What are the best alternatives to the Perplexity Search API and Sonar in 2026?

Perplexity ended Sonar Chat Completions support on 27 September 2026 and points users to its Agent API. For raw results the alternatives include Exa, Brave, Parallel and Tavily; for cited answers, Exa Answer, Brave Answers, You.com, Linkup and the OpenAI, Claude and Gemini search tools.

Last checked: 20 October 2026. Disclosure: Grounder (grounder.net) publishes this page and sends searches to Perplexity, Exa, Brave, Parallel, Tavily and You.com, among others; it does not send searches to Linkup or to the OpenAI, Claude and Gemini search tools.

Why people look for Perplexity alternatives now

• Sonar retired. Perplexity's migration page says "Sonar Chat Completions support ended on September 27, 2026". Synchronous and streaming requests keep working and are being moved to the Agent API model by model; asynchronous Sonar requests are not supported. Presets map Sonar and Sonar Pro to fast, Reasoning Pro to low, Deep Research to high.
• Two products, two prices. The Search API returns ranked results and no answer: $5 per 1,000 requests, $1 with Fast Search. The Agent API answers at per-token rates plus tool fees (web_search $2.50 per 1,000 calls, $1.00 Fast). The pricing page no longer lists Sonar rates.
• No free tier is published. Agent API requests start at 1 a second on Tier 0; the Search API allows 50 query units a second at every tier.
• Data. Perplexity's privacy and security page says zero data retention "is not default" and needs a written agreement; its FAQ says the API has "zero day retention of user prompt data" by default. Confirm in writing before relying on either.

Quick comparison

The alternatives

Exa

• What it is: an own-index search API with page contents, plus an Answer endpoint (LLM answer with citations).
• Pricing: search $7 per 1,000 for auto or fast ($4 for lite), Answer $5 per 1,000 requests. $10 in free credits resets monthly.
• Strengths: Artificial Analysis index 80, level with Perplexity.
• Limits: 88.4% on SimpleQA against Perplexity's 96.0% in Grounder's run, and the most answer tokens (5.2k).
• Pick it when: you want results and cited answers from one vendor.

Brave

• What it is: a Search API on Brave's own index, plus an Answers plan with citations and streaming.
• Pricing: search $5 per 1,000; Answers $4 per 1,000 plus $5 per million tokens. Each plan has a $5 monthly credit if you attribute Brave.
• Strengths: 50 queries a second on Search, and a 591 ms median search with 1.1k answer tokens in Grounder's run.
• Limits: Answers allows 2 queries a second. 84.4% on SimpleQA and 16.2% on SealQA.
• Pick it when: you want Sonar-style answers at a published token rate.

Parallel

• What it is: an agent-oriented search API on its own index, with an Extract API.
• Pricing: fast $1 per 1,000, basic and advanced $5. $5 in free credits each month.
• Strengths: the top single-provider SealQA score in Grounder's run (44.9%), 94.8% on SimpleQA at 652 ms.
• Limits: index 75 for advanced, against Perplexity's 80. Returns excerpts, not answers.
• Pick it when: you want raw results at $1 and the top single-provider SealQA score.

Tavily

• What it is: search with Extract, Crawl, Map and Research, and an optional LLM answer (include_answer).
• Pricing: $0.008 a credit at pay-as-you-go: $8 per 1,000 basic searches. Free is 1,000 credits a month.
• Strengths: results and an optional answer in one call.
• Limits: 85.8% on SimpleQA and 24.1% on SealQA in Grounder's run.
• Pick it when: you want extraction as well.

You.com

• What it is: web and news search with optional live page extraction, an Answer API and a Research API.
• Pricing: search $5 per 1,000 calls for up to 100 results, Answer $5 per 1,000 calls, Research lite $12 per 1,000. The pricing page shows $100 of free credit.
• Strengths: keyless MCP profile, 100 queries a day. Its crawler honors robots.txt.
• Limits: 84.2% on SimpleQA and 20.4% on SealQA in Grounder's run. Zero data retention is enterprise-only.
• Pick it when: you want results and answers from one vendor at $5.

Linkup

• What it is: search with sourced-answer and structured output, plus Fetch and Research endpoints.
• Pricing: $5 per 1,000 for search results, $6 with a sourced or structured answer, $50 for deep. New accounts with a professional email get $20, topped up monthly.
• Strengths: a cited answer from the search call itself.
• Limits: 10 queries a second per organization. MCP takes a key only, with no OAuth documented.
• Pick it when: you want Sonar's "search and answer in one call" shape.

