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Comparison

Sidenote vs Perplexity

Perplexity answers from the public web, and its free Comet browser puts an assistant on every page. Sidenote's difference is what happens after the summary: verbatim citations, verified server-side, that click through to the exact passage, in the browser you already use.

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Sidenote

Looks inward: answers from your own documents, cited to the exact passage.

Perplexity

Looks outward: searches the open web, and its Comet browser adds an assistant to every page you browse there.

The short answer

Should you use Sidenote or Perplexity?

Choose Sidenote if…

You want answers from the documents you already have (the page you're reading, plus Confluence, Notion, Slack, SharePoint and Google Docs) with verbatim, server-verified citations that scroll to the exact passage. Collections ask across many documents at once, and your documents are hosted in the UK.

Choose Perplexity if…

You want an answer engine for the open web: ask it anything and have it search public sources, discover new material, and follow up with live, up-to-date results. It's built for research and discovery across the internet.

Plenty of people use both. One looks outward at the web; the other looks inward at the documents in front of you.

Compared honestly

Sidenote vs Perplexity: feature by feature.

CapabilitySidenotePerplexity
Answers from the page or PDF you already have openYes Partial
Works on private Confluence, Notion & SharePoint pagesYes Partial
Reads your own uploaded & local PDFsYes Partial
Citations scroll & highlight the exact passage in the documentYesNo
Cites and links public web sources PartialYes
Server-side check drops unsupported claimsYes Partial
One-click glossary of jargon & acronymsYesNo
Ask across many of your documents at onceYes Partial
Searches & discovers across the open webNoYes
Follow-up research with live, up-to-date sources PartialYes
Mobile appsNoYes
Image generation & open-ended creative tasksNoYes

Last reviewed: 16 July 2026.

Several rows go to Perplexity, and we're not pretending otherwise; see Where Perplexity is the better tool below. The two partials at the top are Comet: Perplexity's own browser (free since October 2025) puts an assistant beside whatever page you open there, private pages included, if you make Comet your browser. What it doesn't do is verify: Sidenote checks every cited quote verbatim against the document server-side (see what verified citations mean), and the cross-document row is powered by Sidenote Collections.

The core difference

Search the whole web, or read the document in front of you.

Perplexity is an answer engine, and now a browser too: Comet, free worldwide since October 2025, rides beside every page you open in it. That reflects the wider shift. A sidebar that summarizes the page is free in every direction now: Comet gives it away, Microsoft built Copilot into Edge itself, and OpenAI folded its Atlas browser into ChatGPT. The question that separates tools has moved from “can it summarize this page” to “can you check what it said”.

That second question is what Sidenote is built for. It sits in the side panel of the browser you already use and answers from the documents you already have: the page you're reading, a private Confluence runbook, a PDF, or a whole collection of them. Every cited quote is checked verbatim against the document on the server, unsupported claims lose their citation, and clicking one scrolls the real document and highlights the exact passage. Sidenote's scroll-to-source citations point inward, to the sentence in front of you, rather than out to a list of web pages.

The difference in one example

Ask “what's our incident escalation policy?” Perplexity search can't see the private Confluence page it lives on. In Comet you could open the page and get a summary, but you'd be trusting it. Sidenote reads that page in your own browser, answers, and highlights the sentence that proves it, so trusting isn't required.

Giving credit

Where Perplexity is the better tool.

If these are what you need, Perplexity is a strong choice:

Open-web search & discovery

Ask anything and it searches the public internet, surfacing sources you didn't know existed. Sidenote only reads documents you already have.

Live, up-to-date research

Pulls current information from across the web and lets you follow a question wherever it leads. Sidenote is anchored to the documents in front of you.

A free AI browser

Comet has been free worldwide since October 2025, with an assistant on every page and agentic help for paid tiers. If you want an AI-first browser (plus mobile apps and image generation), Perplexity ships one; Sidenote stays an extension in the browser you already use.

If your work is mostly reading documents you already have (wikis, PDFs, the page in front of you), see how Sidenote fits reading research papers, or compare pricing.

FAQ

Sidenote vs Perplexity: common questions

They overlap more than they used to, but still point in different directions. Perplexity is an answer engine for the open web, and since October 2025 its free Comet browser has put an assistant beside every page you browse there. Sidenote is built for the documents in front of you: the page you're reading, your private Confluence and Notion wikis, your PDFs, with every answer carrying verbatim, server-verified quotes. If your question is 'what does this document say, and where exactly', Sidenote is the better fit; if it's 'what does the internet say about X', Perplexity is.
Only if you move your browsing into Comet. Perplexity search covers the public web, so a page behind your company login is invisible to it; Comet's assistant can help with a page you have open in Comet itself. Sidenote works in the Chrome or Firefox you already use, on your own session, and its answers cite the exact passage so you can check them, rather than summarizing and asking to be trusted.
They look similar and share a premise: an assistant beside the page. Two differences matter. First, Comet is its own browser you'd switch to; Sidenote is an extension for the browser you already use. Second, and more importantly, Sidenote's answers are verified: every cited quote is checked verbatim against the document server-side, unsupported claims lose their citation, and clicking one scrolls to the highlighted passage. A sidebar summary, in any browser, is only as trustworthy as your willingness to re-read the page and check it.
Perplexity cites public web pages and links out to them, which is useful for tracing a claim to a source online. Sidenote cites the exact passage inside the document you're reading: click a citation and it scrolls the page to that sentence and highlights it, so you can verify in a second without leaving the document.
No, and that's deliberate. Sidenote works on the documents in front of you rather than crawling the open web. It will read and answer questions about any web page you have open, but it isn't a search-and-discovery engine. For open-ended internet research, Perplexity is the right tool.
Both cite their sources, which already puts them ahead of a bare chatbot. Sidenote adds that every answer is checked server-side against the passages actually retrieved from your document, so unsupported claims have their citation dropped before you see them. And the citation points to an exact sentence you can click and check, not a list of web links.
Plenty of people do. Perplexity for exploring the open web and discovering sources; Sidenote for reading and questioning the specific documents you already have, with answers in place and citations that scroll to the exact passage.
Try it on the page you are on

Read anything. With citations.

Add Sidenote to your browser and ask the document in front of you a question. No upload, no new tab. Just the answer, and the passage that proves it.

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