Compare AI tools
Side-by-side: what they do, what they cost, what Kai actually thinks. Pass up to 4 tools via ?tools=claude,chatgpt,gemini.
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Perplexity S | Flux (Black Forest Labs) A | Cursor S | NotebookLM S | |
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| Tagline | AI search done right. Cited answers, not chat theater. | Open weights + strong photorealism. The open-source answer. | VS Code fork that made AI coding actually work. | Google's research notebook. Turns your docs into a podcast. |
| Category | Research | Image | Coding | Research |
| Pricing | Free + $20/mo Pro | API + open weights (Schnell is Apache 2.0) | Free + $20/mo Pro + $40/mo Business | Free |
| Best for | Replacing Google for any question where you want a cited answer in seconds. | Developers + power users who want control and privacy. | Developers. Non-developers who want to ship working code. | Students, researchers, anyone with a stack of PDFs or a topic to learn. |
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| Kai's verdict | S-tier for search. I use it before Google now. If you're still Googling everything, try this for a week. | A-tier. S-tier if you self-host. The reason open-source image gen matters. | S-tier for coding. If you write code of any kind, this pays back the $20 in a day. | S-tier for study. The Audio Overview is a killer feature. Try it with three of your favorite PDFs. |
| Link | Open → | Open → | Open → | Open → |