Brave Search vs Perplexity: which search API for your agent?
Compared on the same 170-query benchmark (judge κ=0.78).
Brave Search
Cost / 1k (list)$5.00
Quality87% (indicative)
Strong classespage lookup, direct answer, web
Perplexity
Cost / 1k (list)$5.00
Qualitynot measured
Pick Brave Search if… pick Perplexity if… or route both
Pick Brave Search when your queries are an independent web index with privacy. Pick Perplexity when your queries are cited answer synthesis. On plain web/news lookups, a cheaper engine usually matches both — so don't hard-code one.
Don't pick one — route to the cheapest that clears your bar.
GroundRoute sends each query to the best-value engine and caches the result. You keep half of what the cache saves you, never more than going direct.