Comet vs Claude in Chrome vs Gemini in Chrome (2026)

Side-by-side comparison of Perplexity Comet, Anthropic Claude in Chrome, and Google Gemini in Chrome browser interfaces showing AI agent sidebars

Comet, Claude in Chrome, and Gemini in Chrome are the three AI browser agents still standing after the first casualty of this category: OpenAI officially shut down ChatGPT Atlas on 9 August 2026, less than a year after launch, folding its features into the ChatGPT desktop app and a Chrome extension instead. That leaves three genuinely different bets on the same idea — an AI that can read your tabs and act inside them — from Perplexity, Anthropic, and Google. This comparison works from each company's own product pages, pricing pages, and blog announcements to show what "free" and "agentic" actually mean in each case, because the three companies don't mean the same thing by either word.

This comparison is based on official product documentation, pricing pages, and company blog posts verified as of 13 September 2026.

What each product actually is

Perplexity's Comet is a full standalone Chromium-based browser — you replace Chrome with it entirely. It launched in July 2025 behind a $200/month Perplexity Max paywall, then Perplexity made the core browser free worldwide on 2 October 2025, a move CEO Aravind Srinivas framed publicly as an attempt to build "a better internet." It runs on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS.

Claude in Chrome is the opposite architecture: an extension that installs into the Chrome you already use, rather than replacing it. Anthropic ran it as a pilot for roughly nine months before announcing general availability on 26 August 2026. It's available to every paid Claude plan, starting at Pro — the same $20 tier we broke down in our $20 AI subscription comparison.

Gemini in Chrome sits in between — it's built directly into Chrome itself rather than a separate install, available to anyone signed into a personal Google account. Google began rolling it out in the US in January 2026, then expanded to Canada, India, and New Zealand in March, seven more Asia-Pacific markets in April, and additional regions across Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East by June.

The three companies don't mean the same thing by "free"

All three products have a free entry point and a paid tier that unlocks the ability to actually act autonomously rather than just answer questions. The line between those two tiers sits in a different place for each one.

	Comet (Perplexity)	Claude in Chrome (Anthropic)	Gemini in Chrome (Google)
Base product cost	Free worldwide since Oct 2025	Requires a paid Claude plan (Pro at $17–20/mo)	Free with any personal Google account
What the free/base tier does	Sidecar assistant: page summaries, Q&A, tab awareness	Not applicable — no free tier exists	Summarize pages, compare across tabs, draft with Gmail, schedule with Calendar
Autonomous multi-step actions	"Background Assistant" — Perplexity Max only, $200/mo	Included for every paid tier, with automatic action approval	"Auto browse" — Google AI Pro/Ultra only, US only regardless of plan
Platform reach	Windows, macOS, Android, iOS	Chrome only — not other Chromium browsers, not mobile	Built into Chrome on ChromeOS, macOS, Windows

Read only the marketing and all three sound like they offer autonomous browsing for free. Read the actual pricing pages and the pattern is identical across all three: basic Q&A and summarization is the free or entry-level layer, and the ability to let the agent take multi-step actions on its own is gated behind the most expensive tier each company sells — $200/month for Perplexity Max, a paid Claude plan for Anthropic, and a US-only Google AI Pro or Ultra subscription for Google.

Where each one still can't go

Each company's own documentation discloses a real limitation, not a marketing caveat.

Claude in Chrome: Anthropic's own announcement states it plainly — "Claude in Chrome doesn't run on other Chromium browsers or on mobile yet," and it does not touch files on your computer; that still requires the separate Claude desktop app.
Gemini in Chrome: Google's own pricing page specifies auto browse as "US only" — even a paying AI Ultra subscriber in Canada, India, or the UK gets the free-tier summarize-and-compare features but not the agentic layer.
Comet: the free tier is capped to the sidecar assistant; Perplexity's own help center confirms Background Assistant — the feature that runs tasks unattended for extended periods — is gated to Max subscribers only, with no way to unlock it at the $20/month Pro tier.

The one number Anthropic publishes that the others don't

All three companies acknowledge that letting an AI act on live web pages creates a new attack surface — malicious instructions hidden in a page's content that try to hijack the agent, known as prompt injection. Anthropic is the only one of the three to publish a quantified before-and-after result for its defenses.

In its general-availability announcement, Anthropic reported that on its most recent internal evaluation, using attacks sourced by professional red-teamers, injection attacks that reached the underlying model succeeded 17.6% of the time against an older model with no defenses. With Anthropic's current combination of detection "probes" and a safety classifier that reviews each action before it runs, the reported success rate against Claude Sonnet 5 and Claude Opus 5 dropped to 0%, with a 0.3% rate against Claude Fable 5. Anthropic frames this as an ongoing arms race rather than a solved problem — the same post states prompt injection "remains a moving target."

Perplexity and Google both describe safety measures for their agentic features in general terms — permission prompts, sensitive-action confirmations — but neither has published a comparable attack-success-rate figure for their own browser agents as of this writing. That doesn't mean their defenses are weaker; it means only one of the three companies has made its own security testing numbers public — the same transparency gap we noted between these labs in our ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini coding comparison.

Which one fits which situation

You want to replace your browser entirely and get agent features free: Comet. It's the only one of the three with no cost at the entry point for a full autonomous-capable browser, though the always-on Background Assistant still needs Max.
You already pay for Claude and want it working inside your existing Chrome setup: Claude in Chrome. No separate subscription, and it's the only one of the three with a published, quantified security track record — but it's Chrome-only and desktop-only for now.
You live outside the US and want an agent that acts, not just answers: none of the three currently gives you that combination for free. Gemini in Chrome's free tier is available in dozens of countries, but its autonomous auto-browse feature is US-only regardless of what you pay. Comet's Background Assistant has no geographic restriction Perplexity has disclosed, so it's the more realistic paid option outside the US.
You just want page summaries and cross-tab Q&A, nothing autonomous: Gemini in Chrome, since it's free with any Google account and needs no separate install.

Frequently asked questions

Is Comet actually free, or is that just the entry tier?

The core browser and its sidecar assistant are free worldwide with no time limit, per Perplexity's own announcement. The Background Assistant feature, which runs multi-step tasks unattended, requires the $200/month Max plan.

Can I use Claude in Chrome without a paid Claude subscription?

No. Unlike Comet and Gemini in Chrome, Claude in Chrome has no free tier — it requires at least the Pro plan.

Why is Gemini's auto browse feature US-only?

Google's own pricing documentation lists it as a US-only benefit of the AI Pro and Ultra plans without giving a reason; broader international rollout has not been announced as of this writing.

What happened to ChatGPT Atlas?

OpenAI announced on 9 July 2026 that it was sunsetting Atlas, its standalone AI browser launched in October 2025, with a target shutdown date of 9 August 2026. Its agentic browsing features moved into the ChatGPT desktop app and a new Chrome extension instead of a standalone browser.

Last verified: 13 September 2026. Pricing, availability, and feature sets for all three products are subject to change with future updates from each company.