Honest. Where Perplexity changed how we work, and where it kept missing despite the marketing.
Our current Perplexity stack: Pro tier ($20/month), 4 active Spaces (one per ongoing coverage area), Comet as our research browser, default Focus on Academic for any literature work and Reddit for any vendor work. We hit it 30 to 50 times a week across the team. Total time saved per week, measured by self-logged before-and-after on equivalent tasks, is roughly 8 to 11 hours.
The single highest-impact habit we picked up is the Reddit Focus mode on vendor questions. Before Perplexity, vendor research meant reading vendor sites (marketing), G2 reviews (mostly vendor-curated), and analyst reports (often vendor-sponsored). Reddit Focus surfaces the unfiltered customer voice in 30 seconds. We have killed 2 vendor evaluations this quarter on the strength of a Reddit thread Perplexity surfaced. Both vendors looked great on G2.
The second most valuable habit is Spaces. We resisted them for 4 months thinking they were folder organization theater. They are not. The Space system prompt is the unlock: writing 'you are a research assistant for buy-side equity coverage on enterprise SaaS, no source older than 24 months, always end with a citation list and a confidence score' once means every new query starts sharp instead of generic. The first month we used Spaces, the average query took half the iterations to land on a useful answer.
Where Perplexity keeps missing for us: anything requiring long persistent context inside a single thread. Perplexity is great at a single sharp query and at retrieving sources; it gets lost in long conversational threads where ChatGPT and Claude hold context better. For multi-hour investigations we still use Claude Projects, with Perplexity called in for specific source-retrieval tasks. The honest pattern is Claude for thinking, Perplexity for sourcing.
The other persistent miss is synthesis quality on disagreement. When 3 sources disagree on a question, Perplexity tends to either pick one position and ignore the other two, or to bullet them without judgment. Real research analysts weigh sources and explain the weights. Perplexity does not. So for any contentious question we use Perplexity to gather the sources and then move to Claude or to a human to do the actual reconciliation work.
On Deep Research mode: it is better than we expected on first-draft work and worse than we expected on final-product work. A Deep Research report is a strong scaffolding for a brief. It is not a brief you can ship to a client. The 2 to 6 minute output saves 4 to 6 hours of first-draft research and adds 1 to 2 hours of audit and rewrite. Net win, but the audit step is not optional.
On Comet browser: we underestimated this. The first week felt gimmicky. Around day 10 the habit shifted, and now half our reading happens with the Comet sidebar open. The biggest win is for regulatory filings and SEC documents: highlighting a passage and asking 'what does this mean in plain English for [our use case]' replaces 20 minutes of context-loading per document. We still keep Chrome as a backup for sites that do not render well in Comet (a few enterprise SaaS apps have issues), but Comet is now our default research browser.
The pattern we keep returning to: Perplexity is a research tool, not a chat tool. The features that matter are the ones that change how you source and audit, not the ones that change how you converse. People who upgrade Perplexity expecting it to feel like a better ChatGPT are disappointed. People who upgrade expecting it to feel like a junior analyst with a citation manager are usually thrilled.