Kagi Assistant Review, Pricing & Alternatives (2026)

Kagi Assistant is a multi-model chat and research service from Kagi, a subscription search company founded in Palo Alto in 2018 and incorporated in March 2022. The Assistant entered public beta in 2023 and became generally available in 2024. Kagi made it available across all plans on April 17, 2025. The company reported 30 employees in 2023 and 50 in 2025. It raised $670,000 from users in 2023, bringing total money invested near $5 million, and reported more than $1 million in annual revenue that year. Kagi says subscriptions fund its services instead of advertising. Assistant is not a foundation model. It sends requests to models from providers including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Mistral, Meta, Alibaba, DeepSeek, and xAI.

A typical session starts with a thread in which the user selects a model and chooses whether to enable Kagi Search. Search grounding can use Kagi results, personalized rankings, and Lenses that restrict the search scope. Users can disable web access for direct model conversations or upload files as additional context. The interface includes voice input, custom assistants, prompt editing, conversation branching, model switching, configurable settings, saved threads, and Markdown or JSON exports. A researcher can ask a question, add search grounding, upload a document, and change models within the same thread. Quick mode handles lighter requests, while Research mode supports longer web investigations. Answer quality still depends on the selected model, retrieved pages, and supplied context.

Kagi routes Assistant requests through third-party APIs and does not train a foundation model for the product. Its documentation lists models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, Alibaba, DeepSeek, xAI, and Meta, with access tied to the subscription plan. Recent documented model availability includes releases from 2025 and 2026, but Kagi's catalog changes as providers add or remove models. Kagi also publishes retention information for individual providers. Depending on the selected model, requests may be stored for no time, 24 hours, or 30 days. Kagi says providers do not train on Assistant requests. This arrangement gives subscribers one interface for several model families, while privacy terms and capabilities remain partly dependent on the external provider handling each request.

Assistant is bundled with Kagi subscriptions. The free Trial includes 100 searches and 100 Assistant interactions. Starter costs $5/month and includes 300 searches plus Quick mode. Professional costs $10/month and includes unlimited Kagi Search, Quick mode, and a larger monthly Assistant allowance. Ultimate costs $25/month and adds Research mode, flagship models, and the highest allowance. Kagi applies value-based fair-use limits instead of unlimited model calls. The $25 Ultimate plan allows up to $25 of token usage across models, with a 20 percent margin covering search, infrastructure, and development. After the allowance is exhausted, new AI interactions stop until renewal, upgrade, or early renewal. Team plans use per-user billing and offer selected Ultimate upgrades.

Kagi Assistant's main limitation is that it combines model access with a subscription search service rather than providing a first-party model suite or dedicated Assistant API. Perplexity focuses more directly on search answers and citations, while Kagi emphasizes model switching, private search, editable threads, file uploads, and user-controlled web access. ChatGPT offers a broader first-party workspace with native tools, and Gemini connects more closely with Google services. Provider retention varies by model, from no storage to 24 hours or 30 days, while saved or reported threads may remain for 30 days. Model availability and plan access can change, and self-hosting is unavailable. Choose Kagi Assistant if private search, file-aware research threads, and access to several external models matter more than a unified first-party platform.