI browser will now be available to use for free for all users. The browser was first rolled out to Perplexity’s \$200/\text{month} Max subscribers and became publicly available to all Pro subscribers last month as well.
Comet browser brings in a number of agentic AI capabilities in order to take the throne from Google Chrome while also battling the likes of Browser Company’s Dia and Opera’s new Neon browser.
At the time of writing this article, Comet browser is widely available to download on Windows, Mac, and iOS, while the Android app shows the ‘coming soon’ icon.
Comet browser has been marketed as among the first truly agentic browsers which can take actions on the behalf of users like booking meetings, making online purchases, and comparing products.
The free version of the Comet browser, however, comes with limited features compared to the paid tier. Free users have access to Discover, Spaces, Shopping, Travel, Finance, and Sports, but several other features are tied behind the paywall.
Perplexity Max users now get a new ‘background assistant’ which can perform complex, multi-step tasks autonomously in the background.
The company’s email assistant is also only available to Max subscribers. The AI tool allows users to connect to Gmail and Outlook to sort and prioritize emails, identify the most important messages, and streamline routine tasks like summarizing long email threads and scheduling meetings.
While Perplexity had little competition in the AI browser space when it first announced the Comet browser earlier in the year, competition has been slowly building up in the space. For instance, Google recently added new Gemini-backed features to Chrome, and with the rapid strides the company has been making in the AI space recently, there could only be more such features to come in the future.
Meanwhile, Opera’s Neon browser, which is currently in an invite-only format behind a paywall, also packs many of the similar agentic AI-related tasks like Comet.
Regular browsers like Brave have also been increasingly integrating AI on their app. Brave now comes with a Leo AI assistant built directly into the browser which is designed to run locally to summarize text, translate content, and perform other such tasks.
Even privacy-focused browser DuckDuckGo also comes with its own Duck.ai interface built in that allows users to interact with different AI models for free while keeping users’ data safe as well.
