Perplexity for a UK business: cost, data and where it beats ChatGPT and Claude.

Perplexity answers questions by searching the web at the moment you ask, reading the results and writing an answer with numbered citations you can click. That is a different job from ChatGPT and Claude, which are strongest at reasoning over what you give them and at producing documents and code. Perplexity is the tool for the question “what is the current position on X, and where does it say so”: a regulatory change, a competitor’s pricing, a supplier’s terms, a market figure with a source attached. It is a weaker tool for “draft this proposal in our voice” or “build this integration”, and buying it for those jobs is where firms waste the licence.

For a UK business the honest framing is that Perplexity replaces the hour of tab-opening that precedes a decision, not the hour of writing that follows it.

Individual Pro is $20 a month or $16.67 on annual billing; Max is $200 a month. The Comet browser is free and Comet Plus is included in Pro and Max. For a firm, Enterprise Pro is $40 a seat a month or $400 a seat a year, and Enterprise Max is $325 a seat a month or $3,250 a year, with the two seat types mixable in one organisation. At 24 September 2026 rates that is about £30 a seat a month for Enterprise Pro, before VAT. Perplexity bills in dollars, so the sterling figure moves with the rate, and UK VAT is added for a business without a VAT number on file.

Perplexity list prices, 25 September 2026, at USD 1 = GBP 0.7545. Prices exclude VAT.

Single sign-on, SCIM provisioning so seats follow your directory, role-based admin controls, an organisation-wide file repository and internal knowledge search across it, so a team can ask questions of the firm’s own documents alongside the web. Deployment through mobile device management and a CrowdStrike integration are listed for firms with a managed estate. And the data terms change: enterprise data is not used to train Perplexity’s models, the plan carries SOC 2 Type II, and organisations with 50 or more Enterprise Pro seats, or a single Enterprise Max seat, can set custom retention periods and force deletion.

Uploaded files on the enterprise plans are retained for a short window, seven days by Perplexity’s help centre, which is the opposite trade-off from the chat workspaces and suits a research tool: the file is there to be asked about, not to be stored.

Perplexity publishes a data processing addendum and a security page listing SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR and PCI DSS. The same rules apply as for any US assistant: record it as a processor, use the enterprise plan for anything with personal or client data, set retention deliberately, and keep it out of special-category data unless a DPIA covers the use. The particular point for a research tool is that queries themselves can be personal data: asking Perplexity about a named individual is processing, and the ICO’s guidance on AI applies to it. Our policy template has the clause for that.

Individual Pro and Max accounts are consumer products. Check the account’s data settings before anyone uses one for work, and prefer the enterprise plan for anything the firm would not want in a third party’s logs.

Both ChatGPT and Claude now search the web too, so the question is not whether Perplexity can do something the others cannot but whether it does the research job better, and for the person who does it all day, it does: faster to a cited answer, easier to check, better at staying current. For everyone else the general assistant covers it. So the seat map is simple. The analyst, the researcher, the person who writes the competitor and regulatory briefings: Perplexity Enterprise Pro, about £30. The people who write, advise and build: Claude Team or ChatGPT Business, about £15 to £19. Anyone doing both at volume can hold two seats for under £50 a month, which is less than an hour of their time.