Perplexity vs NotebookLM vs Genspark
Answers from the live web, from your own documents, or from a team of agents? Scores from the RXed AI Periodic Table v1.0 — identical 20-element scale, deterministic overall. How we audit →
At a glance
Scope = elements of the AI stack in the tool’s stated scope (dashed = honestly out of scope, never a penalty). Quality = how well it scores on what it covers. No single number — both axes, always.
The verdict
Perplexity (Scope 16/20 · Quality 6/10) is the fastest cited first pass over the live web (Lg 7.5, Th 7) at ~€20/month — but a 500-query test found only 83.3% of citations supported the claim, quotas were cut unannounced, and agent features sit behind the ~€185 Max tier. NotebookLM (Scope 12/20 · Quality 7/10) is the best grounded-research surface over your own documents (Rg 9.5, Cx 9), free with 50 sources and a 1M-token context — no programming interface, no MCP, and the June 2026 agentic upgrade is Ultra-only. Genspark (Scope 15/20 · Quality 7/10) orchestrates 80+ models and 700+ MCP integrations into one agent for slides, videos and phone calls (Ag 9, Ma 9) from ~€22/month — with one shared credit pool that burns unpredictably and phone-call success around 80%. Checking what is true today → Perplexity, clicking every citation. Working from your own files → NotebookLM. One subscription that does the task → Genspark.
Where the quality sits
Family mean over covered elements only — a dash means the family is honestly outside that tool’s scope.
| Perplexity Scope 16/20 · Quality 6/10 audited 2026-07-10 | NotebookLM Scope 12/20 · Quality 7/10 audited 2026-07-11 | Genspark Scope 15/20 · Quality 7/10 audited 2026-07-27 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Perplexity AI | Genspark (MainFunc, Inc.) | |
| Origin | US | US | US |
| Pricing | Free · Pro ~€18–20 · Max ~€185 per month · Enterprise from ~€37/seat; Comet browser free; API pay-per-use (Sonar from ~$1/M tokens + $5/1k requests). Subscription-only since 02/2026 (advertising abandoned) | Free · Plus via Google AI Plus €7.99 · Pro via Google AI Pro ~€20 · Ultra via Google AI Ultra ~€92–185 per month. No standalone subscription — always bundled in Google AI plans; Workspace/Enterprise SKUs separate. | Free (~100 credits/day) · Plus from ~€22/month · Pro from ~€219/month · Team ~€26/seat/month · Enterprise custom |
| Pr Prompts | 6 | 8 | 7 |
| Em Embeddings | 6 | 6 | — |
| Cx Context | 7 | 9 | 9 |
| Tr Tracing | 6 | 6 | 5 |
| Lg LLM | 8 | 9 | 9 |
| Fc Function calling | 7 | 6 | 9 |
| Vx Vector store | — | 5 | — |
| Rg RAG | 7 | 10 | 7 |
| Gr Guardrails | 5 | 6 | 6 |
| Mm Multimodal | 7 | 9 | 9 |
| Ag Agents | 7 | 7 | 9 |
| Ft Fine-tuning | — | — | — |
| Fw Frameworks & harnesses | 5 | — | 8 |
| Ev Evaluations | 3 | — | 3 |
| Sm Small models | 6 | — | 8 |
| Ma Multi-agent | 6 | — | 9 |
| Sy Synthetic data | — | — | — |
| Pc Protocols | 5 | — | 8 |
| In Interpretability | — | — | — |
| Th Thinking models | 7 | 8 | 8 |
Hover any score for the written reason. Full detail: Perplexity passport → · NotebookLM passport → · Genspark passport →