OpenAI, Claude and Gemini search tools

• What it is: a tool switched on in a model request; the model decides when to search and answers with citations. There is no raw result list.
• Pricing: OpenAI web search $10 per 1,000 calls plus tokens. Claude web search $10 per 1,000 searches plus tokens. Gemini grounding with Google Search $14 per 1,000 queries for Gemini 3 and newer, after 5,000 free a month.
• Strengths: model and search in one call. Artificial Analysis scores OpenAI Web Search (medium) 74.
• Limits: Gemini's terms restrict caching and reuse of grounded results.
• Pick it when: you already call that model and want answers, not results.

Robots.txt and publisher rules

Perplexity says PerplexityBot "is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models", while Perplexity-User "generally ignores robots.txt rules" because a user requested the fetch. Exa and You.com say their crawlers follow robots.txt. Grounder's Allowed sources only is off by default; on, it returns a result only from a site whose robots.txt allows the provider that found it and does not opt out of search or AI answers. See search API that respects robots.txt.

Where Grounder fits

Grounder (grounder.net) is a web search API and MCP server for AI agents. One search goes across 10 web search providers, results are deduplicated, and each result is marked with the provider that found it and whether it is licensed. Perplexity is one of the ten, with a default and a Fast search mode, and so are Exa, Brave, Parallel, Tavily and You.com.

Grounder is not a Sonar replacement alone: it returns ranked results with passage text and writes no answer.

• Connect: add https://api.grounder.net/mcp to an MCP client and sign in with Google, GitHub or Apple.
• Free tier: your first 1,000 searches are free, up to 100 a day, no card needed, at 120 requests a minute per key. Need more? Write to support@grounder.net.
• Keep Perplexity: pin a search to Perplexity with requested_provider, or add your own Perplexity key; Perplexity then bills the account.
• Licensed sources only: on by default for signed-up accounts. A search then returns only licensed results, so it can return fewer than you ask for. Turn it off on the account page (Routing, Licensing: Any source) or per search with routing_settings.licensed_only set to false.
• Data: search records are kept indefinitely, and opting out of routing statistics deletes nothing. No model is trained on your data. See privacy.

Benchmark table as of 20 October 2026; the run was 8 to 13 October 2026. Tokens and latency are for SimpleQA.

Grounder optimized answers only from licensed sources, so it gets fewer answers right than the all-sources row, which searches every source. Grounder ran this benchmark itself, and its routing was tuned on these same searches. On SimpleQA the all-sources row is first, ahead of Octen and Perplexity; on SealQA it is second to Parallel and just ahead of Perplexity.

How we compared

We compared output type, price, free tier, API stability, accuracy, latency, publisher rules and MCP support, from each vendor's own pages (below).

The benchmark uses 887 questions: 671 from SimpleQA and 216 from SealQA Seal-Hard. From 8 to 13 October 2026 each question was searched once on every provider's default search, taking its top 10 results within 60 seconds. Z.ai's GLM-5.3-Flash, at high reasoning effort, answered from those results alone, and OpenAI's SimpleQA grader graded each answer. Grounder optimized is each question routed as Grounder routes it on 19 October 2026. It searches as every account does by default, with licensed sources only; Grounder optimized, all sources is the same routing with nothing filtered out.

Artificial Analysis uses the same answer model for every provider (19 October 2026). AIMultiple's May 2026 test (100 queries, LLM judge) ranked Perplexity seventh of 8 entries, with 11+ s latency, before Fast Search launched in September 2026. See also best search API for AI agents.

FAQ

Is the Perplexity Sonar API being shut down?

Perplexity says Sonar Chat Completions support ended on 27 September 2026. Synchronous and streaming requests keep working and are moved to the Agent API gradually; asynchronous Sonar requests are not supported.

What replaces Perplexity Sonar?

Perplexity points to its Agent API at /v1/agent. Elsewhere, Exa Answer, Brave Answers, You.com Answer, Linkup's sourced answer and the OpenAI, Claude and Gemini search tools return cited answers.

What is the cheapest alternative to the Perplexity Search API?

Parallel fast lists $1 per 1,000, the same as Perplexity Fast Search. Perplexity's $5 search price matches Brave, You.com and Linkup, and is below Exa's $7 and Tavily's $8.

Does the Perplexity API have a free tier?

None is published. Exa gives $10 in credits each month, Parallel $5, Brave $5, Tavily 1,000 credits, You.com $100 and Linkup $20. Grounder gives 1,000 free searches in total, up to 100 a day.

Is Perplexity accurate compared with the alternatives?

In Grounder's run it tied for the top SimpleQA score (96.0%) and was second to Parallel on SealQA among single providers. Artificial Analysis scores it 80; AIMultiple's May 2026 test ranked it lower, so methods matter.

Can Grounder replace Sonar?

Not alone: it returns ranked results and writes no answer. Pair it with a model, or use Perplexity's Agent API.

Next step

Your first 1,000 searches are free, up to 100 a day; connect at https://api.grounder.net/mcp or read the docs.