Comet vs Brave in 2026

Comet and Brave are both built on Chromium, both install Chrome Web Store extensions and both block ads and trackers out of the box. They disagree about what a browser is for. Comet is built around Perplexity's AI and wants to do things for you. Brave is built around keeping your data private, with AI as one feature among many. And some of the best-known security research on Comet came from Brave.

How much AI you get

Comet scores 5 for AI features in our ratings and Brave scores 4. Comet's address bar returns cited answers from Perplexity, and its assistant can act on websites for you, filling in forms or a shopping cart, which is why Comet has agentic mode in our feature table. That agent is free, and Perplexity Max subscribers get a background assistant on top.

Brave's assistant is Leo. It summarises and answers questions about the page you are on, and it is free with no account; Leo Premium costs $14.99 a month for more models and higher limits. You can also connect your own model, including one running locally. Brave has an agent too, AI browsing, but it is still in early testing behind a flag, so we do not count it yet. Brave runs it in a separate browser profile with no access to your normal logins, and has called agentic browsing inherently dangerous.

Privacy is the real difference

Brave scores 5 for privacy and Comet scores 3. Brave goes further on blocking: it dismisses cookie banners, strips targeted ads from YouTube and blocks email trackers, and it offers private windows over Tor and a paid VPN. The bigger gap is what happens to your AI conversations. Brave says Leo needs no account, does not collect your IP address, keeps chat history on your device and never uses conversations for training. Perplexity says Comet keeps your history and passwords on your device too, but the assistant sends your questions and the pages it reads to Perplexity's servers, and its CEO said in April 2025 that the browser would help Perplexity learn about users outside its app to sell better-targeted ads.

What Brave found in Comet

In August 2025 Brave published research showing that hidden instructions in a Reddit comment could make Comet's assistant, when asked to summarise the page, fetch the user's email address and a one-time login code from Gmail and post them back to the attacker. Perplexity deployed a fix within days, though Brave later wrote that the class of attack had not been fully mitigated. In October 2025 Brave showed that instructions hidden in screenshots, almost invisible to a person, could steer Comet the same way. Brave makes a rival browser, which is worth keeping in mind, but Perplexity has acknowledged that prompt injection is unsolved across the industry. Brave's own agent was designed around those lessons, with an isolated profile and a second model that checks each action.

Everything else

Brave scores 5 for extensions against Comet's 4, 4 for customizability against 3, and has vertical tabs and containers, which Comet lacks. Comet scores 4 for ease of use against Brave's 3, partly because Brave's Shields occasionally break a site. Both score 4 for speed and both sync across devices. Brave runs on Linux as well as Mac, Windows, iOS and Android; Comet runs on the latter four.

Which should you choose?

Choose Comet if you want the most capable AI in a browser without paying, research heavily with cited answers, and want an agent that does tasks for you today. Keep it out of accounts you could not afford to have exposed.

Choose Brave if privacy comes first, you want an assistant that does not tie your conversations to you, and you would rather wait until agents are safer than use one now. It is the stronger browser on most measures other than AI.